Lastly, patients regularly overrate the analyst's significance. He is for them not simply a human being who by dint of his training and his self-knowledge may help them. No matter how sophisticated they are, they secretly do regard him as a medicine man endowed with superhuman faculties for good and evil.
Both their fears and their expectations combine to produce this attitude. The analyst has the power to hurt them, to crush their pride, to arouse their self-contempt—but also to effect a magic cure! He is in short the magician who has the power to plunge them into hell or to lift them into heaven.
Karen Horney. Neurosis and Human Growth