Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self Interest between Analyst and Patient

Winner of the 2009 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship!

Irwin Hirsch, author of Coasting in the Countertransference, asserts that countertransference experience always has the potential to be used productively to benefit patients. However, he also observes that it is not unusual for analysts to 'coast' in their countertransferences, and to not use this experience to help treatment progress toward reaching patients' and analysts' stated analytic goals. He believes that it is quite com...