There Is No Such Thing as Adverse Idealising Transference (AIT): A Continuation

By Maja Farrell

This article is a continuation of my earlier piece, Psychotherapy Abuse: When Is It the Client’s Fault?, in which I responded to Dawn Devereux’s 2016 article "Transference, Love and Harm" in Therapy Today. In that first article, I expressed concern about how Devereux—and the broader framework of the Clinic for Boundaries Studies (CfBS)—frames the client’s longing and idealisation as inherently dangerous.

Here, I want to take the critique further. The term “adverse idealising transference” (AIT) has been used to describe what is, in fact, a natural and meaningful part of the therapeutic process: the client’s experience of love, trust, and hope placed in the therapist. What Devereux calls a "harmful side effect," I see as a combination of two therapist vulnerabilities: an inability to tolerate being loved and an even more disturbing inability to tolerate not being loved.

In other words, the client’s love becomes a threat not just when it is intense, but when it fails to sufficiently mirror the therapist’s own narcissistic need to be special, adored, admired. When that need is not fed—when the love feels too dependent, too vulnerable, too unflattering—the therapist may retaliate. They may reject the client, punish them with silence, escalate control, or terminate the work altogether. It is not that the client’s love is dangerous—it is that it does not feed the therapist’s ego.

This distinction lies at the heart of the difference between true love and carnal love, a theme I explored in a previous article. True love in therapy is self-sacrificial—it bears the weight of another’s longing without needing to be flattered or worshipped. It does not depend on reciprocity or admiration. Carnal love, by contrast, demands gratification, admiration, control. When a therapist cannot distinguish between the two, they begin to confuse their unmet personal longings with the ethical demands of the therapeutic relationship.

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PSYOP: Psychological Operations and the Manipulation of Narrative

The term PSYOP, short for psychological operations, refers to the use of information to manipulate emotions, reasoning, and behaviour. In this light, Devereux’s article can be seen as a psyop-level intervention, subtly reshaping how therapists and clients view the transference dynamic. The result? Clients are primed to believe they are inherently dangerous when they feel too much.

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The Central Premise: AIT as a "Harmful Side Effect"

Devereux’s opening statement casts AIT as a "harmful side effect" of therapy. But side effects only occur when something else is working. If transference is harmful, what then is the therapy? The implication is that the moment a client deeply attaches, their feelings become suspect. But what if the "harm" only arises when the therapist cannot tolerate being loved—or worse, not being loved enough?

This is not a side effect of therapy. It is a side effect of the therapist’s inability to love in a self-sacrificial way, and a symptom of the therapist’s narcissistic wound when the client’s love is not sufficiently gratifying.

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Pathologising the Client: A Dangerous Trend

Devereux lays out a taxonomy of client pathology. She writes of AIT as emerging from within the client alone, with no contribution from the therapist. This creates a diagnostic loop that protects the therapist while further marginalising the client:

• The client is predisposed.

• The therapist is innocent.

• The love is delusional.

• The boundary breach was prompted.

This logic echoes the worst of victim-blaming narratives. Devereux even proposes that the therapeutic setting itself—calm lighting, sustained attention, eye contact—might trigger AIT in fragile clients. That is: love and care become dangerous stimuli.

What is the inevitable conclusion? That some clients are simply too broken to be helped.

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A Glorified Defence of Therapist Helplessness

Devereux categorises therapists into types: the Lover, the Opportunist, the Weak One, the Perfect One. But even the so-called "Perfect" therapist can fall victim to a client who develops a regressive or malignant transference. The solution? Reject, contain, or terminate. There is no reflection on the therapist’s countertransference, no invitation to examine their own longing, avoidance, or fear.

She notes that the CfBS receives "several hundred" reports of harm each year—and then pivots to suggest that the real cause is not unethical therapists, but clients suffering from AIT.

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The False Myth of Therapist Neutrality

We are told that some clients suffer from a transference so intense and autonomous that it acts independently of any therapeutic conditions. This myth of therapist neutrality is dangerous. All transference has a hook. It is evoked, not conjured from nothing.

In reality, transference—including idealisation—is not evidence of madness. It is evidence of pain. Idealisation arises because the client must see the therapist as good in order to feel safe. Beneath the "adverse idealisation" is a split-off terror that the therapist will be like everyone else: rejecting, abandoning, unsafe. The client is not manipulating; they are surviving.

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The Real Danger: Therapist Countertransference and Fear of Not Being Admired

The true risk in therapy is not AIT. It is the therapist’s inability to hold and metabolise the client’s unconscious longing without retreating into control, blame, or diagnostic superiority. It is also the therapist’s inability to face their own unmet needs for affirmation, worship, uniqueness. When the therapist’s narcissistic needs go unmet—when the client does not idealise them in the right way—the therapist may reject or punish the client.

