The Toxoid Response*

A certain defensive preoccupation with the unrecognized and inappropriate reactions of the analyst to his patient has characterized the literature on countertransference since Freud introduced the term in 1910 to encompass “what arises in the physician as a result of the patient's influence on his [the physician's] unconscious feelings.”6 The “perfectly analyzed” practitioner having been conceded as nonexistent—a derivative of the Myth of the Hero, according to Glover7—deliverance of the human instrument from the insidious clutches of the “patient's influence” has been the major concern. In striking contrast to the reliance on transference as a conceptual tool, the “counter” phenomenon has been viewed, by and large, as a wholly unwelcome intruder bent on disrupting the analytic process. Vigilant attention to the analyst's subjective and unconscious reactions as a contribution to therapeutic failure has tended to obscure, or at least to retard the recognition of those reactions which are realistically induced in him by the patient as a valuable component of psychoanalytic therapy.

These objective derivatives of the therapeutic encounter are destined to gain increasing acceptance in the future. Their potential value is now being explored as an aspect of various developments