ABSTRACT
There is a phenomenon that repeatedly occurs in the history of psychoanalysis: some aspect that initially was considered regrettable, awkward, arid inconvenient eventually turns out to be worthy of attention and study, to the point that its meaning is reversed, from negative variable to be removed, it comes to be considered a positive technical tool. This chapter examines a specific area of the analytic relationship: the collaboration between patient and analyst. The attack on the myth of the analyst as anonymous and neutral comes mainly from the United States, where liberation from the theoretical and technical canons of ego psychology has come to be something like a movement. Since the postwar period in European psychoanalysis, object relations theory has, though with different nuances, been a common cultural background, whereas in North America ego psychology has been dominant for decades.
