The relationship between psychotherapist's syntax and countertransference in psychoanalytic psychotherapy

The relationship between countertransference and syntactic constructions were studied in five brief psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapies using complete transcripts of two selected hours.;The purpose of this research was to further study the hypothesis (Dahl, 1978) that there are syntactic cues to countertransference. Dahl's study was the first systematic exploration of the psychotherapists' language. The present study employs a revision of Dahl's Scale (Dahl and Weisz 1989) and expands the generalizability of Dahl's findings with a focus on the role of ambiguity.;Hypothesis I proposed that psychotherapists participating in a psychoanalytic treatment process and constrained by the rule of neutrality would reveal and conceal unconscious mental contents or countertransference through their choice of syntactic constructions. Subhypotheses suggested that particular types of countertransference would correlate to particular syntactic constructions. Thus, hypothesis II proposed a relationship between yes/no question syntactic constructions and countertransference hostility. Hypothesis III proposed a relationship between syntactic ambiguity and countertransference defensiveness.;Using an individual case study approach, two judges assessed countertransference and two judges assessed syntactic properties using scales developed by Dahl (1987) and Dahl and Weisz (1989). Mean scores were derived for countertransference and compared to mean scores for syntactic properties. Results supported an overall statistically significant relationship between countertransference and syntactic properties. The relationship between yes/no syntactic constructions and countertransference hostility was not statistically significant. The relationship between syntactic ambiguity and countertransference was supported by the analysis of data.;The overall relationship between countertranference and syntactic properties provides a basis for developing a systematic way to monitor countertransference and the instruments used in this study provide a means for psychotherapists' self-monitoring. While the study focused on brief psychotherapy, it is likely that it has implications for long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well.