ABSTRACT
Systemic therapy has had an ambivalent relationship with the psychoanalytic therapies, and in many ways it has had an oppositional relationship. This chapter explores the usefulness of the analytic ideas of transference, countertransference, and projective identification in understanding issues in the therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy. It considers two particular topics—the first is the process of engagement, and the second is an extension of the concept of sequences to the therapeutic relationship. The chapter begins with some comments about the different therapeutic environments of analytic and systemic therapy. It considers the way in which these analytic ideas may enrich the understandings of engagement and sequences in the therapeutic relationship in systemic work. Psychoanalytic ideas become attractive because systemic therapy has failed to theorize the therapeutic relationship, and examples of this include the failure to offer understandings of the complexities of the process of engagement and therapy sequences.
