ABSTRACT
James Strachey, who spent a period of time in Vienna to undergo analysis with Sigmund Freud, provided a very important contribution to the development of the concept of countertransference, even if his work was not specifically concerned with it. At the Budapest International Congress of 1918, Freud presented a work, entitled 'Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy', that called into question the advancements linked to the psychoanalytic technique. Theodor Reik theorised, in agreement with Freud, that the unconscious of each member of the dyad was in communication with the other, and therefore that the clinician could gather in this way the unconscious material of the patient. According to Karen Horney, Freud's most important discovery was that of transference and of the related possibility of using, for therapeutic ends, the emotional reactions of the patient towards the analyst and the analytical situation.
