-IBIS-1.5.0-
rx
principles (Mind/Body)
transference and countertransference
psychospiritual approaches

definition

Transference:
The patient's feelings towards the practitioner replicate to an ever-increasing extent the feelings toward significant persons in the patient's life. This can be positive transference (feelings of love, respect, interest, trust, admiration, sympathy, etc.), or negative transference (feelings of hate, anger, hostility, mistrust, rebelliousness, etc.). Both positive and negative transference can help or hinder the healing process. (Kaplan, p. 397)

Countertransference: The practitioner has feelings toward the patient that replicate feelings toward significant persons in the practitioner's life. (Kaplan, p. 1446)

• These are terms which explain natural phenomena which occur in all relationships, and may be experienced as fondness, admiration, respect, connection. When one notices strong interactions that seem to have a mind of their own, that's transference and countertransference. This material can be dealt with effectively by opening the relationship channel. This requires extraordinary skill, compassion for human beings, openness to one's own shadow, and ethical development.
(Burg)

Transference and Love: Process Work
Where does the transference and countertransference fit into process work? At a certain moment in the work, the client's development depends upon the practitioner's expertise and real human nature. Carl Jung called the dropping of the usual therapeutic procedure, the real person-to-person contact, 'getting into the same bath water.' Both people develop consciousness together. Both are cleaning up and transforming one another. Jung said that it is important to be open about yourself when this is called for.

In process this opening may happen in many ways. One way is through the working with double signals. Double signals are the living unconsciousness, combining a conscious and an unconscious message, like saying 'yes' to someone while unconsciously shaking your head in a 'no' gesture, thus sending two messages simultaneously.

Getting into the bath water means many things: one of them is not only talking about feelings and dreams, but also working on the bath water, the living unconscious, in the form of double signals, right when they occur.

Mindell relates: "One analysand recently complained that I always seemed to be aloof. This I fervently denied - no one was more personal than I! She agreed with me but insisted nevertheless that something irrational in her was telling her that I was aloof. She felt that we had already been working long enough on her parental projections, that she knew as much as possible about them and that they were not causing her feeling. I noticed that when I defended myself, I was not just speaking words to her, but also sending a message through the high pitch of my voice.

"I listened to the tone of voice for a moment, and then had to admit embarrassedly that there was something like a baby in my voice. She said, 'Don't be embarrassed, process it like you have told me to do.' So I identified for a moment with the baby in me, and to my surprise many needs surfaced in me. I needed, for example, to ask her to help me on one of my projects. She was delighted to help out and not just be considered an unconscious client. Meanwhile I changed by learning to be more of a child, which in fact was what I had dreamed about the night before. I was acting like an aloof adult as a defense against my own kid but had not realized it. We were bathing together."
(Mindell, "Jungian Psychology Has a Daughter" lecture)

see:
process paradigm


footnotes