Client Attachment to Therapist

Relations to Transference and Client Recollections of Parental Caregiving

Woodhouse, Susan S.
Schlosser, Lewis Z.
Crook, Rachel E.
Ligiéro, Daniela P.
Gelso, Charles J.

¹Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park
²Department of Counseling and Personnel Services, University of Maryland College Park.

³Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Charles J. Gelso, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742-4411. E-mail [email protected].

Lewis Z. Schlosser is now at the Department of Professional Psychology and Family Therapy, Seton Hall University. Rachel E. Crook is now at the Department of Counseling Psychology and Special Education, Brigham Young University.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 108th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC. We thank Clara E. Hill and Jonathan J. Mohr for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Received October 7, 2002; Revision received April 2, 2003; Accepted April 7, 2003

Journal of Counseling Psychology 50(4):p 395-408, October 2003.

This study examined the relations between client attachment to the therapist and therapist perceptions of transference, as well as between client attachment and recollections of parental caregiving. Participants were 51 client-therapist pairs in ongoing therapy. After a therapy session, clients completed a measure of their attachment to their therapists and a measure of their perceptions of parental caregiving during childhood. Therapists rated levels of positive and negative, and amount of, client transference. Both secure and preoccupied-merger attachment were positively related to both negative transference and amount of transference. Level of avoidant-fearful attachment was not correlated with any type of transference. Insecure attachment to the therapist was associated with more negative recollections of parental caregiving.