Transference and Countertransference from an Attachment Perspective: A Guide for Professional Caregivers

This is an excellent must read book which summarises the work of McCluskey since the 1990's to today and it demonstrates how she and the colleagues she has worked with such as Dorothy Heard and Brian Lake and her co-author Michael O'Toole transform the intricacies of how clients seek both care and closeness in the therapeutic relationship and how we are an essential component of this as re coil and recoil and explore and freeze or go down cul-de-sacs with our clients. McCluskey and O'Toole give us a relational map which calms the confusion and asks us to reflect on our own responses and where sometimes our strengths as a therapist or professional care-giver can mean an over-reliance on a key-stone system. I am recommending it to all the doctoral trainees I train at the National University of Ireland, Galway and to the psychotherapists whom I work with in a short-term dynamic psychotherapy approach. The first year trainee clinical psychology cohort doctoral trainees go through an 8 week experiential training covering each system of McCluskey's Explorative Goal Corrective Psychotherapy approach by psychologists trained in the McCluskey method (Wale &Lynch) and we have found this approach an excellent one for trainee clinical psychologists.