Reply to Commentaries by Aron and Hirsch

I am grateful to Psychoanalytic Dialogues for creating such a stimulating forum for the exchange of ideas. When I wrote the first draft of “Working in the Countertransference” in 1985, I never thought that it would arouse the very intense reactions that it has generated in many people who have read or heard the paper. It has been called radical, conservative, innovative, and “what we have done all along”—and sometimes these polar opposites are invoked by the same reader. Certain of these responses have seemed motivated by a surprisingly strong ambivalence at letting the patient take an equal share in the work of psychoanalysis, while other responses have made me wonder if additional material could make my meaning clearer.

Quite a few readers have asked for more clinical examples, especially of the use of working in the countertransference at the end of an analysis. I eliminated such an example from the original draft of the paper for reasons of space, but doing so may have misled people into assuming that the one lengthy clinical example represented the only way to work in the countertransference. I present the deleted clinical example here in the hope that it may offer further clarification of what I mean by working in the countertransference.

I worked in analysis with Ms. Louise M, who sought analysis because of a disastrous marriage ending in divorce and fear that she was impossible to love. This case was not in the borderline range. On the contrary, the picture was closer to hysterical neurosis, including a major physiological conversion symptom (which, however, was not one of the original presenting symptoms and which the patient, before the analysis, had never thought of as psychologically determined). The hysterical symptom was modeled on the mother's physical disorders.

Ms. M was extremely talented, with many fine virtues, but could not actualize most of them and kept them hidden behind a false modesty. Early in the analysis, she idealized me and descr