Author's Response

One of the most distinct pleasures that the format of The Forum affords is the otherwise unobtainable opportunity to share discussion and dialogue with esteemed colleagues about matters challenging or problematical of psychoanalytic theory and practice. To Drs. Feldman, Garma, Gilliland, Heimann, Miller, and Saul, I extend my warm thanks for their comments, insights, and criticisms. Almost all have focused on a special issue that I believe merits a more detailed theoretical

attention by psychoanalysts. I refer to the concept of transference and countertransference.

Earlier I submitted this paper to one of our learned journals. The editors indicated their willingness to accept it for publication if I would change the title to “Transference and Countertransference Problems in the Treatment of the Rich, Famous, and Influential Patient.” I chose not to do so, since it seemed to me that such a title would too narrowly restrict the subject matter; and to exclude from purview issues that, although sociological and cultural in character, were not without import in the vicissitudes of analysis with this type of patient. It would reflect the tendency, as Dr. Gilliland has so felicitously put it, “to identify another human being by some single aspect of his current status.”

“Transference” in ordinary psychoanalytical usage conveys, does it not, the concept of unconscious projection onto the person of the analyst of attitudes, postures, and expectations which had their inception in the patient's past relationships. “Countertransference,” too, is usually restricted to unconscious converse projections of the analyst onto the patient.

It became clear to me in the study of rich and famous patients that the analyst's attitudes often reflect intrusion of factors such as these that were not necessarily unconscious, and were not transference per se as we ordinarily employ the term (i.e., a transfer of the analyst's genetic dynamics onto the patient), but were rather a permutation of at