The Resident’s Countertransference: Approaching an Avoided Topic

The resident’s countertransference to his/her patient may offer essential information about certain denied processes within that patient. It may also signal the existence of countertherapeutic scotomas within the resident. This paper offers a clinically based approach for directly identifying, exploring, and utilizing the information emerging from the resident’s countertransference. This approach focusses on the “only or never” phenomenon, the parallel process, and introspective curiosity as modes of identifying the existence of countertransference responses. It highlights the importance of confrontation and clarification to explore the meaning of these responses in the context of that particular resident with his/her particular patient.