Clinical Practice SWES Practice Exam 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

This scenario illustrates a transference reaction. Transference occurs when clients project feelings, emotions, or attitudes from their past experiences onto the social worker. In this case, the client perceives the social worker's fee for treatment as a sign of insincerity or a lack of care, which may stem from the client's previous experiences with authority figures or caregivers who charged for services or who may have made the client feel undervalued.

This projection can affect the therapeutic relationship, as it brings the client's past unresolved issues into the present interaction with the social worker. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for the social worker to effectively manage the client's feelings, address any resistance to treatment, and foster a constructive therapeutic environment.

The other options, while relevant to issues in clinical practice, do not accurately capture the nature of the client's belief. For example, counter-transference involves the social worker projecting their feelings onto the client, and sublimation refers to channeling negative emotions into socially acceptable activities, neither of which apply here. Objective criticism, on the other hand, would imply a more detached analysis of the situation without the emotional context that characterizes this client's belief.