Induced Emotional Reactions and Attitudes in the Psychoanalyst as Transference in Actuality*

In more recent decades, psychoanalysis, the most subjectively rigorous of all the twentieth century sciences, has paid increasing attention to the very emotional reactions and attitudes of the analyst in the psychoanalytic relationship. For psychoanalysts frequently do experience a wide variety of both gross and subtle emotional reactions and attitudes toward many if not most of their patients at one or another stage of the therapy. The important question is not whether these reactions exist, but rather how are we to understand them, and what uses are to be made of them.

This is not to say that the analyst's reactions have previously been neglected. Far from it. From the very beginning of psychoanalysis, Freud counselled an attitude of free-floating attention by which the analyst could not only be aware of the different levels of the patient's associations but of his or her own intuitions as well. Then, in 1910, Freud identified the more problematic of the analyst's reactions and attitudes as countertransference. Yet a long hiatus occurred before the psychoanalytic use of analysts' emotional reactions and attitudes to their patients became a more accepted part of the psychoanalytic armamentarium. It is to this issue of why so long a hiatus occurred that this introductory part of the paper is addressed.