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It is timely to review Ralph R. Greenson's “The Working Alliance and the Transference Neurosis,” published in 1965 and later elaborated in his book The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967). This paper contributed to a significant debate around a fault line in the development of our theories of psychoanalytic technique: namely, the question of the appropriate role of the personality and personal attitudes of the psychoanalyst toward the patient in the conduct of psychoanalysis, and how to understand that role theoretically. The issue that Greenson identified at that time has, in modified form, remained important to this day. It is a theoretical and technical problem that has deep reverberations for all our notions concerning the therapeutic core of psychoanalytic technique.
I shall attempt briefly to outline the problems of psychoanalytic procedure that Greenson perceived and to which he was attempting to respond. I will then describe his proposed solution to the problem and discuss some of the problems of that attempted solution. Finally, I will describe some of our current attitudes regarding those same problems.
The concern at the time was how to reconcile the residual effects of Freud's surgical metaphor for analytic process—in which the analyst has the objectivity of a surgeon, with the actuality of the