THE FIRST INTERVIEW AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE.

It is a certified fact that the therapeutic meeting psychoanalyst-patient during the preliminary interview engages the protagonists in an explicitly convergent intercession, an agreement in the conscious register for a joint effort that aims to cure suffering and ameliorate self-knowledge. This facet of the relation defines the therapeutic alliance. However, what happens in parallel, in the subsurface of the meeting implies, likewise from the beginning, the more cryptic register of the unconscious, subtly looms in both the patient's precocious transferential movements and in the therapist's countertransference response. The paper, centered mainly on the latter aspect, sets to give a possible answer to such inquiries as how much, in what way and if they could be traced so early in the cure, and especially, to what extent are or could be considered (in) the key of the future analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]