ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the complex interplay of transference and countertransference in the clinical construction of evidence and knowledge and the establishing of analytic authority in the psychoanalytic relationship. Complex transference-countertransference processes play major roles in determining the availability, communication, and consequences of clinical psychoanalytic evidence. To a large extent, these processes decide which evidence will be regarded as convincing and why that is so. Ego strength is a flexible term that pertains both to more or less convincing evidence in their analysands' life histories and to the observations analysts can make during initial interviews that seem to promise a reasonably steady capacity to be realistic, focused, in contact with others, and adaptive even when under stress. In the world of psychoanalysis, however, which has in this respect lagged behind the times, the logical-positivist orientation still prevails, each psychoanalytic school claiming to be the only one that has got the facts "right".
