ABSTRACT
The concept of countertransference retains the meaning that S. Freud gave it: the neurotic transference of the analyst to the patient. Quite soon after P. Heimann’s claims for countertransference, it was widely accepted that the analyst’s feelings were a normal part of the analytic setting. A different way of describing the nature and process of the analyst’s disturbance was initiated by W. R. Bion whose elaboration has the advantage of offering as a model one familiar to psychoanalysis—the model of the mother with infant. In the British psychoanalytical tradition a second main source of ideas on countertransference came from Ferenczi’s clinical experimentation. In general, countertransference retains the quality of a pathology about it in the Kleinian tradition—albeit a pathology with potential for being turned into a powerful source of new knowledge about the specific pathology. Transference and countertransference are equally suspect. Relations with others in the interpersonal field mean the imposition of the social upon the individual.
