Rusk's office after hours: the counterphobia of objects, and something about his bed
On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.
Context
This poltergeist-anxiety moment is planted in clinical jargon well before the book pays it off. Rusk reads Stice's condition as "magical thinking about... the behavior of objects' relation to your narcissistic wishes" — the delusion that his mind moves the furniture — and moments later Stice's voice cracks "as he said something about his bed." Rusk hears counterphobia; the reader, later, will watch Stice's bed migrate around his room while he sleeps and his forehead fuse to a window. The player whose body is the wraith's chosen instrument is here diagnosed as merely counterphobic about objects — the institution's vocabulary reaching for what's happening to his body and missing entirely.