What is countertransference? Twenty-five years ago we knew what it was: undesirable and contaminated therapist behavior arising from unresolved personal conflicts. Back then, countertransference was bad-it represented a serious error that would probably interfere with the therapy process and might even disrupt treatment outcome. In this "classical" view of countertransference, it was by definition unconscious, neurotic, and adverse. We were enjoined to avoid and surmount countertransference at all costs.
In recent years, the term "countertransference" has been used generically and, at times, indiscriminately. It can refer to any therapist reaction or feeling, desirable or undesirable. The term is inconsistently employed to refer to the therapist's customary ways of behaving with patients, to the therapist's reciprocal reactions to patients' habitual ways of evoking reactions, to the therapist's unique feelings toward a certain patient, or to all three phenomena (Holmqvist & Armelius, 1996). Now, countertransference can be good. It illuminates the client's repetitive, maladaptive interpersonal processes and provides useful material to the therapist. These two constructs of countertransference-a useful means to understand the patient and a hindrance to the therapeutic work-have intertwined, like a double helix, throughout the history of the concept (Epstein & Feiner, 1979). Perhaps we are advancing or perhaps we have created a Tower of Babel. In either case, practitioners and students alike are confused.
The analysis of countertransference occupies a prominent place in contemporary psychoanalytic thought, of course. But most theoretical orientations place considerable emphasis on the inner work of the therapist-how to constructively harness the intense, conflictual, and often painful reactions of working with difficult people-even if they do not invoke the term (Safran & Muran, 2000). All theoretical traditions, moreover, recognize the therapist's contribution to the treatment process and the need for therapist selfcare when experiencing the looming despair, sudden rage, or boundary confusion that is all part of countertransference.
The goal of this issue of In Session is to examine, from multiple theoretical perspectives and clinical research, the meaning and utility of countertransference.