You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a paper entitled “Further Thoughts on Countertransference” that I gave in Boston at an American Psychoanalytic Association meeting, I referred briefly to “the significance of the vicissitudes of the analyst's own personal and professional development on countertransference.”3a Since then, having been involved in both psychoanalytic and psychiatric supervisory study groups, I have been encouraged to pursue this topic in greater depth. Gertrude Ticho's paper “Self Analysis”11 and a personal conversation with her were additional stimuli.
The literature on countertransference has been reviewed by a number of authors, including Orr,9 Kernberg,7 and Sandler,10 as well as myself.2 I will make a few brief references, however. Glover states that “even if we make the greatest allowance for a hypothetical state of being ‘thoroughly analyzed’ it is evident that, at the least, some analytic ‘toilet’ is a necessary part of the analyst's routine, in order to keep the balance redressed.”5a Freud in “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable” states:
Only when a case is a predominantly traumatic one will analysis succeed in doing what it is so superlatively able to do; only then will it, thanks to having strengthened the patient's ego, succeed in replacing, by a correct solution, the inadequate decision made in his early life. Only in such cases can one speak of an analysis having been definitively ended.4a
Analysis and self-analysis are seen as interminable.
Among the major goals of a training analysis is to free oneself sufficiently from neurotic conflicts so as to allow one's empathic ability freedom of function. This requires an adequate working through of those factors that interfere and bring about countertransference interference. Since it appears that countertransference