Entrenched Analysis

I think that, in general, we all too seldom speak of errors in the sciences as well as in other fields, not to mention politics, where infallibility is a virtue every politician feels he incarnates every day.

Racker (1957) maintains: “The lack of scientific investigation of countertransference must be due to rejection by analysts of their own countertransferences, - a rejection that represents unresolved struggles with their own primitive anxiety and guilt. These struggles are closely connected with infantile ideals that survive because of deficiencies in the didactic analysis of just those transference problems that later affect the analyst's countertransference. These deficiencies in the didactic analysis are in turn partly due to countertransference problems, insufficiently solved in the didactic analyst, as I shall show later. Thus we are in a vicious circle; but we can see where a breach must be made. We must begin by revision of our feelings about our own countertransference and try to overcome our own infantile ideals more thoroughly, accepting more fully the fact that we are still children and neurotics even when we are adults and analysts. It is often just these childhood conflicts of the analyst, with their aggression that led him into this profession in which he tries to repair the objects of