When Devereux calls AIT a risk that can be managed by "informing clients," "not making them feel special," and "maintaining strict professional boundaries," she outlines not safety but emotional starvation. It is a blueprint for relational retreat—a preemptive strike against love, dependency, and relational vulnerability.

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When Institutions Pathologise Love

That Devereux now works in a leadership position at an organisation that handles complaints makes this framework especially concerning. When love is misread as pathology, the client is seen as the problem. When power colludes with fear, complaints are dismissed not on ethical grounds, but on diagnostic ones.

Clients are not losing faith in therapy because they are fragile or delusional. They are losing faith because the profession gaslights them with theories like AIT that locate harm in their love, rather than in the therapist's failure to respond to it ethically—or in the therapist's narcissistic need to be idealised in more flattering, manageable ways.

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What Is to Be Done?

Therapists must do the painful inner work of tolerating transference without acting it out, fleeing, or pathologising. Transference is not a threat. It is an invitation. An ethical therapist welcomes it, holds it, and bears the pain of not needing to be adored, not needing to be special, not needing to be the hero.

We need less discussion about how to avoid being loved by clients, and more discussion about how to love them responsibly—and how to face the pain of not always being the object of their adoration.

The client who idealises is not a threat. The therapist who cannot receive love without fearing it—or resents the kind of love they receive—is the one who poses danger.

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Final Words

The therapeutic frame exists not to shield the therapist from love, but to provide a container in which love can be understood. When that container becomes a fortress or a pedestal, the client is left alone with their pain once more.

Let us stop writing about how love is dangerous, and begin again to write about how it can be held safely—with humility, responsibility, and grace.

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The harm is not in the transference. The harm is in how we fail to meet it—and in how some therapists resent the form it takes when it doesn’t serve their ego.

Love in the Therapy Room: Between Desire and Sacrifice

“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

—Romans 13:10

The therapy room is a place of profound intimacy—a space where unconscious desires, unmet needs, and infantile longings re-emerge in raw and potent form. Love often becomes a central transference theme, not only as an object of longing but also as a site of confusion, distortion, and potential healing. But what kind of love are we speaking about?

In both life and therapy, love is not one thing. There is the worldly love that arises from the carnal mind—self-serving, grasping, seductive. This form of love, often confused with affection or passion, is rooted in the flesh, the ego, and the drive for gratification. It seeks to possess and be possessed. It operates through fantasy and projection. In therapy, it is the kind of love that fuels erotic or idealizing transference, drawing therapist and client alike into powerful enactments if not held consciously.

But there is another love—one written on the heart, not born of desire but of conscience. This love is aligned with what is “right” in the deepest sense: a love that does no harm. It is, paradoxically, a love that sacrifices the self in order to uphold the integrity of the other. In the therapy room, this love often looks quiet, even cold. It refrains. It withstands. It does not indulge. Yet it is precisely this restraint that constitutes its ethical and transformative power.

Transference, Temptation, and the Possibility of Harm

Clients do not arrive in therapy as blank slates. They bring with them the full weight of their internal object world—yearning, rage, need, and a lifetime of unmet attachment. Within this frame, love is often expressed as a desperate plea: See me. Touch me. Want me.

In intense therapeutic relationships, especially those influenced by AIT (Attachment-Informed Transference), clients may unconsciously test or provoke their therapist’s boundaries. These enactments are not manipulations in the conventional sense but efforts to recreate early relational dynamics in the hope of a different outcome.

But the risk is high. Erotic or idealizing transferences can awaken countertransferential responses that feel like love, even destiny. When therapists act on these impulses—even subtly—they enact betrayal. Abuse in therapy is rarely overt at first. It can begin as a compliment, a prolonged hug, an email sent after hours. Eventually, lines blur, and when the collapse comes, the client is often blamed for “pushing” too far.

Such actions are not love. They are exploitation masked as intimacy—fleshly love posing as care.

Love That Does No Harm: A Sacrificial Stance

What, then, does real love look like in the therapy room?

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm reminds us that “love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.” True love, in this sense, is never self-seeking. It is attuned to what the other needs, not what we want to give. It does not use the other to gratify our own unmet needs. It requires the sacrifice of ego.

This aligns closely with Paul’s injunction in Romans—to love as the fulfillment of the law, meaning to act in a way that causes no harm. But "no harm" does not mean passive neutrality. It often requires active suffering by the therapist: to hold erotic, hostile, or dependent projections without retaliation or indulgence.

