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IN ORDER FOR ME TO RESPOND MEANINGFULLY TO JEANNE WOLFF Bernstein's critique of my article, “The Inner Experiences of the Analyst: Their Contribution to the Analytic Process” (1993), and to her general argument with regard to the role of countertransference in the analytic process, I must explain the circumstances under which that article was written, its purpose as I saw it, and what in it I was—and was not—seeking to convey.
About seven years ago, I was asked by the North American Chair of the Program Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association to submit to a contest a short piece describing my inner experiences during an analytic hour. The contest was being conducted to choose a presenter for one of the plenary sessions at the association's summer 1993 meeting in Amsterdam.
I agreed to submit a piece as I had been interested in the question of the analyst's subjective experiences in analytic sessions and how they might be used. For that reason, I had kept some fairly detailed notes on several sessions with a difficult and challenging patient and, based on these, I simply set down all that I could remember of what had passed through my mind during one of these sessions. I had no intention of making a statement about the role of countertransference or the analyst's subjectivity in sessions; about how, theoretically, I think about these issues; about the various ways in which I use my subjective experiences in clinical work, about the role of the intersubjective and/or intrapsychic dimensions of analysis, about analytic technique or the therapeutic action of analysis, or about an egopsychological as compared with any other theoretical approach.