The Therapist Translator: Reflections on Working With Countertransference in the Therapeutic Relationship

While developments within psychoanalytic thought have expanded our understanding of the phenomenon of countertransference and its meaning, clinicians are often left with a sense that negative countertransference is a sign of a therapist's own "unfinished business." Within the context of clinical supervision, the model of putting countertransference reactions through The Therapist Translator is introduced as a means of exploring how to best give voice to and make use of the emotional responses that arise from within the intersubjective analytic field. In this article, the authors introduce a group process dynamic that utilizes the free association of multiple clinicians to assist in "translating" relatively unformulated material into conscious, linguistic information that can be incorporated into the treatment.