ABSTRACT
There is a wide-ranging and rich library of case studies and clinical accounts in the psychoanalytic literature. If clinical cases cannot function as a means of substantiating or supporting theoretical ideas or clinical practices, their role in what Klein called clarifying theories and ways of working seems much less problematic. A good example of how this can figure in clinical writing is given by Otto Kernberg, in a paper on working with "affect storms" in borderline patients. An important way of rendering the character of the analyst three-dimensional is to bring in the analyst's countertransference, that is, his or her "freely aroused emotional sensibility so as to follow the patient's emotional movements and unconscious phantasies". The analyst's subjectivity has been partly brought back in again through the concept of countertransference. However, the kind of subjectivity licensed by this concept is only that deemed to have originated from the patient—countertransference literally means that which is "counter" to the patient's "transference".
