ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a review of the concept of counter transference and to follow its historical development. It also provides an overview of counter transference phenomena as it applies to psychotherapy with children and adolescents. One would have expected that in parallel with the development of counter transference theory and technique in therapy with adult patients, there also would have evolved delineation's of different kinds of counter transference emanating from the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of children. The reference to counter transference comes in 1910; in a short essay by S. Freud entitled The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy. In his well-known book, Transference and Counter transference, Heinrich Racker accepts that counter transference phenomena are ubiquitous and that all the therapist's emotional reactions to the patient are born of counter transference, in analogy to the patient's transference. Racker thinks of counter transference as both the greatest danger to psychoanalytic work and as an important tool for understanding the patient during it.