ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Jennifer Johns describes the terrible physical countertransference impact on an analyst listening to a patient talk of systemic savage abuse in childhood. This raises the complex issue of truth in the consulting-room. A psychoanalyst, not young or inexperienced and to the best of her knowledge in perfect health, was sitting very and listening to an extremely distressed patient speaking with great difficulty, of memories implying savage, perverse and systematic many-layered cruelty in childhood. All psychoanalysts are used to the everyday analytic task of the examination of their own inner world alongside that of their patients, the examination of their own thoughts and feelings, and the everlasting and recurrent psychoanalytic question as to the relationship between their own inner world and that of their patients, the conscious and unconscious influences of each upon the other.
