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Freud's self analysis provided the data upon which the science of psychoanalysis was created. This highly original and exemplary approach to scholarly and scientific investigations has by and large not been pursued subsequently. The study of the analyst's contributions has instead been restricted to issues pertaining to countertransference, a term Freud himself introduced in 1910 (p. 144) in order to describe the unanalyzed aspects of the analyst's personality that interfere with his analytic work.
Contemporary authors, such as Giovacchini (1989), Loewald (1986), Racker (1968), and Winnicott (1949), have expanded the concept of countertransference to include aspects of the analyst's thoughts and feelings that are set in motion by the patient's transference communications, whether neurotic or not. This expansion has produced several competing theoretical and clinical conceptualizations that essentially examine the analyst's response as a reaction to the stimulus that the patient communicated to him. This one-sided exploration of a complex interaction between two autonomous individuals does not seem to take into account that the analyst does not simply react to his patient's communications; he also originates interactions by his presence and ideas that affect the analytic process. Furthermore, it is not only the patient who is affected by the analytic process, the analyst is affected as well. The nature of this effect cannot be assessed simply by