Countertransference is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a clinician lets their own feelings shape the way they interact with or react to their client in therapy.
Often, countertransference is unconscious, and both the clinician nor the client realizes it is happening.
Dysfunctional patterns, beliefs, and assumptions that affect a patient’s perception of other people often affect their perceptions and behaviors towards the therapist. This tendency has been traditionally called transference for its psychoanalytical roots and presents an important factor to monitor and process. Countertransference occurs when the therapist responds complementary to the patient’s transference based on their own dysfunctional beliefs or assumptions.
In a therapy session, a client might remind the therapist of someone or something from their present or their past. As a result, the clinician might unconsciously treat the client in an emotionally-charged or biased way.
Freud first identified countertransference as a detriment to an analyst’s understanding of their patient. Present-day, countertransference is viewed with a mix of both negative and positive associations in psychology. In the original psychoanalytic construction, transference was understood as one of the numerous forms of resistance and difficulty forming a required trusting relationship between therapist and patient.