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Concept of Countertransference

Freud originally defined countertransference as “a result of the patient’s influence on (the analyst’s) unconscious feelings.”The result of uncontrolled countertransference is a loss of analytic neutrality. Beginning circa 1950, the literature on countertransference reflected an increasing awareness of the clinical importance of the phenomenon, and there was a significant expansion of the meaning of the term beyond that in Freud’s original definition. Moreover, many clinicians began dealing with countertransference as a tool for understanding the analysand. In the 1980s and 1990s, countertransference emerged as an area of common ground among psychoanalysts with diverse theoretical perspectives. This convergence can be traced to the development of two key concepts– projective identification and countertransference enactment. Within the intersubjectivity theory, countertransference is an amalgam of the therapist’s response to therapeutic reality with the influence of past experiences on the immediate responses of both patient and therapist. Currently, although there are many differences among the diverse theoretical schools of psychoanalytic thought, there is an area of convergence regarding the usefulness of countertransference in understanding the analysand. In addition, there is widespread acknowledgement that an inevitable aspect of analysis is that a patient will treat the analyst as a transference object. Moreover, the analyst’s countertransference reaction is a joint creation that includes contributions from both patient and analyst.