ABSTRACT
Remembering plays an essential role in establishing, developing, and enriching those crucial contexts of meaning that both enable insight and interpretation and are the products of the understanding they develop. Some of these assaults on remembering are short-lived, some long. Some countertranferential loss of control over remembering is brief and some is not. For example, a male analyst might not remember a major interpretation he made the day before because it touched on guilt feelings he shares with his male analysand, or perhaps he will forget how that interpretation impacted that analysand because he finds it stressful to realize how important he is to him. Certain kinds of transference can have great impact on the analyst's ego functioning. In certain instances, the primary site of countertransference might be most usefully conceptualized not in terms of fantasies and feelings, but in terms of functional impairments or misapplications.
