Thank you for your feedback, Anonymous.

It’s interesting that on re-reading my words, I do find that I’m expressing both the client’s and the therapist’s positions and participation in this phenomena.

Specifically, whilst I define counter-transference as the therapist’s response to unconscious material; I still consider that the C/T manifests within a relationship – it’s both the client’s material and the therapist’s material combined, rather than, as you suggest some counsellors take the position of, it’s just the client’s stuff.

I’m unsure about my own position holding “blame” over the client, per se. If the client experiences the therapist as attacking, and the therapist is not (intending to be?) attacking, I would find that an interesting manifestation of the client’s transference and the therapist’s (possible unconscious) response and participation within this. Something important is happening.

My take on psychodynamic practice is that I don’t consider this example as being a fault of the client, so it’s not really my thing to hold blame over the client for what therapist and client are manifesting together. Yet, when a client cannot – at all – see the therapist as anything other than the distressing object into which he has (been?) transformed, then some may say that the therapy is clearly failing. Yet, maybe, in these circumstances, this was always the intention of the client’s unconscious: to find an object that can be the mantel for a past object/past experience, and be destroyed (enough) for the client to be able to move on (as the client couldn’t have done in the past).

Your comments here are very valuable, Anonymous, and I’m pleased to be challenged by positions and thoughts that I haven’t primarily considered in writing my post.

Thank you 🙂

Where is the counsellor in all this, both points you mention here are about the client’s inability to hold on or of feeling too hurt by the counsellor getting it wrong. This is part of this profession (which I am a part of unfortunately). The client is usually always blamed, in psychodynamic counselling there are just words and theories to support the blame of the client. Person centered counsellors usually tend to find psychodynamic reasons when the client ‘just wont listen, or just cant hold on to the fact that it is all happening in the transference.’

I would suggest a third point, and this I feel is the most important point as it happens many times between counsellor and client and leads to breakdown of the therapeutic frame- the counsellor is still stuck in his/her own past. And by this I am not talking about obvious abusive cts done to her/him by adults that should have known better, no. I am talking about abuse (Alice Miller called it Poisonous Pedagogy)that is seen as normal, acceptable behaviour in society and also the psychotherapeutic schools. In the name of the child’s good the child is abused, in the name of the client’s own good the client is abused.