what is transference?

The concept of “transference” is has, I think, three significant strands to it. One of these is, in the concept’s typical explication, rather muted - despite, in my view, essentially characterising it. Another of them is, again in my estimation, typically rather overplayed. Furthermore, it seems to me that these strands needn’t always coincide. In what follows I try to sort this out a little.

1. Talk of transference is today typically taken to amount to a patient transferring (übertragung: carrying over) emotional attitudes to a past figure - a parental figure perhaps - onto a figure in the present - a figure such as the psychotherapist. (We find this conception in The Interpretation of Dreams.) A patient treats the therapist as having desirable or detestable qualities which in truth the therapist does not have. (‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ transferences.) In its simplest formulation - not one ever offered by Freud himself, so far as I know - these may be taken for realistic conscious attitudes to the past figure. Transference in this sense merely becomes the name for a kind of unwarranted generalisation: we get overly programmed by earlier experiences which we then unwittingly repeat. In transference the expectation that a current figure will behave in certain ways bleeds through into their experience of how that figure does behave. In Freud’s version, what are transferred aren’t so much perceptions of properties which were once genuinely embodied by the past figure, but repressed attitudes to past figures. What I’d like to comment on here, then, is that both in Freud and often in fact, the two figures that are related by positive or negative transference are not so much the i) therapist and, say, the ii) father or mother, but instead the i) therapist and ii) the father or mother imago. These imagos have to do with how the patient desires and fears their mother or father to be - including especially their unconscious fears and desires. In my view, the idea of transference as transferring from the past to the present, especially from the real past to the present, is typically rather overplayed, and doesn’t matter so much for clinical practice as the other two strands.
    
2. A second strand of transference - also met with in Freud - concerns what I shall call thrall. When transference dynamics are to the fore, the patient is in thrall to the therapist. (Freud talks of ‘dependence’ and of ‘mental bondage’.) It is not simply that what’s inappropriate to the person of the therapist is the content of the patient’s attitudes and perceptions. Instead it’s the intensity and investment of the preoccupation, the loss of self-possession, the falling in love, the unwitting giving away of power. I shall illustrate this with a couple of examples. i) A zen teaching tale has a senior monk holding a stick and challenging his students in this way: “If you say this is a stick, I will hit you with it; if you say it is not a stick, I will hit you with it; what do you say?!” One by one the students approach their master and try to say something to win his approval. One by one they get whacked by the stick. Until, finally, a student approaches the senior monk and grab the stick, break it across his own knee, and throw it away. This student had learned the lesson in an experientially vivid way: that if one goes through life electing others as masters, giving one’s power away, trying to be a good servant, one can never emerge into adult self-possession. ii) When I was at psychology school, we had a teaching week at the Tavistock Centre, London. Here we regularly met in small ‘reflective groups’ facilitated by a psychoanalyst. The group I was in set for itself no very specific task, and as is typical in such situations, its participants fairly soon fell into particular roles, some disclosing material of significant emotional colouring. But set that aside. What was striking to me was the behaviour of the analyst who typically sat arms folded, wearing a not very impressed attitude, and when the second hand got to the end of the appointed time, would get up and walk straight out of the room - even if, say, a fellow student was in the middle of an emotional disclosure. This behaviour vexed me greatly for a few days. I wondered if someone with psychopathic traits had been let onto the training, or whether I was somehow hallucinating his behaviour. And then, after a few days of repeated such experiences, it dawned on me: I had never met this man before this week, and I really didn’t need to give him so much power over my feelings. At this moment of ‘grabbing [reclaiming, we might say] the stick’, it felt to me like a bubble had popped - the transference bubble. He had, I suspect, been acting in this way to get, as they say, a ‘rise in the transference’ and to teach a valuable lesson to anyone with the ears to hear. Transference in this sense is regressive not merely in content but in form: whether the patient falls in love or falls in hate with the therapist, what’s key to transference is the falling itself in which the other has been given an outsize role to play in one’s emotional economy. In my opinion, this strand of the "transference" concept is often unduly muted.


