Countertransference
Your own emotional and bodily reaction to another person. Freud saw it as interference; later analysts showed it is often information about what the other person is doing, evoking, or cannot feel themselves.
What drives it
Lets you recognise what someone cannot or will not say, because people communicate inner states by inducing them in others. Your boredom, protectiveness, irritation, confusion or arousal around someone is evidence, once you have subtracted what belongs to you. It is the observer's main instrument.
How it shows
Work
You leave a one-to-one exhausted, or oddly guilty, or wanting to rescue someone you barely know. Everyone who manages a particular person ends up shouting at them. You find yourself over-explaining to a quiet director, or feeling stupid around a peer who has said nothing cutting. These induced states point to the other person's inner world: the guilt you feel may be guilt they disown; the urge to rescue may be the helplessness they enact. The discipline has two steps: notice the reaction, then ask 'is this mine, or is this being done to me?'
Relationships
With a partner or parent you find yourself playing a role you do not recognise in yourself: the nag, the cold one, the parent. When several people in someone's life end up in the same role, the role is probably being induced. Racker's distinction helps: concordant (you feel what they feel) versus complementary (you feel what their inner critic or persecutor feels towards them).
Self
Track your body and impulses in the first minutes with someone: tension, sleepiness, the urge to please or to attack. Then check your own history: is this person a trigger for you specifically, or would most people feel this? Reactions that are unusual for you and specific to them carry the most information.
What tells it apart
Transference: Transference starts in the other person's past; countertransference starts in your reaction. If your reaction would fire with anyone resembling your own father, it is more likely your transference; if it fires only with this person and you rarely feel it, it is likely countertransference carrying information about them.
Projective identification: Projective identification is one mechanism that produces countertransference: the other person puts a feeling into you by how they treat you. The tell is pressure; you feel pushed to act the feeling out, not just to notice it.
Emotional contagion: Contagion is fast mimicry of the mood on display; countertransference often runs against what is shown, such as feeling rage around someone who presents as calm and sweet, or deadness around someone who is animated.
A test
Name your reaction, subtract what you know you bring to this kind of person, and check whether others around them report the same feeling; a shared, specific reaction is data about them.
Questions to carry
- Around this person, which reaction comes up that others around them report too?
- Which feeling comes up in me with one particular person and almost nobody else?
How strong the research is
clinical. Central to clinical practice; Gelso and Hayes and others have studied countertransference management with some evidence that it improves outcomes, but recognising another person's state from your own reaction is a skilled inference, not a measurement.
Where it comes from
Sigmund Freud, 1910; reframed as useful data by Donald Winnicott, 1949, Paula Heimann, 1950, and Heinrich Racker in the 1950s
On the family tree: Sigmund Freud
Sources
- Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood, Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (1992)
- Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2nd edition) (2011)