ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the transformation in the relationship between the former therapist and the former patient. The therapist is always inside the patient's words and actions, living them and experiencing them within the privacy of his own mind. The therapist doesn't dismiss the patient's feelings and attitudes toward him–positive and negative–as untrue or unreal. The patient has cast the therapist in certain roles. The therapist has consented to be the object of the patient's projections. The therapist then, at least ideally, begins to empathize with the patient's experiencing of emotions which are being directed, he realizes, not so much against him personally as against the person whom he has come to represent for the patient. The therapist's "abstinence" in relation to the inter-psychic space between the therapist and patient, which is intended to provide a safe space for the patient's enactment of her inner life, serves to protect the therapist's internal fantasy life as well.