3. The third significant strand to the transference concept is owed to Klein. Much in Kleinian theory draws on the notion of projective identification which has to do with how we unconsciously place the not so tolerable parts of ourselves into our representations of those with whom we interact, and even engage with these others in such a way as they will be disposed to feel what we have projected. Example: a patient who is feeling insecure in himself, but who has little tolerance for anxiety in general or shame in particular, sets questions for his therapist to solve, questions about the patient’s life - “What should I do? You are supposed to be helping me!” - which are not really soluble, and certainly, not really soluble by anyone other than the therapist. Their solution demands, that is, a commitment, an active resolution to make something of themselves, rather than simply the well-reasoned choice of one rather than another option. This asking is accompanied by notes of emotional insistence, frustration and subtly attempted shaming of the therapist when they can’t answer. In this way the patient unconsciously passes over his shame to the therapist. In such ways does a patient experience himself as surrounded, again and again, by the same disappointing and frustrated others. (At other times a patient may, perhaps for safekeeping, project a good part of themselves - their capacity to hope or love, say - into the therapist.) 

Now, no doubt there are ways to have the above three strands of the “transference” concept coincide. Just as an example, and drawing now on Fairbairn’s notion of the moral defence, a child internalises the ‘bad’ part of their parent, relieving themselves of the dread of having an unlovable caretaker, but saddling themselves with the sense of unworthiness which, in truth, belongs to the parent. Now they are the bad one who is often not lovable, but perhaps if they behave as well as they can, they will at least sometimes be lovable. And then later in life, without being consciously alive to these dynamics, and so still regressively trapped within them, they split off from this bad part and sometimes project it onto their therapist. At other times, however, they remain identified with the bad part, and leave their therapist in the idealised, can-do-no-wrong, position of their parent, instead saddling themselves with all the guilt and shame. Their tendency to do just this, an so to be inexorably locked into these dynamics, prevents them from seeing the other person as, simply, another person, and diminishes their own self-possession since they are unhelpfully preoccupied by others. (I’m often reminded, when thinking of this, of the experience of being stung by a honeybee when I was little. It was explained to me that when such a bee stings, part of its own abdomen is ripped off, and it cannot now live. And it seemed to me then, in my fantasy, that the bee which was now hoveringly futilely around me was hoping to be able to reclaim what of it was now embedded in myself, now in thrall to me, quite bereft of self-possession.) Here we have all of 1) repetition of the past, 2) thrall and lack of self-possession, and 3) projective dynamics. At other times, however, we may - it seems to me - find that one transference is marked by the motivated projection of qualities which belong properly to the self, whilst another is marked only by an expectation of repeated ill treatment in close relationships, an expectation derived from past experience of ill treatment, which expectation bleeds through now into their perception. It may of course always be argued that this ‘bleeding through’ also results from the dynamics of splitting and projection. But unless it can be shown that it is unintelligible that it should happen without them, then unless we have independent evidence of such dynamics being in play, I see no reason to assume that what will naturally yet be called “transference” either must or does always involve them.

A final remark. Transference is perhaps not everything in psychotherapy. The patient will after all very often be discussing their anxieties and their shame, their physical symptoms, their struggles with themselves, with their fears and superstitions, and with others. The apt treatment of these may consist simply in a listening that affords recognition (i.e. counselling) or in ego-strengthening (i.e. CBT). Even here the transference may be in play, of course, but it needn’t be focused on, interpreted, or consciously taken for the locus of treatment. And it’s no doubt tiresome when - and here I’m looking at you, Kleinians, with your sometimes relentless, often baffling, occasionally comical, focus on the ‘total transference situation’ - the therapist interprets anything the patient reports, expresses, dreams, forgets, and does as a latent expression of feelings towards them. And yet, so often, the analysis and dissolution of transference provides the surest and deepest route to psychological healing. Very often this involves attention more to 2) and 3) than to 1), especially as the transference reflects the quality of the patient’s actual early relationships. (Not infrequently do we find the patient, after a successful therapy, possessed of - as it will now seem at least to the therapist - rather different, more complex, more forgivable, parents than they came in with.) The gains that result when what above I called the ‘transference bubble’ is burst is very considerable, and the growth in self-possession - which I think the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy - is like nothing else.  Now that the self can relate straightforwardly to the world, knowing its own desires, distinguishing these clearly from those of others, making nobody else its master. The vitality-depleting contact-thwarting ‘kink’ in the line of connection between self and other, such that interpersonal experience is relentlessly parsed through the transference buffer, is ironed out. The thrall is ended. The emancipation is profound.