Challenges to making use of countertransference responses during the Covid-19 pandemic – some preliminary thoughts

ABSTRACT

Some challenges to clinicians’ use of their countertransference responses during the pandemic are explored, in relation to direct clinical work and supervision. Changes to the setting, shared existential anxieties, as well as a sense that authority figures may be compromised, affect the structure of the clinical encounter. It can be harder in this context to differentiate the anxieties and defences of patient, clinician and supervisor, making it more difficult to be guided reliably by countertransference feelings.

KEYWORDS:

• Countertransference
• paternal function
• maternal function
• pandemic
• setting
• differentiation
• Covid-19

Acknowledgments

I first discussed some of the themes of this short communication in an ACP work discussion group for supervisors led by Monica Lanyado, which I attended from May to July 2020. Thank you to her and the other members of the group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is a large literature on countertransference and countertransference enactments, as well as literature on working via telephone or internet (though mainly with adults), which is outside the scope of this short reflective piece. I am also aware that I don’t specifically address issues related to remote working that are pertinent to the theme of this paper – most obviously the question of how the patient and therapist not sharing the same physical space might affect bodily countertransference responses.

2. At the time of writing, the UK has one of the highest per capita death tolls from Covid-19 in the world (Our World in Data, 2021), and the majority of the British public, during most of the pandemic so far, has considered the government’s handling of it incompetent (YouGov, 2021). On allegations of British government incompetence, corruption, and politicisation of science during the pandemic, see Abbasi (2020); Geoghegan (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Kohon

Sebastian Kohon trained as a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and as an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the British Psychotherapy Foundation. Since 2008 he has worked at the Brent Centre for Young People, the Belmont School Mill Hill, and in private practice in South-West London.