A profound dilemma arises here: the therapist must love the client without being loved in return. At least, not yet. Many therapists unconsciously seek to be loved by their clients, to be seen as good or special. But if a client could love—truly love, meaning to recognize the therapist as a separate other and be at peace with that separateness—they likely would not need therapy in the first place. The capacity to love maturely is, in many ways, the outcome of successful therapy, not the starting point.

Boundaries as Love, Not Rejection

This is where boundaries come in—not as cold limits, but as acts of love. A child who becomes the “perfect child,” as Winnicott describes, is often one who never had clear, loving containment. They adapted to survive, suppressing their aggression and need for fear it would be too much for the parent to bear.

So too in therapy: clients will inevitably test the therapist's boundaries—not to destroy, but to find out whether the therapist can survive them.

“The patient needs to be able to do the worst thing and find that they are still loved… Only then can true change happen.”

—Donald Winnicott

It is not love to accept all behaviors without consequence. It is not love to endure boundary violations in silence. Love is not permissiveness—it is clarity. Boundaries are the expression of the therapist's ethical position and care. They say, I will not let either of us be harmed. I will not use you, and I will not let you use me.

Consequences are love. Structure is love. And yet, love is also forgiveness. When a client acts out—crosses a boundary, lashes out, withdraws—what then? The question becomes: Can the therapist forgive when the client returns? Can the door of the room, and the door of the heart, remain open for the one who asks to come back in?

This is where many therapeutic relationships collapse. Boundary-pushing is to be expected—it is not the failure of the therapy. The failure often lies in the therapist’s inability to forgive, to re-open the container, to metabolize rupture into healing. It is not weakness to forgive; it is the therapist’s highest form of love.

Holding the Tension: Eros and Agape

Psychoanalysis has long wrestled with the place of love in treatment. Freud famously warned against acting on erotic transference, yet he also acknowledged that analysis without love would fail. Ferenczi, in contrast, explored the therapeutic potential of tenderness, even mutuality, while later analysts like Heinz Kohut emphasized empathic mirroring as a healing force. But none of these bypass the essential ethical dilemma: love heals only when it remains conscious, boundaried, and sacrificial.

The love that heals in therapy is not eros but agape—a self-emptying concern for the other’s growth. It is the therapist’s capacity to become the container of the client’s unintegrated parts without requiring anything in return. This love does not seek gratification. It does not need to be seen or thanked. It simply remains, unwavering, in the storm.

Final Reflections

When a client enters therapy, they are not yet capable of mature love. The therapist must carry the burden of loving first—without being loved in return, without being seen, and without being understood. That is the crucible of therapeutic love.

To love in the therapy room is not to indulge, idealize, or correct. It is to stand firm in the face of unrelenting testing, to draw clear lines not as punishment, but as protection. And when the client inevitably crosses those lines—as they must—the question becomes: Will you still be here when I come back?

Love in the therapy room is not about feelings. It is about moral action, the restraint of desire, and the willingness to suffer for the sake of the other’s becoming. It is costly. And it is holy.

References:

Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.

Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Row.

Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love. Standard Edition, Vol. 12.

Ferenczi, S. (1931). Confusion of Tongues Between the Adult and the Child. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.

Romans 13:10, Holy Bible, NIV.

Splitting, Shame, and Supervision: A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Narcissistic Abuse in Counsellor Training

The name "Sandra" is a pseudonym used to protect privacy.

Introduction

Supervision is meant to be a space of reflection, learning, and ethical containment. However, when it is co-opted by unresolved narcissistic dynamics in the supervisor, it can become a site of subtle and overt psychological abuse. This paper explores a personal experience of narcissistic supervision during counsellor training, framed within psychoanalytic theory. It examines the phenomena of splitting, idealisation and devaluation, projective identification, and the weaponisation of shame, situating the experience within the wider challenges of professional power dynamics and developmental vulnerability. The intention is to offer a professional account that may support and guide other trainees who find themselves in similar dynamics, and to contribute to a growing body of literature examining supervision abuse.

Initial Idealisation and Early Signs of Narcissistic Dynamics

When I entered my first supervision group, we were a small cohort of four, overseen by a supervisor—Sandra—who was often late and emotionally distant. Her attitude toward clients raised early concerns. On one occasion, when I described a session in which a client was weeping with visible snot running down her face, Sandra commented coldly that the client “had no decorum.” This lack of empathy stood out but did not yet raise alarm. At that point, I was still, in her eyes, a valuable supervisee—engaged, competent, and reflective.

However, I would later come to understand this initial period as one of idealisation. As Kernberg (1975) observed, narcissistically organised individuals tend to split others into “all good” or “all bad” depending on whether they serve their self-esteem regulation. At this early stage, I was still “good.” My interest in psychoanalytic ideas and my ability to articulate clinical material made me useful—what Kohut (1971) would later call a “mirror object” that helped sustain Sandra’s fragile self-image as a competent, powerful supervisor.

