I was at a training day recently where we revisited the main theories of object relations. Freud remains familiar enough, and kindly Winnicott too, but his old supervisor Klein I admit to struggling with still. Some of her ideas can feel a bit like quantum physics – they make satisfyingly good sense before rapidly slipping away. Luckily for my clients, I’m not a Kleinian therapist. But thinking about the complexities of some of these psychodynamics reminded me of all the ‘non common-sensical’ in therapy – the phenomena of introjection, projection, projective identification, transferences included. These defy logical analysis or the ‘usual’ rules of scientific observation. I tried out projective identification on a highly intelligent (but generally sceptical) historian friend. ‘Sounds a bit like magic to me,’ he said while screwing up his nose.

I remember reading Susie Orbach early on in my training and being amazed by her description of a powerful countertransference with a client whose brother had died in a fire. As she described a feeling of her own body feeling ablaze, it made me think of Ouija boards and clairvoyance. I didn’t disbelieve her, but I couldn’t quite make real enough sense of it then. Until, of course, I had my own first experience of a profound physical response to a client that gave me a clue to something very real that had happened to him in the past. Later on in practice I noticed a heightened sensitivity to clients when pregnant – to the point of ‘predicting’ an old client was going to get in contact, when she did (I have written more about this in this publication). ‘Paranormal’ events have become increasingly normal.

Group transferences can be just as remarkable and I’m sure many of you have experiences to share here too. Part of my early training involved a fear-inducing ‘re-birth’ and a popular story circulating at the time was of the person who had spontaneous marks appearing on her skin, just where the forceps had been used to birth her. Family constellation work has its own folklore too, and at a workshop earlier this year, I indeed witnessed participants experience sensations that accurately tallied with the stories of those people they were representing.

The literature is ever-growing about these embodied transferences, but I read less about other synchronicities – such as supervision ‘magic’. As most of us do, I often bring a feeling of ‘stuckness’ with a client to supervision. A good hour of co-thinking tends to free this up, and resources my return to the work with a valuable freshness. But then, hey presto! I often don’t have to do a thing! Somehow the ‘stuckness’ has moved on its own – a client suddenly sees something they haven’t seen before or in a different, useful frame of mind. I have even fleetingly thought they were actually in supervision with me (which they were, of course). Colleagues have shared similar experiences over the years.

I also know I’m not alone in noticing how themes can emerge in one’s practice. I hear time and again, something like, ‘I seem to attract lots of women having affairs’ or ‘I’m working with lots of men with body image problems.’ At the moment, my practice has aligned itself in neat-ish ‘themes’ by day – Friday being my day of X, Thursday Y. I even have a ‘difficult spot’ in my week, which gets filled, time and again, by my most resistant client. I sometimes have to take extra care not to collapse clients into one another, as I find myself thinking along similar lines or even tempted by identical interventions an hour later.

A therapeutic adage passed on to me goes something like, ‘Clients bring issues that we need to look at in ourselves,’ but I also wonder if some clients can help us in other mysterious ways too. I have felt grateful about a last-minute cancellation when desperately tired or time-poor. Or when a client asks to switch session times at just the right time (an emergency dentist appointment, time to finish a piece of work). All of these curiosities – an example of the universal consciousness at work, Jung might have said – for me shines another light on the struggle we have to quantify much of what we do. The stuff that can’t be seen, measured and reduced to scientifically digestible data.

Details have been changed to protect identities.