Countertransference feelings and the psychiatric staff's self-image

This paper presents a study of associations between psychiatric staff's habitual feelings towards their patients and the staff's self-image. At 22 psychiatric treatment homes for psychotic and other severely disturbed patients, 163 male and female staff recurrently rated their feelings towards the individual patients on a feeling checklist. At the beginning of the study period, they also rated different aspects of their self-image (the introject and the mother and father images) using Structural Analysis of Social Behavior (SASB). Over time and over patient, correlations between the individual staff ratings on the feeling checklist and ratings on the SASB were studied for all staff and for male and female staff separately. The analyses showed a number of associations between the staff's feelings and aspects of their self-image. Staff who habitually tended to feel helpful and autonomous towards their patients had a more positive image of mother, whereas staff who tended to feel more rejecting, unhelpful, and controlled had a combination of negative images of mother and father and a protecting introject. Some notable differences between male and female staff were found. Overall, self-image accounted for larger proportions of the male staff's feelings than of the female staff's. Negative feelings for male staff were associated more with a critical father image, whereas for female staff these feelings were associated more with an image of the father as a freedom giving.