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I am sure that there are aspects of these five principles that some psychoanalytic practitioners would seek to challenge. That encapsulates the very nature of psychoanalysis. I ask only that we adopt my brief summary as a means of understanding what lies at the heart of the problems that psychoanalytic practitioners would encounter, within the fitness to practise rubric operated by HPC. It all boils down to the nature and ramifications of the transference.
All psychoanalytic practitioners take into account the transference, though in a number of different ways. At this point, maybe I should make it clear that, when I use the term psychoanalytic practitioner, I am doing so as a means of encompassing all those whose clinical work is based solely on psychoanalytic theory, in the widest possible sense of that term i.e. from all schools of psychoanalysis and whatever psychoanalytic professional title they use, ranging from psychoanalyst to psychoanalytic psychotherapist. There are, of course, other such professional titles. What I am suggesting is that they all acknowledge the above parameters of psychoanalytic clinical theory.
There are, however, profound differences within psychoanalytic clinical practice in relation to how the transference is used. Some practitioners interpret the transference at every opportunity: whatever the patient says is interpreted directly by the analyst as an indication of how the patient feels about the analyst, regardless of whom the patient actually claims to be talking about. Others rarely or never make transference interpretations but listen carefully instead to what their patient is trying to say, in order to understand the nature of the transference and in the hope that, eventually, their patients will realise for themselves, whether directly or indirectly, what is unfolding within that transference relationship. Some practitioners will make transference interpretations to their patients from the very beginning of an analysis. Others assume that their patients will feel persecuted by them if they interpret the transference too early in the analysis and will wait, sometimes many months or even years, until they are able to conclude that their patients are ready to receive their interpretations of the transference and are able to make use of them.
But the patient is not the only one to encounter the transference. Analysts also have transference feelings about their patients. Some practitioners pay attention to such feelings and often pay particular heed to them when they conclude that these are not stricly manifestations of their own feelings but that they arise out of unconscious or non-verbal communications by patients of their projections onto the analyst. We usually refer to such situations as the countertransference. However, few analysts will openly talk of their own feelings within the analysis. Many other practitioners, while aware of their feelings towards their patients, regard these as an intrusion and strive to ensure that they do not influence in any way the analytic encounter with their patients.