ABSTRACT
Confidence in the therapeutic success of the analytic method tempts analysts to overlook some of the strains it imposes on both patient and analyst. The development of transference is always traumatic for the patient, as is the longing for relationship with the analyst as a result of their intimacy. The development of psychoanalytic objectivity and distance, which have to be combined with ready empathy, are similarly an arduous task for the analyst. The most neglected feature of the psychoanalytic relationship still seems to the author to be that it is a relationship: a very peculiar relationship, but a definite one. Patient and analyst need one another. The therapeutic implications of the views of the psychoanalytical relationship which the author have presented center, as far as the patient is concerned, on the resolution of two problems: the trauma that he has undergone and the mourning that he may be left with. The two problems are related.
