Transference: Why Your Feelings About Your Therapist Matter

What does transference look like?

• Rehearsing what to say so your therapist will not think badly of you.
• Feeling irrationally hurt by a neutral comment, or by the end of a session.
• Idealising your therapist — or dismissing them — more strongly than the reality warrants.
• Wanting to be the “good client,” or expecting to be eventually let down.

None of this means something is wrong. It means your relational template — formed early, rehearsed for years — has entered the relationship, exactly as it does everywhere else in your life.

Why does transference happen?

The mind generalises. Early bonds create working models of what closeness, authority, and care feel like (see attachment styles), and new relationships are read through those models — especially relationships with built-in intimacy and asymmetry, like therapy.

How does psychodynamic therapy use it?

In depth work, transference is data. When the old expectation appears — live, between us — we can examine it in real time, trace it to its origins, and have a different experience instead: being met with understanding where you expected judgment. Repeated, that new experience rewrites the template. This is why the therapy relationship is itself the instrument of change, not just the setting for advice.

What about the therapist’s feelings?

Therapists experience responses too — countertransference — and are trained to use them reflectively, supported by supervision. It is one reason I also provide supervision for early-career therapists: these instruments need calibration.

Curious what this looks like from the first meeting? Read what happens in a first session.