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Empathy, transference, countertransference, projective identification, projective counter-identification and other phenomena can be examined as if they were interactive phenomena, through which the person who transmits a message seeks someone to receive it. He does this not so much in order to send him a pre-arranged message, as to receive a listening field from him in which certain fundamental affective ties are formed which confer the status of a message onto the signal he gives out.
According to my hypothesis, countertransference is not a message that the analyst receives in the same form as the patient sent it. It is, rather, something that becomes a message as soon as it finds an internal area of resonance within the analyst, in which meanings are free to take shape.
The patient does not “make the analyst feel” certain emotions. Rather, the analyst, in the patient's stead, organises chaotic material in an internal space in which it is received and makes it possible to experience it as an “emotion”.