Since Freud's initial papers on transference and countertransference, these vast and inexhaustible subjects have occupied psychoanalysts. Transference and countertransference, the essence of the patient/analyst relationship, are concepts so central to psychoanalysis that, to our minds, they transcend theoretical orientation and, thus, can be seen as the unifying focus of psychoanalysis. However differently theoretical traditions conceptualize the transference, or disagree as to when and how to interpret it in our everyday analytic work, we all embrace the phenomena as vital to psychic...

The contributions in this book exemplify ways in which different analysts think about and treat the issue of interpretation, explicitly or implicitly exploring the question of whether there is something distinctive about the way in which an analyst expresses his or her own personality and understanding within the medium of psychoanalysis. Each analyst construes the aims, theories, and body of knowledge of psychoanalysis in his/her own particular way, and when responding to patients, expresses these in an analytic climate with its own particular diction, vocabulary, and distinctive voice.

The contributions in this book exemplify ways in which different analysts think about and treat the issue of interpretation, explicitly or implicitly ...

Practitioners of psychoanalysis find three central themes to be recurrent and ubiquitous in every analysis: issues around identity, the struggle to know the self, to understand the self and to be the self in an authentic way. Intricately entangled with self-identity is the problem of narcissism, essentially viewed as a defensive retreat to a mental state characterized by an unconscious belief in the special value of the self and the diminution of the other. The motive for seeking psychoanalytic treatment is often to improve the quality of relationships with the other, which is clearly...