Recently, a seminary classmate posted about the poor behavior of a member of his congregation on Facebook. Many of the commenters provided similar examples of poor behavior, described as “unmanaged transference,” from their parishes, seemingly unaware that they were engaged in the same behavior of which the parishioner stood accused! After typing and deleting several potential comments, I moved on with my day. Sadly, I concluded that the post represented a list of ministers to whom I could not trust my pastoral confidences, lest I find my peccadillos anonymously displayed for public comment. While social media makes this behavior more visible, clergy didn’t begin complaining about parishioners with the advent of Facebook. Similar behaviors are endemic to all helping professions—and all people.

Transference and its counterpart, countertransference, are often referenced in popular culture but are less understood than their prevalence suggests. Practically, transference means that someone reacts to their unconscious thought rather than the person or object before them. Thus parishioners often transfer their feelings about God, their parents, the church, or other authority figures onto clergy. When Mr. Smith, for example, chastises Mother Sue for her “inappropriate sermons,” he actually is reacting to her remote predecessor who once shamed him from the pulpit. Sigmund Freud argued that transference stood at the heart of the relationship between therapist and patient. The therapist enables the patient’s healing by making the patient aware of their transference patterns. 

Just as a patient transfers feelings onto the therapist, the therapist’s unconscious feelings can easily be transferred onto the patient – a process termed countertransference. For Freud, countertransference “arises in the physician as a result of the patient’s influence on [their] unconscious feelings.” (1) Ultimately, “every analyst’s achievement is limited by what [their] own complexes and resistances permit.” (2) A patient’s unmanaged transference can impede the therapeutic relationship; a therapist’s unmanaged countertransference, due to the power imbalance inherent in the relationship, can poison it, turning a relationship intended to heal into a destructive one.

This brings us back to my original example. The assorted ministers engaged in countertransference by labeling the parishioner’s behavior as transference rather than acknowledging any legitimate reasons for it. They transferred their emotional responses (possibly about entirely unrelated things) onto this parishioner. Jesus’ words in Luke’s Gospel seem readily applicable: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41, NRSV)

Transference and countertransference are simply facts of life, and we cannot avoid them. However, like ocular specks and logs, they impede our ability to see clearly and respond appropriately to the people and situations before us. We should also remember that relationships between clergy and parishioners are not the only unequal power relationships within the church. In every pastoral relationship, the person providing the care has more power than the one receiving care. Thus, countertransference can and does appear in relationships between Eucharistic visitors and those they visit, between members and officers of vestries and other parishioners, and between members of intercessory prayer ministries and those for whom they pray. St. Gregory the Great, in his Book of Pastoral Rule, cautioned: “when [a minister] shows [themselves] to be zealous against the vices of others, let [them] prosecute [their] own, so that hidden envy does not defile the tranquility of judgment, nor headlong anger disturb it.” (3)

St. Gregory provides a helpful foil to Freud here, helping us take the insights of psychoanalysis and apply them to pastoral care. Ministers, lay and ordained, are not therapists, and we have a different scope of practice. While a basic understanding of transference and other psychological defense mechanisms can inform the practice of pastoral care, I argue that countertransference has a more direct application for those of us in ministry. While we lack the specific training to examine and correct transference in relationships, we must be able to recognize and manage our countertransference so that we can be present with those who seek care from us, rather than with our projections, hidden envies, and even  anger which we have transferred into our relationships.

Freud recognized that psychoanalysis “in essence is a cure through love.” (4) We see something similar in Jesus’s ministry. Although the formerly hemorrhaging woman lacked specific knowledge of his ultimate identity, her unconscious faith in Jesus facilitated her healing. At its most positive, transference functions similarly in pastoral care relationships. The person seeking care comes to us because they believe that they will find a reflection of Jesus’ healing love in the pastoral relationship – in short, because they transfer their feelings about and trust in God onto their caregiver. Such is the extraordinary privilege and responsibility afforded to clergy and other caregivers. 

Countertransference commonly occurs among clergy in the infantilization of parishioners. I saw this playing out in my classmate’s Facebook thread. The parishioner’s unconscious actions, which crossed several behavioral lines, was implicitly contrasted with the wise and discerning clergy able to properly “diagnose” the transference. I doubt that those posting on Facebook saw themselves infantilizing the parishioner. Yet this is ultimately what they were unconsciously doing. Instead of recognizing what came out of them, as Jesus did, they instead allowed unmanaged countertransference to imperil pastoral relationships.

It is easy to say that I am reading too much into a simple social media exchange. However, such posts from clergy are hardly uncommon. Much has been said about how the laity is disempowered when clergy infantilize them. I want to point out that, in addition to devaluing lay folk’s ability to exercise their gifts of leadership, infantilizing countertransference subverts the basis of the pastoral relationship. When pastoral caregivers’ (especially clergy) countertransference is unrecognized and unmanaged, they cannot see, hear, and respond to the needs of those seeking care. (Clergy who treat parishioners like children should not be surprised when parishioners angrily respond in childlike ways. After all, these parishioners have been conditioned to respond as children!) Rather than welcoming people into community, as Jesus did the hemorrhaging woman, pastoral caregivers perpetuate isolation when their countertransference remains unmanaged.

In Clinical Pastoral Education, educators assess students’ ability to “demonstrate self-supervision through realistic self-evaluation of pastoral functioning” by recognizing and managing how their countertransference impacts their ministry. (5) This is an essential skill for all who provide pastoral care, ordained or not. As the continuing COVID-19 Pandemic continues to stress and traumatize us, effective self-supervision and self-reflection will become more critical. For this reason, the Christian tradition has always called those who care for others to pay the most attention to their own struggles and stumblings. To do any less is pastoral malpractice.

1. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” in Collected Papers, Volume 2, 289. Here and elsewhere, I have modified quotations to be more gender-inclusive.

2. Ibid.

3. Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule (trans. George E. Demacopoulos; Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s, 2007), 51.

4. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (ed. W. McGuire; Princeton: Princeton, 1979) 10.

5. ACPE. https://www.manula.com/manuals/acpe/acpe-manuals/2016/en/topic/objectives-and-outcomes-for-level-i-level-ii-cpe