Transference – A mental process in counseling

Transference. This is a particular kind of projection in which any client might re-enact toward the counselor any kind of intense feeling which was, or is, really directed, but insufficiently expressed, toward someone else, such as a parent or sibling, the marital partner, or some other significant figure. For example the client who as a child was continually humiliated, taunted or teased by a parent or sibling, or possibly by a sadistic school teacher, may accuse the counselor quite seriously of humiliating him, in some such manner as, “You just sit there like God Almighty, nodding as if you knew everything. I hoped for a bit of help, not humiliation!” When the client’s parents were indifferent and cold to him as a child, and failed to talk to him, the counselor’s silence, designed to allow him a good hearing, may be misinterpreted as indifference and aloofness, and the client will show the same kind of hostility as originally felt (but not able to be expressed) toward the parents.

If the counselor reacts to such feelings and accusations as if they were unwarranted attacks on himself it will only deepen the client’s hostility and will probably ruin the counseling. This kind of emotional reaction to the client’s transference is called “counter-transference,” and it will be dealt with in a later part of this section.

It is the counselor’s task to understand why such feelings may arise in the client, and to accept them so that the client will have the opportunity to work through them to a positive relationship with his own feelings and with his marital partner and other people. In psychotherapy the handling of transference is one of the most important aspects of the whole treatment, and transference is almost inevitable as the therapist makes contact with the surging dynamics of the patient’s inner personality. Transference is less marked in the more superficial work of counseling, but with the intense emotional conflicts in marital disorders the counselor cannot avoid having to deal with some amount of transference.

Apart from the hostility already touched on there are other kinds of transference. A client may find in a counselor of the opposite sex an embodiment of the qualities looked for and not sufficiently found in the marriage, such as acceptance and interest, and may “fall in love” with the counselor. Even a counselor of the same sex as the client may quite unwittingly stir up some latent or actual homosexual feelings in the client with the same result. Almost any emotion, hostility and aggressiveness, romantic love, anxiety, cold indifference, and even deep morbid guilt, may be “transferred” onto the counselor without his deserving it in any way.

In most cases he can best show his acceptance of the transference by the kind of accepting “questioning” comment that has already been illustrated in earlier parts of this book, such as, “You feel very disappointed in what I’ve been able to do?” or “You’re feeling pretty sore at me?” An important exception to this is where the client shows any indication of “falling in love” with the counselor. If the counselor made such a comment as “You’re feeling in love with me?” it would almost certainly cause extreme anxiety in the client and upset the counseling beyond repair. The counselor’s best approach is probably a simple non-verbal acceptance of the feeling, unless it is verbally expressed directly by the client, and careful avoidance of any word or action that would possibly add to the client’s feeling.

One of the greatest services any counselor or psychotherapist can offer to any troubled person is to allow the person the opportunity progressively to express the less “respectable” aspects of his personality and to find that he is accepted in spite of them. Many such people have never felt really accepted “for themselves alone.” They have come to the deeply set conviction that they can never live up to what would be necessary for other people’s acceptance, without which they cannot accept themselves. The counselor’s simple acceptance of any such client, progressively tested and tried by more and more expression of aspects of his personality of which he is ashamed or apprehensive, will gradually release the client from many of these inner hindrances to naturalness and self-acceptance. Then there is no need for many of his automatic defensive reactions which had stirred up so much conflict with his marital partner, his “boss,” his children or others.

In doing this the counselor cannot avoid overlapping into the field of psychotherapy, but if he keeps the relationship between the partners as the central focus of his work he will not generally go far beyond his depth. The fact that he has good rapport with the client will often give him more chance for good therapy in such situations than the therapist would have in the absence of established rapport at this stage. But if the difficulty shows itself as mainly in the inner personality of any client the counselor should immediately consider the advisability of referral to a psychiatrist.

Tags: Counseling