The Breakdown of Idealisation and the Rise of Hostility

Subtle signs of enmeshment and control emerged over time. While Sandra was seemingly indifferent when other trainees missed sessions, I was told by a colleague that she anxiously asked about my whereabouts whenever I was absent. My responses in supervision were often met with contradiction: if I said A, she said B; if I said B, she said A. This unpredictable opposition became a constant undercurrent—what Freud (1914) described as repetition compulsion, a re-enactment of unresolved relational trauma, possibly Sandra’s own.

The turning point came when I sent an email to my personal and professional contacts (including Sandra), sharing that my son was running a cancer fundraiser. It included a light-hearted remark along the lines of “God sees if you don’t donate.” When I returned to supervision, Sandra used this as an opportunity to publicly shame me. In front of the group, she declared that I had crossed boundaries by sending her the email. Though I calmly apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again, she refused to move on—her eyes growing wider, her tone increasingly fixated.

Her inability to accept my non-defensive response led to prolonged humiliation. The group fell silent. Some looked at the floor. No one intervened. When I eventually said, more firmly, “I hear you, and I’ve apologised—can we move on?” Sandra accused me of “always switching things around.” The accusation was both vague and loaded—classic projective identification (Bion, 1962), in which her own confusion or instability was located in me.

Power, Dependency, and the Collapse of the False Self

Sandra had institutional power: she was one of the professionals who would decide whether I passed my training. This structural imbalance—common in counselling education—left little room to challenge her behaviour. During this time, I was also experiencing a breakdown in my personal therapy, which I will explore in a future paper. My husband was working abroad for three years, leaving me to face not only the present distress, but also reawakened feelings of childhood shame and abandonment. Despite this complex emotional terrain, I remained professionally functional, holding clients, attending training, and working reflectively.

Looking back, I see that I was caught in a coercive relational bind: if I submitted, I was rewarded with praise and favour; if I asserted myself, I was devalued and attacked. Sandra’s dynamic fits closely with the narcissistic pattern described by Masterson (1981), in which the caregiver (or supervisor, in this case) creates an emotional environment where the other must continually regulate the narcissist’s sense of self.

When the first half of the training ended and new supervision groups were being allocated, Sandra informed our group—with a visible grin—that everyone would move to a new supervisor except me. “You’re going to be my favourite child now,” she said, half-joking, half-serious. I responded, “I don’t want to be anyone’s favourite child.” Her laughter was unnerving. I felt trapped.

Shame as a Weapon of Control

Ferenczi (1931) wrote poignantly about how shame can be used as a weapon in therapeutic relationships. He argued that pathogenic shame—induced rather than uncovered—serves to control the other through humiliation and confusion. Sandra's use of shame was not revelatory but silencing. Her “feedback” turned into character assassination. A formal report was written, portraying me as emotionally unstable and psychologically unwell—despite previous praise for my clinical insight and theoretical competence.

Alongside this, she wrote a separate, three-page document describing me in degrading terms, which I was never supposed to see. In a rare act of transparency, the training organisation shared it with me, so I could respond. This moment was pivotal: for the first time, I was believed. I suspect I was not the only supervisee who had raised concerns.

At a meeting with the organisation's leadership, Sandra, and my husband present, I was informed that I would no longer be in her supervision group. At that moment, Sandra stood up and shoved her chair back. Her body language betrayed her inner collapse—rage, loss, and perhaps panic. The narcissistic supply had been severed. I was no longer available to stabilise her false self. As Kohut (1977) described, narcissistic rage arises when the self-object fails to mirror or admire, triggering a collapse of the narcissist’s cohesion.

The Power of Documentation and Pedagogical Transparency

I still possess the reports Sandra wrote about me. Though painful, they now serve a new purpose. I have chosen to share them—selectively and privately—with my supervisees via a closed Patreon platform. My aim is pedagogical: to help trainees recognise the signs of supervisory misuse of power, the tactics of institutional gaslighting, and the emotional toll such experiences can take. These documents are not shared to shame, but to teach.

In supervision, we often speak about ethics, boundaries, and emotional safety. But we must also speak about power—the power to shape narratives, the power to destroy reputations, the power to determine who is "well enough" to practice. When that power is misused, especially in environments where trainees are already vulnerable, the damage can be profound.

Conclusion

This paper is offered to the field as both a personal testimony and a theoretical reflection on narcissistic dynamics in supervision. It is a reminder that clinical training does not occur in a vacuum; it takes place within human relationships, fraught with projection, transference, and unspoken power. Narcissistic supervisors, like Sandra, often operate within systems that fail to hold them accountable. But when we name the dynamics—splitting, idealisation, shame, rage—we begin to take back the power they seek to steal.

