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Concept
Body-centred countertransference
Summary
Body-centred countertransference involves a psychotherapist's experiencing the physical state of the patient in a clinical context. Also known as somatic countertransference, it can incorporate the therapist's gut feelings, as well as changes to breathing, to heart rate and to tension in muscles.
Dance therapy has understandably given much weight to the concept of somatic countertransference. Jungian James Hillman also emphasised the importance of the therapist using the body as a sounding-board in the clinical context.
Post-Reichian therapies like bioenergetic analysis have also stressed the role of the body-centered countertransference.
There is some evidence that narcissistic patients and those suffering from borderline personality disorder create more intense embodied countertransferences in their therapists, their personalities favouring such non-verbal communication by impact over more verbalised, less somatic interactions.
Susie Orbach has written emotively of what she described as "wildcat sensations in my own body...a wildcat countertransference" in the context of body countertransference. She details her role responsiveness to one patient who evoked in her what she called "an unfamiliar body experience...this purring, reliable and solid body" to counterbalance the fragmented body image of the patient herself.
Irish psychologists at NUI Galway and University College Dublin have recently begun to measure body-centred countertransference in female trauma therapists using their recently developed 'Egan and Carr Body-Centred Countertransference Scale' (2005), a sixteen symptom measure.
Their research was influenced by developments in the psychotherapy world which was beginning to see a therapist's role in a therapeutic dyad as reflexive; that a therapist uses their bodies and 'self' as a tuning fork to understand their client's internal experience and to use this attunement as another way of being empathic with a client's internal world.
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