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M'Uzan adopts Neyraut's wide definition of countertransference which gives it precedence over the transference. He is concerned with a certain type of analytic phenomenon in which the analyst suddenly finds in himself strange images, unexpected phrases, abstract formulas, more or less elaborate reveries, etc. He believes that even without countertransference elements, these episodes prove singularly helpful in understanding the patient's material. He hypothesizes that at such a moment the analyst has been "invaded" by the analysand and that the analyst's psychic apparatus has become that of the analysand. He would like to call such phenomena "paradoxical thought," and the system to which such thoughts belong would be a "paradoxical system." M'Uzan prefers to explain such phenomena through a biological analogy of immunity and recognition of foreign bodies. He believes that such a paradoxical system occurs with the inhibition, on a momentary or partial basis, of the functions which permit the recognition of the other person and which protect against such merging. He links his concept with certain aspects of Greenacre's work on identity and with Lacan's mirror stage.