ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the complex interaction that takes place between analyst and analysand in our everyday work. Wilfred Bion made the succinct remark that when two people get together they make a relationship whether they like it or not; this applies to all encounters, including psychoanalysis. While earlier understanding regarded countertransference as something extraneous rather than integral, Paula Heimann showed the use of the countertransference as an important tool for psychoanalysis and differentiated this from the pathological countertransference response. Roger Money-Kyrle shows how closely the analyst's experience of the patient's projections may be linked with the analyst's own internal reactions to the material. The chapter is intended as a development of James Strachey's classic paper 'The nature of the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis'. Strachey states that the full or deep transference experience is disturbing to the analyst; one which the analyst most fears and most wishes to avoid.
