Unit 5 2000 word essay The transferential

phenomena in
the therapeutic relationship

This essay requires critique of a TA perspective and other

psychotherapy models.

Introduction

Transference and counter transference. I confess to feeling ambivalent around this subject.
I question what the difference is between Intuition and Transference?
I am in my third year of training to becoming a Psychotherapist in Transactional Analysis.
I have been in my placement for fifteen months, doing a mixture of long-term and short-
term work for the NHS.
My primary supervisor and my placement supervisor have talked about Transference many
times in our sessions, yet I still don’t really understand it.

I read in the following article by. John M Dusay (1971) Eric Berne’s Studies of Intuition 1949-
1962. He talks about Berne doing a psychological assessment on some soldiers, he was only
given 40 to 60 seconds for each man. He was able to predict with great accuracy the
answers they would give to his questions. He then went on to guess their jobs, but when he
applied his objective criteria his accuracy decreased.

Berne went onto say that intuition is knowledge based on experience without the intuitor
being able to formulate how he came to his conclusion. In other words, it is from his
subconscious. This is how Transference works, it is from the unconscious.

A fellow student explained something to me about her understanding around Transference

that made a lot of sense. She said she was in a first session with a client and she noticed she
was showing off a little, she noted it, and said she would tuck that thought away and see if it
plays out in their future sessions. I then decided I will do the same I will just be more aware
of how I am feeling and what is being triggered in me when I am with my clients.

I had a dream the night before seeing a client. I dreamt I was on an escalator and that I was
angry with all the men going past me, I was saying horrible things to them, then one man
grabbed me and was going to punch me, I was thinking why I didn’t just keep my mouth
shut, now I am going to be beaten up and or killed. The dream stayed with me all day.
That evening I saw my client who had come to therapy due to anxiety, she is about to give
birth to her second child. She also suffers from anger and that brings her a lot of shame. She
has a strong Be Perfect Driver. This was our third session together, she started off by saying
she felt the last two sessions were like an escalator and that she felt she was quickly
becoming aware of why she was feeling the way she is. She went on to say that she gets
herself in to situations due to not being able to control her anger.
She described walking through Vitoria station when a man bumped into her, she became
angry with him, he then punched her in the face. “these things keep happening to me” she
said.
I got goosebumps as she told me this. Was this projected identification? I noticed that I felt
a little scared before seeing this client, yet she is soft and genital. She is Turkish, well
educated and from a privileged background. She is married to a Bangladeshi who she met
when she came to the UK when she was in her twenties.

I felt my dream and what she said was to much of a coincidence to be ignored. But what is
it? What am I picking up from her, is it her stuff or is it mine? I to have a temper and like my
client I have been known to get into scraps. I am twice her age and I am conscious of
wanting her to be able to change her unhealthy ways of relating faster than I did. She would
say things like the English never get angry and she feels jugged by them if she is to express
her feelings, she said she is trying so hard to be “normal”. I reflected on this Contamination
of her Adult Ego Staite. (ref)

Could her Transference with me be that she sees me as a “typical English person” that I
would never get angry or lose my temper, I wonder if she felt I was judging her? I got the
impression she felt a lot of shame as she told me about her altercation. I could see her
looking for my reaction. I then instinctively disclosed something about myself, I told her I to
suffered from having a temper, that it was something I’d had to work on, that it had brought
me a lot of shame. I did not disclose that I’m still struggling to overcome it.

She visibly softened, she became tearful, I think she felt heard. I was showing her that
English people can have tempers too. I wanted to show her a different relational experience
to give her a different outcome. It is only in retrospect that I can analyse what was
happening between us, none of this was done consciously. On reflection I wish I had asked
her if she thought I could have a temper.

I remember after our first session together, telling my supervisor I felt that somehow my
client had experienced some form of racism, it was just a hunch. This was partly due to what
she didn’t say rather than what she did say. On her notes she had declined to say what
religion she was, she also described her husband as British but not English, she did not tell
me he was Bangladeshi until our third session. I picked up she was slightly reticent in telling
me this. I wondered why. She would often say how she knew she would never make friends
in the UK like she had in Turkey. I challenged this Contamination. I was also conscious of her
possibly feeling she needed to adapt to the “British way of life” I am always aware of this
with people from different cultures.
I thought of the power dynamic in our therapeutic relationship. I am British born and bred; I
don’t have to adapt to fit in, something I take for granted. Could she feel she is Not Ok, Your
OK?
She told me her husband told her on many occasions that the British do things this way or
that way, so you need to change. He praises her for the changes she had made in herself
thus far. I felt sad when she told me this and felt she was becoming self-aware in that she
was not being congruent.
I felt I knew something of her experience and my countertransference on to her. When I
was in my teens, I played truant from school. I went to work in a Turkish restaurant in North
London run by a Turkish family. I worked from 10am until 12pm, I loved it. I decided I
wanted to be Turkish, I changed my name to Nisha, I covered my red hair in a long black wig,
I listened to Turkish music day and night, I tried in vain to learn Turkish, I went to watch
Turkish films once a week. I drank Turkish coffee at home that I made in one of those little
silver pots and my ambition was to become a belly dancer.

Of course, this is funny looking back, but at the time I experienced what people from
different cultures experience in different degrees when they come here to the UK. I wanted
to belong to be part of a tribe, I had no family just a strange mother. I tried very hard to fit
in, but in my subconscious, I knew I didn’t. One must look at in the context of London in the
1970’s men and woman were not even nearly considered equal; this was even more
apparent in the Turkish community.
I was not excepted; I was a white English girl who did not warrant respect like a Turkish
woman would. I put myself in danger the outcome could have been a lot worst than it was, I
was lucky. But the mental damage was done, it made a big imprint on me intrapsychically.
I am conscious of having an internal prejudice toward Muslim men. I question what is going on in my
unconscious self how this impacts the therapeutic relationship.

A client I saw for twelve sessions for the NHS conducted over Zoom due to the pandemic.
She had been raped by a friend, she had kept this to herself for over a year, she blamed
herself for letting it happen and thought wrongly that she would be able to deal with it
without help. She was in her early 30s highly intelligent, talented, and beautiful in her
appearance. She lived with her partner and had what she described as a good upbring and a
relatively stable family background. She had become very anxious and withdrawn, there was
no joy in her life. I also noted she was a perfectionist. She has very strong Be Perfect and Be
Strong Drivers (REF). I found myself feeling overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and I
felt useless it was out of the blue, I lost my intuition, I felt stuck.

I took this to supervision at my placement and the supervisor said she thought this client
was complicated, I had also mentioned I felt she had PTSD due to her flash backs, the
supervisor agreed. She said that this client needed to be seen by a level 3 therapist. I took
this to mean that I wasn’t good enough to be seeing her, so my feeling of helplessness
increased. I then email the supervisor to ask if I should get her transferred as obviously, I
was not experience enough to continue working with this client. Her reply was you are
doing a good job and you have taken this the wrong way. she also used the word
Transference. The client was feeling helpless and had somehow transferred it to me. as
Concordant Countertransference, at some deep level I was taking on her feelings of
helplessness it would have been co-created between us.