The Uses of Countertransference Michael Gorkin Northvale, NJ:  Aronson, 1987,  viii + 312 pp.

For decades the subject of countertransference remained obscure. Until the 1940s and later, there were few articles on countertransference in the psychoanalytic literature. In fact, countertransference had a stigma associated with it. It was something to be gotten rid of or at least to be made aware of. After all, isn't one of the purposes of the training analysis to help the analysand become aware and to be better able to deal with countertransference? The pendulum seems to have swung the other way in recent years: There is more interest in the “real” relationship between analyst and patient, and there has been a tendency to shift from an intrapsychic to an interpersonal approach. The analyst is more and more expected to use his own emotional reactions to the patient as a barometer to measure what might be going on inside the patient's mind.

Michael Gorkin has given us another book on countertransference, written from the “totalistic” point of view. To him, countertransference includes reactions of the therapist that are due to his own transference (subjective countertransference), reactions induced by the patient that are expectable (objective countertransference), and all other therapist's reactions to the patient. As the reader can see, this definition seems to include everything. Whether one appreciates this book may depend on one's own definition of countertransference and on whether one places greater emphasis on the active use or the sizlent use of countertransference in the clinical situation. What is meant by the active use of countertransference is self-disclosure. Even though Gorkin is selective in his use of self-disclosure, he advocates its use far more often than a “classical Freudian.” In his approach to countertransference, he is on the opposite end of the continuum from Brenner, who has a much narrower definition of countertransference, and who, I presume, advocates self-disclosure only on the rarest of occasions, if at all.

In spite of the fact that