ABSTRACT

This paper was first given at a scientific meeting of the BPAS in February 1947 and published in the IJPA in 1949, but it does not seem to have occasioned much debate at the time. Although Ferenczi and the Hungarian school more generally had been concerned with the analyst’s emotional responses to the patient from the 1920s onward (Ferenczi, 1933; Balint and Balint, 1939), a wider concern with countertransference phenomena only developed after Paula Heimann’s paper, ‘On Counter-Transference’, was given at the congress of the IPA in 1949 (published 1950). At that time the analyst’s countertransference, following Freud’s remarks in the papers on technique (1910, 1915), was still primarily regarded as an impediment to the analytic work, an expression of insufficiently analyzed aspects of the analyst. From 1949 on, countertransference was referred to in a rather different way (Little, 1951; Reich, 1951), and Winnicott’s paper may be regarded as anticipating this interest. Like the work of Ferenczi and his colleagues, Winnicott’s approach grows out of the difficulties of work with psychotic patients, and this paper’s significance lies in his conceptualization of the countertransference as a useful tool in understanding the patient, a shift usually associated with Paula Heimann (1950) and Heinrich Racker (1953).