ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Greenson's own love of analysis and people took the form of a preoccupation with and constant seeking to understand the factors that facilitated or impaired the analyzability of his patients. Increasingly his awareness of the analytic situation as one of an interaction between patient and analyst in which each participant played a constitutive role in the outcome came to influence his work and become ingrained in his thinking. In discussing intractable cases Greenson went on to refer to those "which have become so because of some subtle but important errors in technique. Most cases," he concluded, referring to insurmountable problems from the inadequate selection of patient and errors in the analyst's conduct of the cases, will turn out to contain a mixture of both errors. Central to the concept of resistance was this understanding of transference as a repetition of the past and inappropriate to the present.
