ABSTRACT
By training and experience, the analyst has been prepared to expect patients to struggle against analytic insight into the internal world of unconscious conflict and phantasy. Freud emphasized from early on that resistance accompanies the analytic effort every step of the way. While contemporary analysts would consider it absurd to think that analysts’ preparation, accompanied by the hard knocks of their personal analyses, should be so effective as to bar all countertransference responses, they can hardly question the appropriateness of analyzing each such response to the extent possible. A female patient arrives five minutes late and enters the consulting room in a breezy manner. The male analyst, feeling that he has been kept waiting, assumes the patient intended to provoke his irritated response. The analytic literature amply explains the patient’s role in becoming a frustrating object. “Normal countertransference” refers to character traits, particularly those stabilized tendencies to seek to play specific roles in relation to others.
