ABSTRACT
Analysts undertake self-scrutiny, focusing on transference and countertransference reactions, in order to facilitate the treatment of their patients. However, this self-reflection also serves to continue and enhance the analyst's own personal understanding. In the course of analysing patients, an interactional process develops in which many of the therapeutic aspects of analysis affect the analyst as well as the patient. Over the last decade and a half, a shift has occurred in the way analysts view the analytic process. While many analysts have always seen analytic work as interactional, for many years there was a school of thought in the United States that considered psychoanalysis an enterprise in which analysts functioned as 'blank screens' on whom patients could project their conflicts. In recent years the analyst and his/her role in the analytic work has become a focus of study. Countertransference and enactments increasingly engage analysts' attention and interest.
