ABSTRACT
The concept of transference has long dominated psychoanalytic theory and practice (Freud, 1912), but it was only within more recent times that its corollary, countertransference, emerged from its former status as an inevitable but regrettable occurrence in psychoanalytic treatment to become a most highly important psychoanalytic function and source of highly valued clinical data – so much so, in fact, that it is increasingly written about and spoken of as if it were inseparably connected with transference, as a single entity: transference-countertransference, as an example of a “binary-oppositional structure” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958). 1 I shall make that assumption in this chapter even when I seem to separate one from the other for purposes of individual discussion.
