ABSTRACT
Most people have heard of the term transference and perhaps have some idea that it is most commonly applied to psychoanalysis. The only reason that transference is central to the practice of psychotherapy is that it is not merely an imaginative theoretical construction like many psychoanalytical ideas, but, like projection, is something that actually occurs between human brain/minds in certain situations, one of them being the encounter between analyst and patient. In psychotherapy the awareness of transference offers a window into the patient’s past, revealing some of the earliest feelings perhaps from the pre-verbal times of earliest infancy. The acceptance of countertransference opened the door to a completely new realisation about what was therapeutic in psychotherapy. The importance of the somewhat reluctant acceptance of countertransference into mainstream psychotherapy far exceeds the narrow disputes about its precise meaning.
