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Dr. Ticho deserves our thanks for putting forward for discussion a very important but sadly neglected topic.
I am in full agreement with his view that the personality of the psychoanalyst influences the treatment. This has been acknowledged far more in casual discussions, particularly in relation to referrals, than in systematic exploration and publication.1 I also agree with Dr. Ticho's stress on the fact that the analyst's personality is revealed to his patients in many ways, even by his physical appearance and the appearance of his rooms. One frequently meets the view that the patient becomes capable of recognizing his analyst's personality at the end of his analysis and that this fact serves as a criterion for termination of the analysis. In my experience, however, the patient, unless his reality sense is severely disturbed, notices much of his analyst's personality from the beginning, but he may need to develop greater ego strength, diminution of fear of the superego/analyst, greater trust in himself and his analyst (and the analyst's predecessor[s]), before he will openly admit to his notions of his analyst as a person. This developmental process includes the patient's recovery of good infantile memories in relation to his mother, father, and other members of the family, or of the imaginative capacity that allowed him to form good objects in his mind, although their real character differed from his friendly picture.
I see a better prognostic criterion for terminating an analysis in the patient's ability to use the psychoanalytic method himself in a constructive (not with obsessional-ruminative) manner, thus indicating that he has introjected and assimilated the psychoanalytic process rather than the analyst. Willi Hoffer used to stress this point.