No abstract

HE LITERATURE ON countertransference is increasing rapidly (20, 21,28,40). Karl hlenninger (19) and Mabel Cohen (2) both T list dreams about the patient as countertransference indicators. Current research into the process of dreaming (3, 4, 36) has shown that dreams occur much more often than was hitherto suspected (1 1). Such observations, indicating increased quantity of dreaming, when combined with a changing attitude (13, 17, 18, 23, 28) to the purely negative implications of the countertransference, suggest that a reappraisal of the analyst or therapist dreaming about the patient might well be in order. T h e thesis of this paper is that dreams about patients by the analyst or therapist are occurring more often than is being reported, and, furthermore, that these dreams may be highly productive in providing insight into the transactions of the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic process. Because much of our data is from both psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we shall refer to both processes.Descriptions of countertransference vary from occasional to invariable (33), from negative to positive (34), from all-inclusive to partial (18, 26), and from neurotic to normal (20). As an initial approach we propose to classify a dream of a therapist about a patient in the manifest content as a countertransference dream. This provides ease of identification so that we can focus our inter-