ABSTRACT
Complementary countertransference involves the therapist being ‘recruited’ to take a complementary role in the client's script, usually by taking on the projected experience of the client's Parent. The therapist experiencing complementary countertransference may find they feel subtly critical of their client or that they are distracted in sessions and not paying attention to their client or taking them seriously. Introjective transference is considered to be always present, although it may be hidden by projective or transformational transferences as it relates to the emotional nourishment the client takes from therapy throughout. The projective transferences are aspects of the repeated relationship, whereby the client recapitulates aspects of the primary relational experience in the therapy in order to gain mastery over their unconscious process. Clients with higher levels of functioning may need the therapist to be more opaque so that their projective distortions emerge and become apparent and thus are able to be worked with in the therapy.
