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The working alliance is a problematic concept. There is a wide array of opinion regarding its utility, definition, and relation with transference.1
Before getting into my subject, however, a fundamental question arises: Why bother to clarify the term “working alliance”? Does it really matter? What difference can it possibly make in our daily work with patients? Now, one would be hard-pressed to defend the position that what the analyst thinks, how clear and informed he or she is, is essentially irrelevant in daily work. For, to some degree at least, what he or she thinks guides what is said during sessions. And we do believe that what we say to our patients contributes in no small measure to beneficial personality change. So we very much care what is in the minds of analysts and therapists. In fact, we care so much that our struggles with competing ideas at times take on much heat! There is an awful lot at stake.
Pulver (1987) put it most aptly in his epilogue to an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry taken up entirely by the topic “How Theory Shapes Technique: Perspectives on a Clinical Study.” In that study, an analyst provided detailed process notes of several consecutive sessions on one patient and some well-known analysts of differing psychoanalytic orientations (structural, developmental, self-psychological, Kleinian, interpersonal, object relational, and others) gave their analysis of the therapeutic process. Pulver concluded: “An analyst's theoretical orientation has a marked impact on the way he