ABSTRACT
The chapter explores some of the links between them and examines at the same time in what ways they differ. Whereas transference is about feelings and responses of the client towards the consultant, countertransference is about the consultant's reaction to clients. A piece of understanding about the relevance of this to working with organizations came suddenly in the middle of a conference in 1993. The understanding arrived at via the concept of splitting helped to explain why sociotechnical work has been so consistently frustrating. "Projects" in which social scientists made a contribution to engineering developments, were simply too weak a mechanism to counteract the institutionalized splitting. The excitement of the original Tavistock breakthroughs, which brought psychoanalytic understanding to bear on non-clinical situations, remains. There is a literature about the "psychoanalysis of organizations", and there is an International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.
