This dissertation attempts to explore the concepts of authority and influence as they come to play a role in a therapist's development of a professional identity. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective in critically reviewing the literature related to these and other closely connected concepts, this dissertation proposes that a contemporary constructivist viewpoint provides a necessary component to fully understanding the nature of the psychoanalyst's authority and influence. By specifically emphasizing the interconnected matrix of the patient's transference and the analyst's countertransference, traditional conceptualizations of authority and influence are understood as taking a distinctively new shape within each analytic relationship. Building from the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1912a/1958) and Irwin Z. Hoffman (1991a, 1996), this dissertation attempts to integrate classical psychoanalytic ideas with contemporary relational views in a way similar to that of Jay Greenberg (1999). The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a new framework for understanding the process by which the analyst's professional identity is constructed as authority and influence are brought into each analytic relationship, and then take new shape within the transference/countertransference matrix.