ABSTRACT
The day of the supposedly ideal psychoanalyst working free of all emotion happily has passed, a victim of the irrepressibility of reality. Indeed, concern for the sweep of feelings to which psychoanalysts are vulnerable has moved on from consideration of eccentric and neurotic distortions (narrow countertransference) to general appreciation of the more full panoply of affects that contribute to the mind of the analyst at work. Just as the analyst’s psychology helps shape and color the unfolding clinical experience, so too does fear arising in an analysis affect the analyst’s mood and even character. The psychoanalytic process itself implies the analyst’s experiencing two particular fears. First, the analyst, having attached emotionally to the patient, must then go through the experience of loss of attachment. Second, looked at from a different angle, the analyst, linked to the patient’s observing ego, and must face the power of resistance when struggling to bring the confliction sphere under the sway of the observing sphere.
