Psychotherapy in Translation: One Clinician's Experience of Working with Interpreters*

In my retirement from the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute, I am working as a volunteer marital psychotherapist with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.1 This name, albeit cumbersome, is self-explanatory. The clients are mostly refugees, from most parts of the world, with manifold problems, few speak English and 80% require an interpreter if therapy is to take place. This is an account of one new aspect of my work.

My professional problem is that I now have a shaky reliance on one of the tools of my trade. From experience and training I have long used, and come to rely on, transference and countertransference experience as a diagnostic tool that amplifies the information that the patient is giving me verbally and non-verbally, consciously and unconsciously. When this experience of a growing relationship with a client is mediated via another, the interpreter, I feel the waters are clouded, indeed sometimes muddied. In my private practice with English-speaking clients, I feel more surefooted and clearer about the transference and countertransference implications and where I might be going with clients. I am used, in my marital work, to experience partners directly through my own senses, and also the perception of the partner's experience of their partner. A jig-saw of perceptions at the best of times, but I do have the professional sanction to comment on this and verbally to explore and elucidate one partner's perception of the other, especially when it is radically different from mine. In this way I can arrive at quite a rounded, corrected, and extensive picture of the clients in front of me.

I do not have the same freedom and sanction to confront the interpreter. They are colleagues, not clients; but they are a particular sort of colleague. When working maritally with a therapist colleague, I use their experience of transference and countertransference as part of the diagnosis and treatment resources, and expect to have the freedom to comment