ABSTRACT
The relational analyst holds to the notion that a patient needs to hear what is on the therapist's mind and how the therapist experiences the patient. Analysts take risks by stating what has come to their mind within the context of the therapeutic relationship. Risky though their speech may be, analysts offer their ideas from a non-authoritarian stance with tentativeness, curiosity and humility. Sigmund Freud considered countertransference to be residual unanalyzed aspects of the therapist's past that threatened to interfere with the patient's transference and disrupt the therapy. In 1985, Kumin argued that erotic transference is a form of negative transference and contended that both patient and therapist suffer from being objects of frustrated desire, and are, therefore, expected to behave - the patient by free-associating, and the therapist by maintaining a professional attitude. Spontaneity without discipline may too quickly "solve the limits of knowing, or more precisely foreclose the necessity of unknowing that [is] vital to analytic exchange".
