Transference and countertransference

Psychoanalysts have returned to transference and countertransference again and again since Freud's first papers on them, and the subjects still seem to offer more to explore. These two ideas lie at the heart of the relationship between patient and analyst. The authors argue that they are so fundamental that they rise above any single school of thought and can serve as a shared point of focus for psychoanalysis as a whole. Theoretical traditions disagree about how transference should be understood and when or whether analysts should address it in everyday clinical work, yet all of them treat it as vital to psychic change.