Author's Response

I am indeed grateful to my discussants for their serious consideration of my paper. Dr. Searles raises vital issues relating to my clinical experience with the patients reported, and I must confess to a certain diffidence in reporting on the complex vicissitudes of my countertransference.

It took me a long struggle to find the discipline and freedom to begin to use my subjectivity and sensibility in the service of my patients' clinical personal needs. It will probably take me some years yet to arrive at that necessary inner knowledge of my own countertransference which would help me verbalize and share it. Without such intellectual distance and assimilation of experience, one's statement could so easily degenerate into an indirect beseeching confessional and/or an abreactive infliction of one's gropings on others.

Following the spirit of Dr. Searles's discussion I would suggest that there are two distinct categories of countertransference usage in the clinical situation. With the so-called classical patient we employ our countertransference as a neutral element to allow maximum scope for the patient to experience and project his internal-fanstasy-systems and object relationships. The type of patients I am talking of make a very specific demand on our countertransference; they need to be needed, loved, hated and affectively mirrored in a live reciprocity of relatedness.

I have little doubt that true understanding of the long clinical stasis in these patients, which Dr. Ehrenwald rightly deplores, will accrue from our deeper and truer grasp and utilization of our countertransference in the clinical situation. The researches of Balint, Greenson, Little, Milner, Searles and Winnicott all point in this direction.

Dr. Weiss has contributed relevant remarks about the denial of overt aggression and its oblique absorption into symbiotic omnipotence

in these patients. One of the chief reasons why it becomes necessary at certain stages of their transference relationship in anal