ABSTRACT
For psychoanalysis, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, transference is a process of actualization of unconscious wishes. Countertransference is a concept that members of the British School should, and probably do, feel proud of having developed. The Object Relations view is that the psychoanalytic situation is always created and developed from the specific and unique interaction between the patient and the analyst. The theory of the countertransference has come to be used as a defence against the impact of the analytic relationship, a defence that belongs to the analyst, not to the patient. Independent analysts question any notion of the psychoanalytic process as exclusively one of projection and projective identification. The belief that whatever happens in the psychoanalytic process is a result of something emanating from the patient, which is then projected into the analyst, has contributed to the creation of a distinctively stagnant psychoanalytic product: the 'you-mean-me' interpretations.
