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Searles sets out to examine as comprehensively as possible the relevance of the concept of transitional phenomena to an understanding of the therapeutic process. He reviews his own prior work and the literature in general in considerable detail, taking up a variety of ways in which symptoms, fantasies, and therapeutic instruments can function as transitional phenomena for therapist, patient, or both. Searles's focus, as always, includes emphatic attention to countertransference experiences. Most of the clinical examples refer to work with psychotic patients but the points made are meant to apply to the psychotherapy of any disorder. Searles identifies transitional phenomena in therapy as subspecies of the more general phenomenon of "therapeutic symbiosis," which he has defined and explored in previous writings. In his view, many therapists are reluctant to appreciate the extent to which their patients experience them—and therefore influence them to experience themselves—as "nonhuman." The concept of the transitional phenomenon may be an attempt at particularism that avoids a more threatening experience.