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Freud viewed countertransference, even when he first discovered it (1910d), as connected with the patient's transference in a dynamic way. It “arises in him [the physician] as a result of the patient's influence on his unconscious feelings” (Freud 1910d, p. 144). Freud emphasizes that “no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit” (1910d, p. 145). Thus it is necessary for the analyst to undergo a training analysis in order to be freed of his “blind spots.”
Because Freud's recommendations about treatment techniques — expressed in striking metaphors such as to reflect like a “mirror” and to act like an “emotionless surgeon” — were taken literally, countertransference retained a negative meaning for decades. Freud had to place great value on “psychoanalytic purification” (1912e, p. 116) both because of his concern about the dangers that misuse might pose to the psychoanalytic method, and for scientific reasons. The fact that the analyst's “personal equation” (Freud 1926e, p. 220) would still remain even after the influence of countertransference had been mastered (i.e., ideally, eliminated) was regretfully accepted as inevitable. Freud was able to comfort himself with the fact that the personal equation1 cannot be eliminated from observations even in astronomy, where it was discovered. However, he hoped that training analysis would lead to such a far-reaching balancing of the personal equation that satisfactory agreement would one day be achieved among analysts (Freud 1926e, p. 220).
These reasons were decisive factors in the very different histories of the concepts of transference and countertransference. It was not until much later that their separate paths merged in the realization that “we are dealing with a