ABSTRACT
Any difficulty we have in knowing countertransference is therefore of primary clinical significance. Operationally, for the working psychoanalyst, knowing one's experience of the patient means being able to formulate it in words, if only to oneself. Yet we all sometimes have trouble finding these words, in just knowing what our ongoing experience of the patient is, much less solving the additional problem of knowing what it means. For the time being, I will focus on those aspects of the question that are least influenced by the characterological difficulties the analyst brings to the interaction. Because they have been written about so often, and in fact are relatively rare in the everyday countertransference of seasoned analysts, I will not discuss the typical problems in which the analyst, for private reasons, refuses to know how she feels about a patient (Ehrenberg, 1985; Tauber, 1978).
