On the Counter-Transference in Psychoanalysis*

The transference, as you know, in both its negative and positive phases, creates in the course of a psychoanalysis an interesting situation, in which the analyst is endowed by the patient with qualities, and to him are displaced emotions, of varying and opposite kinds, brought en masse from infantile situations and individuals of great significance to the patient in his infancy and childhood. On account of this transference on the part of the patient to the analyst, everything said or done by the analyst will have a highly suggestive value or effect on the patient. As you know, the effect on the patient of communications made by the analyst, certainly in the phase of the treatment during which the phenomena of the transference are not consciously known to and accepted by the patient, is determined in a great measure by the nature of the transference at the moment, that is, whether the transference is of a positive nature, and is acting as a cooperating influence; or whether the transference has itself become the most important temporary source of resistance. In the former instance the patient may accept everything blindly, as emanating from the fountain head of all knowledge, the analyst; in the lattei instance everything the analyst says may be viewed with the greatest skepticism, doubt and suspicion; and the knowledge previously accepted may now be completely discarded. The ultimate purpose of the analysis itself is to open gradually the closed pathways from the infantile or early childhood periods to the present, thus enabling the patient, by living over again in the transference, to see his past repeated therein; gaining in the process a more objective view of both periods, approaching thereby nearer to reality. The closer the approach to reality and objectivity, the less marked is the suggestive effect of the psychoanalytic therapy. That suggestion wholly disappears as a therapeutic agent in the psychoanalytic treatment, is questionable.1