Countertransference
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Countertransference
Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client. Early formulations The phenomenon of countertransference (german: Gegenübertragung) was first defined publicly by Sigmund Freud in 1910 (''The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy'') as being "a result of the patient's influence on he physician'sunconscious feelings"; although Freud had been aware of it privately for some time, writing to Carl Jung for example in 1909 of the need "to dominate 'counter-transference', which is after all a permanent problem for us". Freud stated that since an analyst is a human himself he can easily let his emotions into the client. Because Freud saw the countertransference as a purely personal problem for the analyst, he rarely referred to it publicly, and did so almost invariably in terms of a "warning against any countertransference lying in wait" for the analyst, ...
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Body-centred Countertransference
Body-centred countertransference involves a psychotherapist's experiencing the physical state of the patient in a clinical context. Also known as somatic countertransference, it can incorporate the therapist's gut feelings, as well as changes to breathing, to heart rate and to tension in muscles. Various approaches Dance therapy has understandably given much weight to the concept of somatic countertransference. Jungian James Hillman also emphasised the importance of the therapist using the body as a sounding-board in the clinical context. Post- Reichian therapies like bioenergetic analysis have also stressed the role of the body-centered countertransference. There is some evidence that narcissistic patients and those suffering from borderline personality disorder create more intense embodied countertransferences in their therapists, their personalities favouring such non-verbal communication by impact over more verbalised, less somatic interactions. Orbach Susie Orbach has ...
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Body-centred Countertransference
Body-centred countertransference involves a psychotherapist's experiencing the physical state of the patient in a clinical context. Also known as somatic countertransference, it can incorporate the therapist's gut feelings, as well as changes to breathing, to heart rate and to tension in muscles. Various approaches Dance therapy has understandably given much weight to the concept of somatic countertransference. Jungian James Hillman also emphasised the importance of the therapist using the body as a sounding-board in the clinical context. Post- Reichian therapies like bioenergetic analysis have also stressed the role of the body-centered countertransference. There is some evidence that narcissistic patients and those suffering from borderline personality disorder create more intense embodied countertransferences in their therapists, their personalities favouring such non-verbal communication by impact over more verbalised, less somatic interactions. Orbach Susie Orbach has ...
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Transference
Transference (german: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the "feelings, attitudes, or desires" a person had about one thing are subconsciously projected onto the here-and-now Other. It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment. Occurrence It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Another example of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend. In ''The Psychology of the Transference'', Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a ...
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Paula Heimann
Paula Heimann (née Klatzko; 2 February 1899 – 22 October 1982) was a German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who established the phenomenon of countertransference as an important tool of psychoanalytic treatment. Life in Germany Born into a Jewish family which migrated from Russia, after studying medicine in Königsberg, Berlin, and Frankfurt, Paula Klatzko took and passed her ''Staatsexamen'' (state exams) in Breslau. There she met her future husband, the physician Franz Heimann. Together they went to Heidelberg where she trained to be a psychiatrist from 1924–1927. She wrote her doctoral dissertation in 1925. Their daughter Mirza was born that same year. In 1927, the Heimann family moved to Berlin, where she began her psychoanalytic training under Theodor Reik in 1929. Together with her husband she was a member of the International Society of Doctors Against War. Emigration and work in the United Kingdom In 1933, Heimann's husband had to leave Germany because of h ...
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Margaret Little
Margaret I. Little (21 May 1901 – 27 November 1994) was a British psychoanalyst of the British Middle Group, and an influential figure in the creation of object relations theory, particularly as an early proponent of the utility of countertransference in the analytic process. Training and contributions Little's second analysis was with Ella Freeman Sharpe, and her third with D. W. Winnicott; and it was out of her experiences as analysand that she wrote her seminal article of 1951 on 'Counter-transference and the patient's response to it'. There she insisted on the element of reality in the patient's perception of the analyst, and the way it could serve as a mirror for the analyst in illuminating the countertransference. She continued her exploration of the total quality of the analyst's response to the patient in later writings. She also took issue with what she saw as the coercive side of free association, maintaining that "We no longer 'require' our patients to tell us e ...
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Harold Searles
Harold Frederic Searles (September 1, 1918 – November 18, 2015) was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Searles had the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the IPA, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician". Life Searles was born in 1918 at Hancock, New York, a small village in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, which was the subject of many of his reminiscences in his first book, ''The Nonhuman Environment''. He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II, where he served as a captain After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Chestnut Lodge, a private sanitarium in Rockville, Maryland, from 1949 to 1951, then at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene C ...
