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I wish to comment briefly on a few points of general interest that have been raised by a reading of this interesting paper.
While I do not agree that the roles of patient and therapist should, or even can, be “blended” or “transcended,” there is no doubt that when classical interpretation fails to promote insight, the analyst should be able—for tactical purposes—to project himself into the verbal enactment of whatever role is required to promote the patient's insight into his (the patient's) own psychic processes. Certain factors, implicit not so much in the works of Freud but in the conservative sectors of the Freudian tradition, conspire to prevent the orthodox practitioner from abandoning his established “set” in the therapeutic encounter when necessary. The chief obstacle is the suspicion with which he has been trained to regard countertransference reactions; the concept of countertransference is so hedged about with moral strictures that the analyst automatically searches within himself, rather than within the dynamics of the encounter, to identify the intrapsychic cause of his affective reaction to the patient. Yet it is the transformation of the countertransference impulse into a therapeutic intervention—be it in the form of a comment, a question, an exclamation or the voluntary enactment of some role induced by the patient—that promotes the latter's insight.
Another prime factor militating against creative response by the