For trainees currently navigating confusing or disturbing supervisory relationships, may this paper offer both insight and solidarity. You are not alone. Your intuition matters. And you can survive it with your integrity intact.

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References

• Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Heinemann.

• Ferenczi, S. (1931). Confusion of Tongues Between the Adults and the Child. In Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-analysis. Karnac, 1980.

• Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12.

• Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.

• Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.

• Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press.

• Masterson, J. F. (1981). The Narcissistic and Borderline Disorders: An Integrated Developmental Approach. Brunner/Mazel.

All Is Vanity”: Hopelessness, Therapy, and the Search for Something Greater

 “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 1:2

The Void Beneath the Surface

There is a quiet despair that can live within even the most functional, successful, and outwardly fulfilled lives. This despair is rarely shouted—it is sighed, shrugged, hidden beneath routines, progress, or even purpose. In the therapy room, it can settle like fog. Not always dramatic, but unmistakably present.

All is vanity...

It is the despair that Ecclesiastes knew well: a spiritual exhaustion, a futility that makes even the most celebrated human achievements seem hollow. “I made me great works,” writes the Preacher. “I built me houses; I planted me vineyards... Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought... and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 2:4, 2:11)

The question arises quietly but dangerously: What is the point of all this? 

The Dangerous Question and the Therapist’s Own Vanity

The question of purpose is often deferred in life—replaced with plans, ambition, children, relationships, or therapy itself. But eventually, for some, the scaffolding collapses. Clients may arrive at therapy when that collapse has begun or when it is already complete. The drive that once fueled their life—career success, family roles, intellectual mastery—suddenly feels meaningless. And therapy, if idealized as a path to healing or growth, can become yet another expression of vanity.

As therapists, we may unconsciously enter into this same fantasy. We hope to help, to repair, to facilitate meaning. But the despair lives in us too. We are not immune to the questions that torment our clients. As Wilfred Bion warned, the analyst must surrender the desire to “know” or “understand” too quickly. He advocated for “faith in the analytic process,” which includes tolerating not-knowing—sitting with the utter absence of meaning when it arises.

This is not a position of helplessness, but of depth. As Bion writes, “The analyst must suspend memory, desire, and understanding,” and that includes our desire for hope, direction, or outcome. Therapy becomes not a cure, but a shared witness to the void. Which really, may only be possible when there is a strong sense of hope internalised. 

Transference, Countertransference, and the Fantasy of Meaning

In therapy, unconscious hopelessness is often enacted through transference. The client may feel the therapist holds the key to a life of meaning, expecting them to reawaken a purpose that feels lost. But this projection—this fantasy of the therapist as redeemer—can be quietly destructive.

For the therapist, the corresponding countertransference may take the form of pressure: the need to “restore” the client, to inject meaning into an otherwise barren psychic landscape. Here, Donald Winnicott’s idea of holding becomes vital. Holding does not mean comforting, nor does it mean offering answers. It means staying. Remaining. Facing what feels unfaceable without fleeing into technique or cheerfulness.

When both therapist and client are able to endure this hopelessness without disavowal, something changes.

Ecclesiastes and the Therapeutic Collapse of Illusion

Ecclesiastes names what most of us dread: the futility not just of failure, but of success. It is not that we don’t achieve—it is that achievement itself cannot ultimately satisfy. "There is no remembrance of former things,” the Preacher laments, “neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” (1:11)

This is a chilling truth, and one that therapy must occasionally confront. Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden has written about the “analytic third”—the space created by therapist and client together, where new understanding emerges. But before this emergence, there is often collapse: the collapse of self-image, of illusions of control, of the fantasy that therapy or life itself will deliver us to lasting peace.

And in that collapse lies a strange hope.

Despair as a Portal to the Sacred

The deepest therapeutic work may involve not change, but surrender. Not triumph, but humility. As analyst Marion Milner observed, the psyche’s longing is not for answers, but for a capacity to stay with inner experience—however painful. To stop avoiding what feels meaningless and to discover, paradoxically, that it is in that confrontation where something meaningful can begin.

Despair, when faced and not bypassed, becomes a threshold. Ecclesiastes never resolves into optimism, but it does conclude with reverence: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” (12:13)

Whether one reads this literally or metaphorically, it suggests that meaning cannot be self-generated indefinitely. The ego must collapse. Purpose must be relinquished before it is transformed.

In clinical language, this is not far from what Jung meant when he described the necessity of encountering the “shadow,” or what Bion evoked with the idea of O—ultimate truth, unknowable yet real, which can only be approached through surrender, not mastery.

