Part 2 - When the past arrives in the room: transference, countertransference, and the therapeutic frame

In Part 1, I explored how people can remain psychologically present long after a relationship ends: not as literal “ghosts,” but as internal objects emotionally charged impressions that continue to organise expectation, longing, defence, and attachment. In Part 2, I want to bring that idea into the consulting room.

Because psychodynamic therapy is not only a place where we talk about old relationships. It is a place where those relationships internalised and unfinished often arrive in live form. The past does not simply sit in the narrative; it enters the relational field. It comes in through transference, it echoes in countertransference, and it pressures the frame. For me as a trainee, this is where theory stops being something I can intellectually agree with and becomes something I can feel sometimes uncomfortably in my body, in my timing, in the subtle pull to do more, say less, rescue, withdraw, or prove something.

Psychodynamic work, as I’m learning it, is not primarily the delivery of insight. It is the slow creation of a relationship sturdy enough to hold what the psyche has been unable to hold alone so that what used to be repeated can be recognised, symbolised, mourned, and transformed (Freud, 1914).

The consulting room as a place where time collapses

One of the strangest and most clinically useful discoveries in training is how easily the psyche collapses time. A client may be speaking about a partner, a parent, a colleague, or an ex-but the emotional temperature in the room can belong to an older scene. The client may not be lying or exaggerating. They may simply be relating from a part of the mind where the past is not “over there,” but alive and immediate.

The boyfriend that never left (anonymised vignette)

All identifying details have been altered.

I worked with a client in her early thirties who spoke about turning 30 as if it meant the end of possibility. She described herself as “too old” to find anyone meaningful and talked as though her life had already closed down. I found myself curious not in a questioning way, but clinically attentive because she had been single for three years and yet spoke as if relationship was no longer available to her.

As the work unfolded, a single word kept appearing: “cheap.” She said that going out, meeting people, or dating made her feel cheap. What stayed with me was not only the harshness of the label, but the sense that it did not fully belong to her almost as if she were borrowing someone else’s language to describe her own desire. In psychodynamic terms, it felt less like an opinion and more like an internalised verdict a ready-made judgement she had taken in and was now living under (Melanie Klein, 1946) and (W.R.D. Fairbairn, 1952).

Over time, she linked the word to a previous partner who repeatedly verbally abused her and called her “cheap” whenever she went out with friends. Gradually, the insult seemed to shift from something said to her into something spoken from within her. She did not only remember the boyfriend; she carried him as an inner voice. This is one of the ways internal objects form: relationships are taken into the psyche as emotionally charged impressions that continue to organise behaviour long after the external relationship ends (Klein, 1946) and (Fairbairn, 1952).

In the room, the word “cheap” functioned like a psychological gatekeeper. It did not simply describe how she felt it regulated what she was allowed to do. When she considered dating, the internalised accusation rose up and shut the possibility down with shame. In classical psychoanalytic language, harsh self-judgement can be understood as a punitive internal authority an internalised moralising voice that restricts desire and punishes need (Sigmund Freud, 1923). From an attachment perspective, it also resembled an internal working model shaped by relational threat: closeness and autonomy were linked to danger, and ordinary social freedom became associated with humiliation and loss (John Bowlby, 1969).

What became clinically important was that this residue was not just “in the past.” It was active in the present, shaping her choices and narrowing her life. In psychodynamic therapy, part of the task is to make these internalised residues visible so that what is currently experienced as “who I am” can be recognised as “what happened to me, and what I had to internalise to survive it.” This is the slow work of loosening old patterns through bringing them into awareness and working through them, rather than simply fighting them with willpower (Freud, 1914).

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This is the logic of transference: feelings, expectations, and roles originally linked to early figures are displaced onto someone in the present, including the therapist (Freud, 1912). Transference is not a mistake that interferes with therapy. It is one of the primary ways therapy happens because it lets an internal relationship become visible as a relationship, not just as a story.

From the perspective of object relations, this makes deep sense. If we internalise emotionally charged impressions of others figures associated with safety, intrusion, abandonment, seduction, humiliation, demand, admiration then those internal objects will seek expression under the right relational conditions (Klein, 1946) and (Fairbairn, 1952). The therapeutic relationship is a uniquely concentrated condition: regularity, intimacy, asymmetry, attention, and meaning all within boundaries. It is precisely the sort of environment that can awaken older attachment templates and object-relational “scripts.”

