ABSTRACT
Discovering Clara Thompson’s 1938 paper on the significance of the analyst’s character and personality in the outcome of psychoanalysis was a total surprise. It came about when in 2015 I was invited to write a commentary on her paper for Psychiatry. Her ideas are virtually identical to mine in that both she and I believe that who the analyst is as a person influences the course and outcome of psychoanalysis in different ways and to different extents depending on how these characteristics interface with those of the patient. In this chapter, I address the absence of such a perspective in my psychoanalytic training in the context of North American psychoanalytic training in the 1960s and 1970s in mainstream psychoanalytic Institutes, or certainly in mine.
