fantasies and defenses that the patient martials against the therapist. Together, the patient and the therapist are said to "work through" the transference to resolve the conflicts that impede the patient's full functioning. Using the transference reactions, the analyst guides the reconstruction of the patient's past, giving the patient access to the experiences that generated his or her present pathology.A danger of the employing the transference is that therapist may find that he or she responds to the patient's transference with a countertransference reaction.
The concept of countertransference was introduced by Freud (1910) as a way of warning analyst's against the temptation to reciprocate the love the patient experiences in the transference. In many instances the patient or an element of the therapeutic situation creates a countertransference reaction (Kernberg, 1986). The establishment of the transference provides an emotional conduit through which the therapist can direct his or her own projective identifications, associating material with the patient that may have little directly to do with that patient. Instead, it is generated in the therapist's own conflictual states. The reaction comes from the therapist's own infantile wishes and fantasies stimulated by contact with the patients infantile wishes and fantasies (Meyer, 1986). At a conscious level, the analyst or therapist experiences irritation, anger, boredom, or some other negative emotion. From the orthodox point of view, the therapist's emotions temporarily obscure the constructive work of therapy.
Nevertheless, useful psychotherapy depends on some emotional exchange between therapist and client. Through the process of transference, the patient imbues the analyst with the character of past "objects." The analyst undergoes a transient identification with the patient that allows him or her access to an intuitive understanding of the patient, ...