Introduction

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Key Papers Series brings together the most important psychoanalytic papers in the journal's eighty-year history in a series of accessible monographs.

Approaching the IJP's intellectual resources from a variety of perspectives, the monographs highlight important domains of psychoanalytic enquiry.

The papers in this volume were commissioned with a view to describing the current views of countertransference, and their historical evolution, in four intellectual communities of psychoanalysis: North America, Britain, France and Latin America.

Psychoanalysis is still sometimes described as a monolithic and unchanging theory and practice. These papers vividly contradict such a view through their close study of the evolution of the concept of countertransference from the periphery of psychoanalysis to its current position of central importance in most analytic communities. In doing so, they provide a window of the development of a living and evolving discipline during its first one hundred years.

- From the Introduction by Richard Rusbridger