He comments on resistances, tries to correlate the transference with current interactions and significant childhood relationships, and attempts to help patients to gradually understand those aspects of themselves about which they are unaware. As in psychoanalysis, the therapist looks to the elaboration and working through of the transference to be the principal vehicle for both insight and change. This is analytically oriented psychotherapy in its pure form. The maintenance of neutrality was considered most important in those therapies emphasizing the transference. The concept of neutrality has since become controversial.
Many contemporary therapists view it as a theoretical ideal, impossible to attain in actuality.
Analytically oriented psychotherapy is similar to psychoanalysis regarding neutrality, its emphasis on insight-oriented techniques, and its focus on the establishment and unfolding of the transference. Differences from psychoanalysis include the use of the chair versus the couch, the lesser frequency of sessions, and the relative de-emphasis of free association. The main difference between dynamically oriented psychotherapy and analytically oriented psychotherapy is downplaying transference as a therapeutic modality in the latter. Although transference reactions are noted, especially when they occur as resistances, the elaboration of the transference is not a major ingredient in this form of psychotherapy. Rather, therapists and patients focus more exclusively on present-day interactions and relationships, and their correlation to the patients' past.