The working alliance is St. Stephan's cathedral. Epistemological considerations of the Heinrich Deserno lecture, "Analysis and the working alliance" (1990)]

With the term "working alliance", as it was discussed by R.R. Greenson in noted publications, an understanding of work was introduced that corresponds with the dominant contemporary idea of work as a purely instrumental and technical process which is alien to the original "spirit" of Freudian Analysis. The author shows that psychological work, which in analysis is carried out cooperatively by analyst and analysand, needs transference to be successful, a transference with the help of which the analysand is able to discuss and specify his unconscious psychological conflicts. In Greenson's understanding the working alliance--supposedly neurosis-free--appeals to the rational part of the ego and introduces a normative understanding of reality. The transference relationship, by contrast, gives room to those psychic forces which refuse to obey the authority of the ego and its tendencies to conventionalize and suppress unconscious material.