Interpreting the Countertransference

Interpreting the Countertransference organizes the varieties of listener (therapist) responsiveness along a developmental axis of human relatedness possibilities. He offers fresh alternatives to long-standing problems of countertransference responsiveness and provides specific ways for the professional listener to being systematically considering his or her emotional reactions to clients.

Hedges defines a paradigm shift of major proportions that characterizes psychoanalytic thought in the last two decades. A key idea among the rich offerings this book provides is that intense, persistent, and troubling listener-responsiveness can be considered as originating from a preverbal symbiotic level of relatedness expression that belongs to the speaker’s early life history. Through nonverbal emotional relatedness, the speaker in analysis communicates to his or her listener what Christopher Bollas has called “the unthought known.” It is the listener’s task to perceive and to being the joint process of articulating crucial formative and enduring patterns of experience from the speaker’s infantile past. In this undertaking the countertransference is shown by Hedges to be a key informer.

Hedges maintains that knowing how to interpret the countertransference is a critical new skill required for understanding all intense emotional relationships, especially those encountered in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.