Conclusion: Facing the Void Together

There is something sacred in the moment when therapist and client face the void together. When neither clings to false hope. When both are willing to admit that sometimes life does not make sense, and that therapy may not rescue us.

But it is also in this shared space—of hopelessness survived—that a deeper form of hope begins to stir. Not the hope of progress, but the hope of presence. Not the hope of outcome, but the hope of truth.

And sometimes, through the cracks of despair, something greater shines through. Whether one calls it God, a Higher Power or the Soul, or simply Being—it arrives not because we chased it, but because we stopped running.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Perhaps therapy at its most honest is not a search for meaning, but a willingness to sit with its absence—and to discover, in time, that we are not destroyed by it but reconnected to our true purpose.

© Maja Farrell

When Therapy Hurts: Navigating Attachment and the Risk of Re-traumatization in a New Therapeutic Relationship

"It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.” – D. W. Winnicott

Therapy, at its best, is a sanctuary—a place where the psyche can soften, reorganize, and begin to heal. But not all therapeutic relationships are healing. Some become subtly (or overtly) exploitative, mirroring the very dynamics of neglect, intrusion, or manipulation that a client came to escape. In such cases, the rupture of the therapy relationship can itself be traumatic. And when a client, still caught in the web of unfulfilled attachment needs, moves into a new therapy without careful reflection or support, they may unknowingly repeat the past—sometimes with devastating consequences.

This article is not about blaming therapists. It is about taking seriously the complexity of human vulnerability—on both sides of the therapeutic relationship—and naming how easily the dynamics of early trauma can be replicated even in supposedly “safe” spaces. Especially when those spaces are misunderstood or misused by the therapist.

The Unmet Attachment Need

A client who has experienced a harmful therapy relationship (and ending) often leaves not only hurt but confused—still psychologically entangled with the former therapist, which will be most likely a repeat of earlier more significant attachment bonds. Attachment bonds, once formed, are not easily seen as such or "undone". Even when the relationship was deeply problematic, the longing to be understood, soothed, and seen persists. This is the child’s need that never got met. And now, in the absence of safety, it becomes even more urgent.

In this state, the client seeks another attachment figure. Another opportunity. A rescuer. A better “good object.” This desire is raw and primal, and a sensitive therapist will feel its weight in the countrr-transference—the grief, the rage, the helplessness, and the hopelessness.

But not all therapists can hold it.

Some become frightened by it. Some mistake it for pathology. Others—consciously or unconsciously—begin to exploit it. The client, vulnerable, angry yet eager to attach, may become a source of professional gratification: a case study, a loyal follower, an income stream, or a means to confirm the therapist’s self-image as a healer.

Becoming aware of this may cause the well meaning therapist to withdraw! 

It is important to recognize: not all re-traumatizations are intentional. Some therapists truly mean well, but act out their own unresolved dynamics through the therapeutic relationship. Others are more predatory. In either case, the result is the same: the client becomes trapped in a new dynamic that may be just as violating as the one they escaped.

How to Protect Yourself After a Harmful Therapy Experience

If you have experienced a harmful or disturbing therapy relationship, your longing for help is real—and valid. But so is your need for protection.

Here are some ways to guard your psychological integrity while seeking a new therapist:

1. Pause Before You Attach

If possible, give yourself time to reflect on what happened in the previous therapy. Write about it. Talk to trusted friends. If you can afford it, work with a clinical supervisor, therapist-consultant, or trauma-informed practitioner whose role is explicitly to help you make sense of what happened—without requiring you to form a deep attachment right away.

2. Interview Your Next Therapist Carefully

Before committing, ask difficult but essential questions:

Have you worked with clients who’ve had traumatic experiences in previous therapies?

How do you handle strong attachment dynamics in therapy?

Are you open to discussing power, authority, and rupture in the therapeutic relationship?

What’s your stance on clients reading or accessing their notes?

Have you had your own therapy or supervision around enactments and countertransference?

A good therapist will welcome these questions. A defensive or dismissive response is a red flag.

3. Look for Evidence of Accountability

Ask if the therapist participates in regular supervision, consultation, or peer review. Are they open about their own learning process? Do they acknowledge the possibility of mistakes—not just theoretically, but in practice?

4. Trust the Small Signals

Pay attention to how you feel during early sessions—not just what’s said, but what’s implied. Do you feel pressured to commit quickly? Are your questions answered with openness or with evasion? Do you feel that the therapist is attuned to your pace—or trying to fit you into theirs?

5. Name the Wound

If you feel able, tell the new therapist what went wrong before. Share your fears. The way they respond will tell you more than any credentials or training ever could.

A Final Word

Winnicott taught us that the therapist’s task is not to be the perfect parent, but to survive the client’s need for one—to hold space for the unmanageable without collapsing or retaliating. This is a sacred responsibility, and one that too often gets lost in the competitive, performative culture of modern psychotherapy.