Attachment theory describes something similar in different language: internal working models guide what we expect from closeness, how we interpret distance, and how we manage need (Bowlby, 1969). In therapy, those models are not only described; they are often enacted.

The unconscious, repetition, and why insight is not enough

A core psychodynamic assumption is that much mental life is unconscious not merely unknown, but actively defended against. This is not a poetic claim; it’s an observation about how quickly we lose access to what we cannot yet bear to know. People forget what they just said. They shift topic when emotion rises. They turn tenderness into sarcasm. They intellectualise. They detach. They over-please. They attack. They disappear. These are not “bad behaviours.” They are organised strategies often once necessary.

In classical psychoanalytic terms, symptoms and patterns can be understood as compromises: formations that protect against psychic pain while keeping desire alive in disguised form (Freud, 1914). When the original situation cannot be remembered, grieved, or thought about, it is often repeated. Freud called this repetition compulsion: the tendency to re-stage unresolved conflict, not because the person wants suffering, but because the psyche is trying again and again to reach mastery or completion (Freud, 1914).

As a trainee, what stands out is how reasonable repetition feels from inside the client’s experience. It does not announce itself as repetition. It feels like reality:

• “People always leave.”

• “If I need anything, I’ll be punished.”

• “I have to earn love by being useful.”

• “If I relax, something bad will happen.”

When these expectations are treated as facts, the person doesn’t experience themselves as repeating the past; they experience themselves as navigating the world accurately. This is why insight alone often fails. You can understand the pattern and still be inside it. Something else is needed: a relational experience in which the pattern becomes thinkable, feelable, and nameable while it is happening without either collapsing into enactment or becoming shaming.

The therapeutic frame: why boundaries aren’t cold, they’re clinical

This is where the therapeutic frame becomes central. In psychodynamic work, the frame refers to the consistent structure that holds therapy: time, fee, setting, confidentiality, roles, and boundaries. The frame is not an administrative detail. It is part of the treatment.

For many clients, especially those with histories of intrusion, abandonment, role-reversal, or chaotic attachment, the frame is the first dependable “other” they can test. Not test in a manipulative way, but test in the way a child tests whether a caregiver survives their need, their anger, their disappointment.

Here I find Winnicott especially clarifying: therapy often requires an environment that can be relied upon enough for regression, play, and emergence of true feeling. If the environment is inconsistent, the client must spend energy managing the relationship rather than exploring their mind. What looks like “resistance” may actually be the client attempting to establish whether the relationship is safe enough to tell the truth.

Boundaries matter ethically, but they also matter psychologically. Without them, therapy risks becoming another relationship where the client must perform, caretaking replaces exploration, and the old script is confirmed rather than understood. With them, therapy becomes a place where intense feelings can arise without becoming actions that harm.

Containment: when the therapist “holds” what the client cannot yet hold

In Part 1, I described internal objects as organising forces in the psyche. In the room, these forces can be felt as pressures: pressure to reassure, to fix, to withdraw, to argue, to explain, to seduce, to punish, to rescue, to become the “good one,” to become the “bad one.” The work is not to deny these pressures, nor to act them out, but to contain them.

Containment, in the sense developed by Bion, describes a function: receiving raw, overwhelming emotional experience and metabolising it into something thinkable (Bion, 1962). In lived clinical terms, this might mean:

• staying present when a client’s despair makes me want to urgently “do something,”

• tolerating a client’s anger without retaliating or collapsing,

• noticing when I’m being recruited into a familiar role,

• and using my own internal response as information rather than instruction.

This is one reason psychodynamic training emphasises supervision: not because trainees are untrustworthy, but because our minds are part of the instrument. If my countertransference is unmanaged, I may mistake the pressure of the client’s internal world for my own “true” impulse and act it out. If it is thought about, it can become clinically valuable data.

Countertransference: the therapist’s mind as both risk and tool

Countertransference refers to the therapist’s emotional responses to the client, including what the client evokes through transference and what the therapist contributes from their own history and personality. Historically, countertransference was viewed largely as an obstacle something to overcome so the therapist could remain neutral. Over time, it was reconceptualised as a potential instrument: a way the therapist can feel, in themselves, what is being communicated or enacted by the client (Heimann, 1950) and (Racker, 1957).

As a trainee, this is both liberating and sobering. Liberating because it validates the fact that therapy is not a sterile procedure; it is a relationship. Sobering because it means my feelings are not automatically “mine,” and not automatically “the client’s” they must be examined.