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Therapeutic Relationship
The therapeutic relationship refers to the relationship between a healthcare professional and a client or patient. It is the means by which a therapist and a client hope to engage with each other and effect beneficial change in the client. In psychoanalysis the therapeutic relationship has been theorized to consist of three parts: the working alliance, transference/countertransference, and the real relationship. Evidence on each component's unique contribution to the outcome has been gathered, as well as evidence on the interaction between components. In contrast to a social relationship, the focus of the therapeutic relationship is on the client's needs and goals. Therapeutic Alliance / Working Alliance The therapeutic alliance, or the working alliance may be defined as the joining of a client's reasonable side with a therapist's working or analyzing side. Bordin conceptualized the working alliance as consisting of three parts: tasks, goals and bond. Tasks are what the therapist ...
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Role Suction
Role suction is a term introduced in the United States by Fritz Redl in the mid-20th century to describe the power of a social group to allocate roles to its members. W. R. Bion's group dynamics further explored the ways whereby the group (unconsciously) allocates particular functions to particular individuals in order to have its covert emotional needs met; and the process has recently been highlighted anew within the systems-centered therapy of Yvonne Agazarian. Among regularly occurring group roles are those of the scapegoat for the group's troubles; the joker; the peacemaker; the critic/spokesperson for group standards; the idol, or upholder of the group ideal; and the identified patient. In mixed gender groups, women may be disproportionately pressured by role suction into playing a nurturing/peacemaker role. Driving forces The ease whereby people pick out those who play complementary games, and the psychological splitting of good and bad help fuel such role differenti ...
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Psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might be considered an unfortunately abbreviated description, Freud said that anyone who recognizes transference and resistance is a psychoanalyst, even if he comes to conclusions other than his own.… I prefer to think of the analytic situation more broadly, as one in which someone seeking help tries to speak as freely as he can to someone who listens as carefully as he can with the aim of articulating what is going on between them and why. David Rapaport (1967a) once defined the analytic situation as carrying the method of interpersonal relationship to its last consequences." Gill, Merton M. 1999.Psychoanalysis, Part 1: Proposals for the Future" ''The Challenge for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Solutions for the Future''. New York: Americ ...
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Projective Identification
Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a route to psychological change; used for ridding the self of unwanted parts or for controlling the other's body and mind. According to the American Psychological Association, the expression can have two meanings: (1) In psychoanalysis, projective identification is a defense mechanism in which the individual projects qualities that are unacceptable to the self onto another person, and that person introjects the projected qualities and believes him/herself to be characterized by them appropriately and justifiably. (2) In the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, projective identification is a defense mechanism in which a person fantasizes that part of their ego is split off and projected into the object in order to harm or to protect t ...
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Acting In
"Acting in" is a psychological term which has been given various meanings over the years, but which is most generally used in opposition to acting out to cover conflicts which are brought to life inside therapy, as opposed to outside. One commentator, noting the variety of usages, points out that it is often "unclear whether 'in' refers to the internalization ''into'' the personality, to the growth in ''in''sight, or to the acting with''in'' the session". Patients With respect to patients, the term 'acting in' has been used to refer to the process of a client/patient bringing an issue from outside the therapy into the analytic situation, and acting upon it there. The therapist is advised to respond to the issue immediately to prevent further and more disruptive acting in. Hanna Segal distinguished positive acting in from destructive acting in - both being aimed however at affecting the analyst's state of mind, whether to communicate or to confuse. Posture The term was used in 1 ...
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Parallel Process
Parallel process is a phenomenon noted in clinical supervision by therapist and supervisor, whereby the therapist recreates, or parallels, the client's problems by way of relating to the supervisor. The client's transference and the therapist's countertransference thus re-appear in the mirror of the therapist/supervisor relationship. Origins and nature Attention to parallel process first emerged in the nineteen-fifties. The process was termed reflection by Harold Searles in 1955, and two years later T. Hora (1957) first used the actual term parallel process – emphasising that it was rooted in an unconscious identification with the client/patient which could extend to tone of voice and behaviour. The supervisor thus enacts the central problem of the therapy in the supervision, potentially opening up a process of containment and solution, first by the supervisor and then by the therapist. Alternatively, the supervisor's own countertransference may be activated in the parallel p ...
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