Countertransference

Countertransference is a therapist’s emotional response to a patient, shaped by the patient’s behavior and by the therapist’s own conflicts and experiences. It can obstruct treatment or provide information about the therapeutic relationship.

Transference: The redirection of feelings, expectations, and relationship patterns from earlier relationships onto a person in the present. A patient’s transference can evoke the therapist responses called countertransference.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed its theories and treatment methods. Freud introduced countertransference as an obstacle arising from the analyst’s unresolved conflicts.
Classical Psychoanalysis: A psychoanalytic tradition that emphasizes neutrality, interpretation, and the analyst’s management of personal reactions. Its narrower view treats countertransference chiefly as the analyst’s unresolved conflict interfering with treatment.
Reflective Practice: A disciplined examination of one’s actions, assumptions, and responses to improve professional judgment. Reflection helps therapists separate their personal history from responses elicited by a particular patient.
Projective Identification: A psychoanalytic process in which a person projects feelings onto another and pressures that person to experience or enact them. It describes one proposed way a patient’s emotional communication can shape a therapist’s response.
Paula Heimann: A German-British psychoanalyst who argued that the analyst’s emotional response could help interpret the patient’s unconscious communication. Her influential account broadened countertransference beyond Freud’s view of it as a problem to overcome.
Relational Psychoanalysis: A psychoanalytic approach that understands therapy as shaped by the interaction of both participants. It treats therapist and patient as jointly shaping the emotional field, unlike narrower definitions of countertransference.
Mentalization-Based Treatment: A psychotherapy that strengthens the ability to understand behavior in terms of mental states in oneself and others. Mentalizing can help therapists consider multiple explanations for an intense reaction to a patient.
Therapeutic Alliance: The collaborative relationship between therapist and patient, including agreement on goals and tasks and the quality of their bond. Countertransference can affect the collaboration and emotional bond between therapist and patient.
Heinrich Racker: An Argentine psychoanalyst known for a systematic account of countertransference and its role in psychoanalytic treatment. Racker distinguished forms of identification that shape analysts’ responses to patients.

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