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“There is almost universal agreement on the crucial importance of transference and counter-transference in clinical psychoanalysis, but far from unanimous agreement on how these concepts are to be understood and still less on how the phenomena themselves are to be dealt with in psychoanalytic treatment.” With those words Douglass Orr concluded his paper on a comprehensive historical survey of the concepts of transference and countertransference. (16)
I would like to present one point of view on how the analyst can deal with some of his own responses in the analytic relationship. I use the word “responses” because “countertransference” is defined in so many different ways. The reference to “analytic relationship” acknowledges there are many types of therapy, but the one I wish to discuss is psychotherapy of a specific nature. The word “relationship” may give a further indication that my own orientation stems from an interpersonal and socio-cultural framework.
In “individual” psychoanalytic therapy there is a two-person system; exactly what each thinks he is doing with the other depends a great deal on the theory of the analyst. What is actually going on between them may be a very different story. Historically, with each discovery of new data, the theories have changed. Theories which have attempted to explain the human phenomena involved have, not unexpectedly, followed the general trend of scientific theories of the particular era. Furthermore, in all theories concerning the nature of psychopathology, philosophical questions concerning the nature of man, the nature of life, and the meaning of existence and the role of human values have had to be dealt with explicitly or implicitly.
In early analytic views (as noted by Wolstein) the patient was seen as a closed system in a state of internal psychic equilibrium, closely analogous to physical energy systems. The psychopathology was understood in terms of some disturbances in the distribution of the forces in this closed s