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According to Freud, transference is the acting out of unconscious fantasies as a defense against remembering. Orr describes the modifications of this concept by Klein, Horney, Sullivan, and others. He states the arguments for activity and passivity in the analyst's management of the transference. Remarks by Ferenczi and Glover illustrate these two kinds of technique. Orr also discusses the various schools of psychoanalysis, with emphasis on the 'short analysis' of the Chicago school. The 'active' psychoanalysts tend to exploit the transference by manipulation rather than interpret it. The analyst is said to become an impartial adviser, the analysis serving as a corrective experience rather than a repetitive one. (Surely there is inconsistency here. Short analysis is partly based on the idea that the neurotic will learn by experience alone, a theory that will be disputed by most analysts on the bases of experience and theory. The adult neurotic is unable to profit by experience unless the infantile conflict is analyzed, and for this the transference neurosis must be interpreted.)
Disagreement also exists over the definition of countertransference. Is it everything the analyst feels toward the patient, or only those attitudes derived from the analyst's repressed infantile history? It is clinically useful to subdivide the phenomena of countertransference into, for example, habitual tendencies in the analyst, temporary acting out in special situations, and reactions to patients in general. The analyst needs frequent periods of introspection. Orr discusses technical problems of countertransference and the current disagreements over how much of the countertransference is to be communicated to the patient. There is always the danger that this may become a 'confession', an added burden for the patient.