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This book is an important contribution to the theories of psychoanalytic technique. Proposing major innovations in analytic technique, Dr. Maroda begins by asserting that the majority of psychoanalysts, even today, practice with an authoritarian approach. By this she means that analysts not only pontificate but also remain aloof, guarded, and defensive against getting too close emotionally with their patients. Analysts hope that by practicing in that fashion they can avoid personally influencing patients' transferences. It is impossible, however, not to influence the transference; and, even if they attempt not to, analysts will be drawn to it nevertheless and drawn to countertransference through their own defensiveness.
Whether the author is correct or not about the majority of analysts, her book is part of an ongoing reexamination of our analytic technique. For at least the past 35 years, through informal discussions and in papers and books, various analysts have written about the inevitability of countertransference. Freud at the start pointed out the inevitability of the patient's transference becoming a resistance. Later he understood that the transference as resistance is a necessary therapeutic vehicle. Similarly he first regarded countertransference as an obstacle. Later he accepted its inevitability but still regarded it as an obstacle, and therefore he recommended reanalysis of the analyst. We now acknowledge that countertransference, although it may not be necessary, is inevitable but at the same time can be a vehicle for the process of the treatment. From Robert Fliess (1942), who wrote that the patient affects us by forging or forcing a counterfeeling of identification with him or by forcing or by forging an identification with the internalized objects of the patient's past; to Racker (1957), who said that our patients