1 | INTRODUCTION
The objective of this text is to present, for all health professionals
who work in medical settings, the phenomena and concepts of transference
and countertransference found in daily non-psychiatric clinical
practice. It is also aimed at presenting some possible interventions
addressing these psychodynamic phenomena that could facilitate the work
of clinicians with their patients. With these objectives in mind, the
phenomena and basic psychological concepts—whether psychodynamic or
not—from which the concepts of transference and countertransference
emerge will be presented first. For each concept presented, the
definition and nature of the phenomenon, an example with non-psychiatric
patients—all examples are hypothetical and not from real
situations—and a possible intervention to manage this phenomena in
cases where they complicate working with the patient, will be expressed.
The phenomena are not discrete and tend to overlap, therefore, the
reader should feel comfortable when discovering that the definitions are
not mutually exclusive. Also, it is difficult to express definitions by
genus and difference that are not very narrow or too
broad,1 thus, it is better to consider all definitions
as an approximation to the real phenomenon that they attempt to define,
and not to consider that the real phenomenon is what is defined.
To conclude this introduction, the author invites the reader interested
in reviewing the history and empirical evidence on the existence of
these phenomena to review Luborsky and Barret,2Yakeley,3 and Ulberg and Dahl.4