Countertransference - Reactive and Responsive
We explore his distinction between reactive and responsive countertransference, and how this differentiation is central to therapeutic presence, involvement, and ethical clinical work. Richard begins by redefining transference as a fundamental human process: an attempt to organize experience, create meaning, and seek resolution for earlier relational disruptions. From there, he explains why psychotherapy is impossible without transference—and why countertransference is equally unavoidable. In this conversation, Richard discusses:
Transference as the enactment of old relational stories in the present
Countertransference as the therapist’s emotional, bodily, imaginative, and behavioral responses
Reactive countertransference as an expression of the therapist’s own unresolved conflicts
Responsive countertransference as attunement to the client’s affect, rhythm, developmental needs, and relational history
Why empathy, compassion, anger, protectiveness, and tenderness can be healthy and therapeutically necessary responses
A powerful clinical example illustrating how what first appears as reactive countertransference may also contain vital information about the client’s unspoken trauma
The importance of personal therapy, supervision, and ongoing reflection in learning to differentiate between what belongs to the therapist and what belongs to the client
Richard also offers a beautiful metaphor: the therapist as a radio receiver, picking up unconscious emotional broadcasts from the client—and the therapist’s task as making thoughtful, ethical sense of what is received.
This video is especially relevant for psychotherapists, trainees, and supervisors interested in Integrative Psychotherapy, relational psychoanalysis, trauma work, and ethical use of countertransference.
