“Ghosts at the banquet” - Scholarly Commons Home

The Role of Countertransference in Informing the Therapist
Feiner (1982), suggests that, if we take the client’s affective state and
behaviour as triggering our own inner processes, we are then able to
differentiate our response from that of the client, and therefore are able to go
on and explore the question: “What is there about this person that elicits this
from me, that is, the way I am right now (hopeless, angry, defensive, guilty,
withdrawn, sexy, humorous, etc)?” (p.407). This, Feiner suggests, helps to
metabolise and process our experience and, as Wallin (2007) concludes, this
allows the client to be more available and more accessible to herself. Part of
the difficulty is in “the anxiety of influence” (Feiner, 1979) exerted by the
client and experienced by the therapist by way of countertransference, as the
client faces into their fears. At these times, Wallin (2007) notes that the
therapists subjective experience is both a resource and a resistance that can
enhance or inhibit the therapy.
In noting the similarities of therapist and client, Racker (1988) says that, while
both have “internal and external dependencies, anxieties, and pathological
defences” (p. 132), there exists the difference in objectivity; that the therapist
in true objectivity can form an internal division that enables the therapist to be
alive to her own countertransference and subjectivity, and ideally to remain
relatively objective towards the client. This reflects the shift of psychoanalysis;
namely that, on one hand, the therapist is not seen to live without anxiety or
anger but also at the other extreme is not ‘drowning’ in the
countertransference. Part of this shift, is also due to the influence of
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