Discussion of “The Working Alliance and the Transference Neurosis” By Ralph R. Greenson

Ralph R. Greenson's 1965 article on the working alliance is certainly a landmark paper. His concept, along with Zetzel's (1956) of therapeutic alliance, has been part of the vocabulary of many mainstream psychoanalysts for the last thirty years. With the recent increased emphasis on the interpersonal (as opposed to the intrapsy-chic), including a major focus on the mind and the experience of the analyst, these concepts are often assumed to be theoretically well founded.

However, my own training and experience have led me to be part of the “unconvinced minority” described by Brenner (1979). His succinct statement, “It is as important to understand why a patient is closely ‘allied’ with his analyst in the analytic work as it is to understand why there seems to be no ‘alliance’ at all” (p. 150), gets to the heart of the matter. I also agree with Brenner that Greenson's clinical examples are largely unconvincing and do not contain sufficient clinical detail. However, we need to contextu-alize Greenson in his era and to understand the atmosphere that he thought required more thoughtful discussion. In his paper written with Wexler a few years later (Greenson and Wexler 1969), he addresses the “non-transference relationship between patient and analyst” and explains that their emphasis “is a result of our dissatisfaction