No one can ever fully prevent harm, but we can increase awareness. We can speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. And we can remind ourselves—and our clients—that even when the first (or second) attempt at healing fails, the possibility of a more real, more honest connection is still alive.

There is hope in a hopeless place.

The therapeutic relationship can hurt. But it can also heal. And the difference lies in whether the therapist can truly see the person before them—not as a project, not as a product, but as a human being whose utterly hopeless.

I believe it is this hopelessness, the confrontation of that bottomless abyss, that we are all so afraid of, even if it is mostly unconscious -- because it is so terrifying.

Stare into the abyss, and the fear is, the abyss will 
stare back into you....

© Maja Farrell

When Therapists Harm: The Dangers of Narcissistic Wounding in Counselling

The Disruption in Supervision

As I sat in group supervision another counsellor knocks at the door. A colleague within the group immediately looks at our supervisor who pulls a face but says nothing. The door opens and another colleague enters the door. Without apology she announced "Someone parked their car in the driveway and I cant get out, does it belong to any of you?" After she was told that the car didn't belong to us, she shut the door.

Emotional Reactions and Sudden Indignation

Two group members seemed to bristle with anger

informing the rest of the group that this "had never happened before in all our time we have been in supervision!" Intense indignation filled the room within seconds of the door shutting when suddenly another door in the hallway was opened. Faint voices and the door was shut again.

The colleague had entered another room, asking the counsellor, who saw a client at the time, if it was her car and if she could move it.

When Therapists Harm

Lack of Empathy Among Therapists

How was it possible that my colleagues expressed no compassion for the counsellor who had entered our supervision group but felt so slighted by her action? It seemed as if they took the disturbance very personal, unable to put themselves into the other's situation. Yet when they sat with clients they reported feeling very empathic and concerned.

The "intruder" too seemed to have difficulty putting herself into the client's (and counsellor's) shoes when she disturbed their session demanding the counsellor move her car. Yet these are the people who see clients...

The Withholding Counsellor

What happens when such narcissistically wounded practitioners work with clients?

They become sadistic and unconsciously desire to hurt, torture and annihilate the client. A bit extreme? Not at all.

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of narcissistic rage or anyone emotionally intelligent enough to recognise their own narcissistic wounding and need to hurt the other, will know that the rage of the hurt baby/child, re-experienced within the adult, can be boundless, ruthless and annihilating.

A therapist who has not worked through such early emotional childhood trauma (and who did not get his needs met by his own therapist), who is unaware of the unconscious urge to re-create traumatic past situations within relationships, will use the client to re-play past experiences. But this time, the then helpless child is in control. No longer does it have to be the victim. Now, it is powerful, now it can hit back.

When Therapy Becomes a Weapon

Psychodynamic/psychoanalytic counselling is used by many narcissistic practitioners to do just that - hit back. The client, seen through the counsellor's lens, is either experienced as a victim or a persecutor and (mis) treated accordingly.

This is not to say that a "caring" counsellor cannot be extremely narcissistic and dangerous, but that is food for another post.

The Angry Client

After working with a client for some months she became attached to the counsellor and despaired whenever she felt separated from him (counsellor). Vulnerable and exposed (as is a child) she asked if he could get her a glass of water (she couldn't stop coughing - asthma). The counsellor said "No". The client explodes with anger, acts out, hurts herself and withdraws. Left to deal with the sudden tidal wave of rage she leaves therapy never to return again.

Supervised Sadism

In supervision this counsellor reports that he withheld the water on purpose.

When asked why, he replied "She is a very angry person but was unable to feel or express it. Me not giving her what she wanted got her in touch with her rage."

This is absolute non-sense yet there are many psychoanalytic schools who integrate such abusive behaviour into their training. Supported by "theories" those narcissistic practitioners, unable to get in touch with their own self (as there is a lack of Self/Narcissism) mostly depend on a fanatic obsession with Freud/tutor/supervisor/personal therapist and what s/he did and didn't do or say, rather than to feel their way into the clients' world, meeting their needs (vs wants). Sadistic urges stemming from childhood are openly played out withholding words and actions in order to evoke/provoke suppressed anger. Whose anger? Perhaps the counsellor's own suppressed rage against those who humiliated him as a baby/child.

Whose Rage Is It, Really?

The goal of therapy is not to provoke suppressed rage. Rage will come naturally and can be worked through, over time, if trust is built, and especially if the counsellor is genuinely accepting and containing (see Melanie Klein and Primitive Envy).

