TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE

Transference is a unique relationship between a client and a therapist.

The client projects feeling from significant people in their lives on to the therapist causing the client to behave toward the therapist as if he was the significant other person.

The term transference denotes a shift onto another personof feelings, desires, and modes of relating formerly organized or experienced in connection with persons in the subject's past whom the subject was highly invested in.

Freud described two forms of transference, negative and positive.

Transference implies maintenance of a particular relational form and fidelity to a past relationship that has been preserved in the unconscious.

Transference is a primary tool used by psychoanalysts to better understand the inner workings of a clients mind

It allows the therapist to better understand the relationship dynamics between the client and significant others in the clients present and past .

The transference relationship is an inevitable necessity, Freud argued. Psychoanalysis does not create it. It brings it to light so that it can be combated at the appropriate time.

A subject incapable of any kind of transference is unsusceptible to treatment by analysis.

The therapist uses it as a therapeutic tool to allow the client to explore and resolve issues with significant people through an as if relationship.

It allows the client to work through problems in a safe place with out the fear of damaging the relationship with the real person in their life.

Repetition in the transference becomes the means whereby the patient remembers forgotten, unconscious mental attitudes:

The part of the patient's emotional life which he can no longer recall to memory is reexperienced by him in his relation to the physician.

Furthermore, it allows clients to practice new behaviors in a supportive environment that will allow them to generalize the behaviors to their every day life.

The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made.

The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention.

In its full meaning, transference is what is observed in the course of the treatment and what constitutes an essential precondition of the effectiveness of treatment.

It has to be dissolved before treatment ends so that the patient can reassert his or her independence and resume an adult role. Dissolution proves difficult in some cases.

Counter transference is the opposite of transference

In this case it is the therapist who experiences distorted displacement directed towards the client.

When this occurs it can have both positive and negative effect,

If the analyst is aware of the effects it has on them it may aid in the understanding of others similar reactions to the client.

By 'counter-transference' is meant the transfer by the therapist of feelings derived from his past into his relationship with the patient: such feelings have to be recognized and overcome.