Why Is It Called Transference?

And Other Things You Didn't Know About Transference

“I love you. I’m in love with you. I’m sorry. ... I dream about you. ... I think about you all the time.”

A man confesses to his psychiatrist immediately after trying to kiss her during a session. This man, who in the external world is a mobster with no remorse about killing people, finds himself fumbling and lost for words in front of his psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist replies,

“I know this may be very hard for you to swallow, but you’re only feeling this way because we’ve made such progress... I’ve been a broad, generic sympathetic woman to you because that’s what this work calls for. You’ve made me all of the things you feel are missing in your wife... and in your mother.”

The exchange is a now famous scene from the TV show, Sopranos, you can watch the scene here.

The above example is a classic example of transference in the clinic. It is a phenomenon where the client displaces and projects their feelings toward a significant individual in their life, on the therapist.

Here you can see Tony Soprano projecting his feelings for his wife on the therapist because the therapist fulfils things and needs that his wife cannot.

But that is not all that transference is.

What is Transference?

Transference is a psychoanalytic term that was first described by Freud when he faced a curious difficulty in his clinical practice.

His patients would often treat him as if they were talking to their mothers or fathers and hold similar expectations from Freud as well.

Freud believed it was because as the psychoanalytic treatment went on, the patient came to see the analyst as a caretaking figure. The relationship formed by this new caretaker was influenced by the kind of relationships patients had with their previous caretakers.

This meant that the relationship dynamics, coping mechanisms, communication styles and even non-verbal communication were transferred from the old relationship and imposed on the new one.

Students are today told that transference is usually limited to strong feelings of love and hate towards the therapist but that is a gross simplification. Transference is not limited to love or hate, it can be something as simple as finding someone easy to talk to, thinking someone is exhausting, that someone feels like ‘home’ and the list is endless.

Transference Outside The Clinic

The modern psychotherapist who has been trained only in cognitive therapies believes that transference only occurs in the clinic but that is not how human minds, or our unconscious, work.

Transference occurs everywhere in our daily lives. If someplace fosters interpersonal relationships, you can be sure it will involve transference overtly or covertly.

Let’s take work as an example.

DG is running a startup of his own and is disappointed with the results from the recent quarter. He calls the product manager (PM) to his office to take a stock of the situation and finds the PM is as confused as him.

Searching for answers, DG and PM get into a discussion that escalates to an argument. In a moment of heat, PM tells DG “I cannot perform well if you don’t tell me what your expectations are”

This evokes a strong emotional response from DG who raises his voice and tells PM to get out of the office and not come back next Monday.

While recounting this event in therapy, DG is confused about what evoked such a violent response in him. He thinks it was his authority being questioned but on introspection, he realizes that it had to do with his childhood experiences with his parents.

As a child, he had always been told to be better than he was and to improve his academic performance. The young DG felt confused and lost about what his parents wanted from him. When he tried to communicate his confusion to his parents he was told off, loudly, for being insensitive and incapable of understanding the non-communicative parents.

DG transferred the dynamics he had with his parents onto PM at that moment.

At that moment, DG took on the role of the parents telling off the young confused PM to not be so insensitive.

Similar things happen in our friendships and romantic relationships as well.

The well-known “daddy/mommy issues” are simply a manifestation of this transference.

Is Transference Bad?

Transference is not good or bad by its nature. It is inescapable. Transference, though, does offer an opportunity to remember and work through our past memories which still have us in their roots.

But that requires a therapist, especially one who is trained in psychoanalysis. It’s not easy to identify transference within ourselves but being self-aware and introspection are the first tools used to catch it.

“Why does that phrase evoke such a strong reaction in me?”

“What makes them so tough to deal with for me?”

You can always try to understand yourself better. If you need help, a therapist is always there.

Is It Even Real?

As with any psychoanalytic concept, the question of empirical validity will always be an unanswered question.

After all, how do we ‘prove’ the existence of something that takes its roots in childhood and plays out in some moments in our adult life?

The skepticism of the concept is fair and valid, empirically talking.

Cognitive therapists claim it is simply an imposition of a schema onto new information. Behavioural therapists call it a learned reaction but very few doubt the existence of the same.

While it is not necessary that transference only has its roots in interpersonal dynamics, we are pretty sure that transference exists, and it is more common than we think.

Have you ever noticed a past relationship affecting your present one?

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And that is it for this week! I dived into my psychoanalytic training at AUD to bring you this story and much like most of my time at that uni, I was confused, terrified and fascinated at the same time.

How do you think transference affects your everyday life? You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments :)

Yours,

Arjun

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