ABSTRACT
Irwin Hirsch notes the very different geographies and cultural eras involved at the time of Freud's development of psychoanalysis and Sullivan's emendations a half-century later. Freud's more formal psychoanalysis was brought to America by European immigrant analysts. Freudian psychoanalysis in the USA was ego psychology, a clear technical theory and procedure in which the objective scientist/analyst studied the patient without interacting with that patient and without participating in the creation of data that evolved from the process. Interpersonal psychoanalytic thinking, on the other hand, situated the analyst in a field of forces with the patient. No longer viewed as an expression of the analyst's unanalyzed neurosis, countertransference took its place, with transference, as the central ingredients in the field of psychoanalytic engagement. Since the late 1980s, previously disparate traditions have converged around the inevitability of countertransference. Transference and countertransference were no longer conceived separately, but instead were understood to form, together, a matrix.
