Transference,countertransference and responsibility: Their role in therapy and consultancy

The thrust for this paper lay in the author's experience as a psychotherapist (using broadly psycho-analytic methodologies), and as an Organisation Development Consultant working with individuals and groups in organisations where issues of transference and counter-transference relationships remain uncovered. The paper further explores transference from the point of view of its manifestation as the ghost in the machine in mundane relationships that becomes amplified in the authority relationship of therapy or consultancy. The paper then looks at the crucial issues in counter-transference—in particular issues of responsibility, power and humanity in the relationship. In the concluding section we suggest a taxonomy in order to explore situations in which transference and counter-transference can be benevolent or malevolent.In all, the ideological thrust of the paper is that, from the therapists/consultants' positions, they have, in a hermeneutic sense, to accept their own humanity and take responsibility for it (through the process of the counter-transference) in the therapeutic encounter.