A simple example: if I suddenly feel sleepy with a particular client, that may reflect my own fatigue or it may reflect dissociation in the room, a flight from affect, a deadening defence, or a communication of “I can’t stay here” that is happening indirectly. If I feel urgent and overly responsible, it might be my personal style or it might be the client installing a relational pattern where care must be earned through emotional labour (as in Part 1’s vignette). The clinical task is not to act on these feelings, but to use them: to wonder, to observe, to test hypotheses gently in the relationship.

Where this becomes ethically crucial is in boundary pressure. A client may unconsciously recruit the therapist into being the rescuer, the special one, the punitive parent, the abandoning figure, the seductive object, the idealised saviour. If the therapist gratifies that pull through extra contact, blurred roles, excessive disclosure, hidden anger, or subtle retaliation the therapy may become a repetition rather than a working-through. The frame protects both client and therapist from the power of unconscious enactment.

Transference in practice: interpretation, timing, and the risk of being “right”

In early training it can be tempting to think the job is to interpret transference accurately: to name what’s happening and link it to the past. But I’m learning that interpretation is less about cleverness and more about timing, humility, and care.

If interpretation is delivered too early, it can feel invasive like being analysed rather than understood. If it is delivered too late, the work may drift into enactment. If it is delivered defensively because I feel pressured or incompetent it becomes about my needs rather than the client’s. This is why psychodynamic technique often emphasises patience: allowing the pattern to become observable, sometimes repeatedly, before trying to name it.

Freud (1912) described transference as inevitable and central; later traditions expanded the clinical focus from “explaining the past” to paying close attention to the here-and-now relationship as the place where change is negotiated. In practice, that might look like:

• noticing a shift in the client’s tone when I set a boundary,

• tracking how disappointment is handled between us,

• exploring what the client imagines I feel about them,

• and staying curious about what becomes unsayable in the room.

Often the most helpful interventions are not dramatic interpretations but small acts of relational truth: making the implicit explicit, naming what is happening between us, and doing so in a way that leaves the client with more choice rather than more shame.

They described themselves as “fine,”

All identifying details have been altered.

A client came to therapy after a relationship ended abruptly. They described themselves as “fine,” but the sessions had a brittle quality fast speech, lots of detail, minimal affect. I noticed that when I asked gentle questions about feeling, they became subtly irritated, as if I were doing something inappropriate. At the end of sessions they often smiled warmly and said, “Thank you this really helps,” yet their body looked tense, and they routinely left early.

After a few weeks, I took a small risk and reflected the pattern in the room: that it seemed difficult for them to slow down here, and that when I moved closer to emotion it could feel intrusive or unsafe. They paused, then said: “You’re like everyone else. You want something from me.”

In that moment, I felt two impulses. One was to reassure “I don’t want anything from you.” The other was to retreat and become very formal. Both felt like invitations into a familiar script: either I become the needy intruder who must be managed, or I become the cold figure who confirms abandonment.

Instead, I tried to stay with the live experience: “It sounds like when I move closer, it can feel like a demand. Like you’re being taken from. The client’s eyes filled. They said quietly: “That’s what it was like with my mother. If I showed feeling, she’d make it about her.”

Over time, the room became a place where this internal object an emotionally hungry, intrusive caregiver could be felt without being enacted. The client began to test whether I would retaliate when they said no, whether I would collapse when they withdrew, whether I would become resentful when they didn’t reassure me. My countertransference mattered: I had to notice when I felt dismissed, when I wanted the client to “value” me, when I felt anxious at their detachment. Supervision helped me hold these responses as data rather than directive.

A turning point came when the client arrived late and said, sharply, “You’ll probably be annoyed.” I felt a flicker of irritation. Instead of denying it or acting it out, I acknowledged the relational moment: “Part of you expects annoyance and it makes sense to ask. I did notice I felt a moment of irritation. And I’m also interested in what it’s like for you to imagine my irritation, and what you need to do with that.” The client exhaled and said: “I usually have to fix it. I have to make it okay.”

This became the work: not the factual lateness, but the internal script that love requires repair work, that other people’s feelings are dangerous, and that closeness demands self-erasure. The goal was not to eliminate the internal object, but to loosen its dominance so the client could relate with more freedom.

Boundaries and ethics: power, containment, and the trainee’s responsibility

Part 2 would be incomplete without naming power. The therapeutic relationship is asymmetrical: the therapist is paid, holds confidential material, and has professional authority. That asymmetry is not inherently harmful, but it can be misused consciously or unconsciously. This is why boundaries are not only comforting; they are ethical necessities.

