ABSTRACT
Heinz Kohut paid particular attention to the creation of a bond between therapist and client based on empathic attunement and the selfobject transferences, as well as highlighting the important role of rupture: `the quietly sustaining matrix provided by the spontaneously established selfobject transference to the analyst that establishes itself in the early phases of analysis is disrupted time and again by the analyst's unavoidable, yet only temporary and thus non-traumatic, empathy failures ± that is, his ``optimal failures'' ' (p. 66). We have also previously reviewed the importance of such `failures' in the development of a healthy infant, and the role that `rupture and repair' plays in the development of a child's secure self structure. These ideas have led to an increasing interest in more recent psychoanalytic literature on the process of rupture and repair in the therapeutic setting and the potentially key role that this process might play in determining the outcome of treatment (e.g. Mitchell and Aron, 1999; Safran and Muran, 2000).