It is the narcissistic counsellor who forces the client to become angry because the narcissistic counsellor does not see the client or hear the client instead is caught up in the past when s/he herself was a victim of terrible emotional abuse at the hands of superior adults who should have treated her/him with respect and dignity not humiliation and ridicule.

The Mask Falls Off

Going back to my colleagues, it is my guess that all three felt personally attacked by the "intruder". Re-experiencing painful feelings from the past when their own meeting of needs was denied, they were left "starved" and therefore incapable to empathise with and give to the other; quickly enraged the counsellor mask flew off and a raging, venom spewing harpy showed her pain distorted face.

The Psychological Dilemma that causes tension

A Final Reflection

Psychodynamic counselling can be very helpful but also extremely dangerous if the therapist is unaware of her narcissistic wounds. If you are unsure whether you are in an abusive "therapeutic" relationship please reach out to others. Not everything is transference and every transference needs a hook - more on this in a later post.

© Maja Farrell

The Retaliatory Practitioner - Returning the Unbearable

by Maja Farrell

I would like to encourage other therapists to think about possible unconscious forces that may arise in a very short space of time; e.g. within/after a phone call or e-mail from a client enquiring about therapy, the first session or a first presentation of a client in supervision and the damage that can be caused to the client within this very short period of time in which therapist can become deeply affected by the client's internal world and unable to think and act, re-acts and rejects, leaving the client in even greater distress.

Being a therapist myself, I have found the very first contact with a client (be it face to face or via e-mail or telephone) creates an energetic space in which our minds meet and communicate in a powerful way. I believe it is the task of the psych-dynamic practitioner to tune into this communication and help create some meaning, for and with the client together, of his internal world. Even if contact is very brief, the practitioner has a responsibility to "first do no (psychological) harm" meaning, he needs to stay aware of his anxieties towards the potential client, acting in her best psychological interest.

What, however, happens if the client's unconscious communications reach the mind of the practitioner in such a powerful way that he cannot, does not want to, is unable to hold and contain them and act empathically?

Wilfred Bion thought about those dangerous pitfalls with help of the infant-mother relationship in which baby, unable to think about the frightening world around him, needs mother to help make sense of what he is experiencing. Bion suggested because baby has no words to communicate his distress, he uses the unconscious vessel of projective identification to put into mother his anxieties, who in a state of reverie, picks up on her baby's fears and, able to think about them, returns them to him in a more digestible form, thereby offering him an experience of both, himself and mother, surviving the unbearable.

The mother's response is to acknowledge the anxiety and do whatever is necessary to relieve the infant's distress. The infant's perception is that he has projected something intolerable into his object, but the object was capable of containing it and dealing with it. He can then reintroject not only his original anxiety but an anxiety modified by having been contained. He also introjects an object capable of containing and dealing with anxiety (Segal 1975, pages 134-5).

On the other hand, should mother fail to provide such a mental container (capacity) to receive, take in and think about her baby's anxieties, his, as well as his mother's anxieties, may be returned to him in their raw, terrifying form. Unable to make sense of what is being returned to him, he is left with an experience of his mind, feelings and thoughts being too intolerable to be thought about.

 "If the projection is not accepted by the mother the infant feels that its feeling that it is dying is stripped of such meaning that it has. It therefore reintrojects, not a fear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread" (Bion, 1962, p. 183).

If a client, especially after having experienced previous abuse, enters counselling sessions s/he may hold a lot of conscious or unconscious hopelessness, anguish and murderous rage.
Unable to direct those feelings towards the Object (person) and not having any Object available that seems strong enough to hold and contain this rage, make sense of it and resolve it, the mind of the client projects it outwards; away from him/her; it is too unbearable to feel, to be aware of. S/He is left with the "nameless dread" of something horrific - a fear of the unknown known.

We as therapists need to remember that even the first phone or e-mail contact from a client is not only highly significant but also utterly important - we must strive to keep the client's pain in mind at all times while reflecting on our responses so we do not add to the client’s already fragile sense of self.

If we as therapists are unable to hold this tension and the anxiety (ours and that of the client) we may be likely to Re-act rather than Act empathically and therapeutically (after having been able to think and link - Bion). If the client is extremely anxious, the (intuitive and involved) therapist will pick on it (un/consciously), but if he is not mentally strong enough will return the unbearable to the client in a traumatic and further damaging manner.  

References:

Bion, W.R. 1959 Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 40: 308-315.

Bion, W.R. 1962. A Theory of Thinking. In E. Bott Spillius (ed.) Melanie Klein Today: Developments in theory and practice. Volume 1: Mainly Theory. 1988. London: Routledge.

Segal, Hanna 1975 A psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of schizophrenia. In Malcolm Lader (ed) Studies of Schizophrenia. Ashford: Headley

© Maja Farrell