From a trainee standpoint, the ethical edge often appears where good intentions meet unconscious pressure: the wish to be helpful becomes rescuing; empathy becomes over-involvement; frustration becomes subtle punishment; attraction becomes blurred disclosure; the fear of harm becomes avoidance of meaningful work.

Containment is ethical because it reduces enactment. Supervision is ethical because it provides a space to think where the therapy room might become saturated. Clear endings matter ethically because they protect against the fantasy that the therapist can become a permanent internal regulator. In reality, therapy aims to help the client develop more internal capacity so that the therapist’s role can be relinquished without collapse.

Working-through in the therapeutic relationship

Freud (1914) described working-through as slow, repetitive, often frustrating. That description still feels accurate. Patterns do not dissolve because we name them once. They loosen because they are encountered repeatedly in a relationship that can bear them: the disappointment, the longing, the envy, the fear, the anger, the shame. Over time, what was acted out becomes speakable; what was concrete becomes symbolic.

In object relations language, internal objects can soften: persecutory figures become less absolute; idealised figures become more human; split parts begin to integrate (Klein, 1946). In Winnicott’s terms, the person becomes less dominated by internal objects and more able to “use” them recognising them as internal representations rather than external inevitabilities (Winnicott, 1969). Clinically, this often looks like a shift from compulsion to choice: the client still has feelings, still has history, still has longing but no longer must obey the old script as if it were law.

What I’m taking forward as a trainee

If Part 1 was about why some people remain inside us, Part 2 is about what happens when those internalised relationships arrive in the therapeutic space.

I’m learning that therapy is not a conversation about relationships; it is a relationship where old expectations are revived and tested. Transference is not an error; it is a doorway. Countertransference is not just a hazard; it is an instrument if held ethically and thought about. The frame is not coldness; it is care in structural form. Containment is not emotional distance; it is emotional endurance.

And perhaps most importantly: the goal is not to eradicate inner figures. The goal is to relate to them differently to mourn what was missing, to loosen what is rigid, and to make room for new ways of being with self and other.

Part 3 - Introduction: when the relationship itself becomes the material

In Part 3, I want to move even closer to the edge of what makes psychodynamic work powerful and ethically demanding: the moments when transference is not only felt but begins to shape behaviour, fantasy, and boundary pressure in real time.

If Part 2 focused on recognising transference and using the frame as containment, Part 3 will look at what happens when the client’s inner world brings intensity into the room: erotic transference, idealisation, devaluation, and the sudden swing between “you are the only safe person” and “you are just like everyone else.” These are not side issues. They are often the very place where a client’s most defended conflicts become visible especially around dependency, shame, desire, aggression, and the terror of needing.

I’ll explore how therapists can differentiate interpretation from enactment: how easy it is (especially as a trainee) to be pulled into rescuing, withdrawing, over-explaining, over-disclosing, or subtly retaliating while believing we are simply being kind, authentic, or efficient. And I’ll write about the clinical significance of rupture and repair: how breaks in attunement are not failures to hide, but moments that can become transformative when named and worked through, rather than acted out or avoided.

Finally, Part 3 will focus on endings not only planned termination, but the smaller endings that happen every session: the meaning of leaving, the reactivation of old separations, and the way the frame asks both client and therapist to tolerate “goodbye” without collapsing into abandonment or denial. If Part 1 asked why some people stay inside us, and Part 2 asked what happens when they arrive in the room, Part 3 will ask what happens when the room itself becomes the relationship the psyche tries to keep, test, or break and what it means to hold that ethically.

References

1. Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Tavistock Publications.
2. Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss: Volume I – Attachment. London: Hogarth Press.
3. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications.
4. Freud, S. (1912) ‘The Dynamics of Transference’. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press.
5. Freud, S. (1914) ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press.
6. Heimann, P. (1950) ‘On Counter-Transference’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, pp. 81–84.
7. Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, pp. 99–110.
8. Racker, H. (1957) ‘The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 26, pp. 303–357.
9. Winnicott, D.W. (1969) ‘The Use of an Object’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50, pp. 711–716.
10. Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss: Volume I – Attachment. London: Hogarth Press.
11. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications.
12. Freud, S. (1914) ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press.
13. Freud, S. (1923) The Ego and the Id. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19. London: Hogarth Press.
14. Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, pp. 99–110.