Transference: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst’s take on a central Psychoanalytic Concept

 

Transference is a phenomenon first observed by Freud.  Like another phenomenon, resistance, it was initially seen as a problem for the treatment, but then, as part of his genius, Freud was able to recognize transference not just as something that was getting in the way, but as something that would help him better understand the way that the mind works and therefore help better help the people who were coming to him for help.

 

The garden variety definition of transference is that is reacting to a person in a current relationship as if the person you were interacting with were a figure from earlier in your life.  This is true, as far as it goes, and it is what Freud observed – his patients interacted with him as if he were their father (primarily) or mother or brother or sister.  Instead of hearing his interventions as the brilliant and useful understandings of his patients that he knew them to be, his patients heard his interpretations, for instance, as a means of controlling them – just as others had done.

 

For Freud, this is most tragically seen in his case history of Dora.  The 19 year old girl was brought to him by her father (whom Freud had treated in the past).  She had been sexually assaulted by a close family friend – and her father was having an affair with the friend’s wife.  She felt, on some level, that her father was offering her to the friend in exchange for the friend’s wife – and that he was bringing her to Freud to help silence her about the affair.  In any case, she felt herself, not at all surprisingly, to be used by many of the important adults in her life. 

 

When Freud tried to point out to her that she was an active participant in all of this – which Freud intended as a tool that she could use to help her extricate herself from the drama – she experienced him as something akin to what would later be called “blaming the victim” and fired him.  Freud was confused by the case – and why it fell apart – he had been proud of his interpretations of Dora’s dreams – and didn’t understand why she ran from him. 

 

When we read the case, we are able to see that the transference caused it to fall apart.  In particular, as is often the case, Freud’s actions – in this case being more excited about his interpretations of her dreams than attending to what the impact of his interpretations on her would be, lined up closely enough with the perception that Dora had in mind that others were not interested in her well-being but in how they could use her.  All that said, we can’t completely blame Freud for not seeing this – he hadn’t yet invented the concept of transference!  He couldn’t see what he didn’t yet have a label for.

 

We transfer material from an old situation onto a new one for many reasons, but the primary one is that it is inefficient to go into every situation without a plan of action.  So we learn – we overlearn – steps to various interpersonal dances and we practice them so much that they become automatic.  Daniel Stern studied the ways these dance steps are learned by observing infant/parent interactions and called these proto-transference interactions Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs).  Stern was studying parents playing peek a boo with their kids (among many other things), but we can see that we teach our kids how to interact by playing with them – and they learn the rules of interaction by doing that.

One of the nice thing about thinking about transference as a RIG is that it clarifies that the transference is not simply an iron-on procedure of transferring something in-tact - applying it like an iron-on transfer - to something new.  The mind actively looks for strands and elements of a current situation that are consistent enough with an old one to "fit" more or less - it is an approximation that gets reworked.  The therapeutic danger is that it becomes a replay rather than a new way of playing with a similar situation.  The idea of the RIG, however, opens up the possibility that it will occur.

 

Freud chose the term transference to describe this phenomenon, however, because he understood our current interactions that are guided by the past as essentially transferring material from the unconscious into action, where it is observable, and thus can be made conscious.  So, as analyses lengthened and analysts worked to be more neutral, the patient would experience the analyst as a more and more “pure” form of the unconsciously “remembered” person, generally from early in their life and the quality of the interactions that took place with that person could be inferred from the ways that the current interaction unfolded.

 

A psychoanalytic interpretation of the transference, then, serves two functions.  It helps the analyst and the analysand track what the analysand “recorded” in their early interactions with significant figures.  So, the expectation that the analyst would be critical – or, more telling, the interpretation of something benign that the analyst says as something critical – clarifies to the analyst and analysand that the analysand was brought up in a household where they so consistently expected authorities to be critical that they hear this in even relatively neutral material.  This helps the analyst and the analysand reconstruct the analysand’s early life as a means of understanding how their character was shaped.  It is an important caveat that this is the perceived life of the child.  And it gets muddied by all of the other dances that the person has engaged in between now and then (and the dances the analyst has been engaged in - despite Freud's hope, we don't become blank slates after we have been analyzed).

Btw, transferences can be positive.  We generally focus on the negative or problematic transferences, as in the paragraph above, because these are the ones that create the difficulties that people come to us for help with.

 The second function of interpretation is to disrupt something that is unconscious – what the neurologist Mark Solms sees as having been stored in a kind of interpersonal muscle memory.  The disruption is important because it allows us to engage in the inefficient process of consciously evaluating whether it is a good idea to keep interacting with others in the ways that we have unconsciously been doing (though here automatically may be a better descriptor than unconsciously - it is both).  When our automatic processes get interrupted and we think of new ways of doing things, we can lay down new “tracks”.

Transference is part, then, of what makes psychoanalysis necessarily an interpersonal process.  Something that resides within us - what analysts call intrapsychic material - gets enacted in the relationship with the analyst, and it is the ability to discuss this - to be curious rather than judgmental about it - that allows it to become conscious.  And, by the way, I am referring to it - the transference - in the singular as if it were a single, concrete thing.  What we expect of others is actually tremendously complex and multifaceted and emerges in subtly and wildly different guises across the course of treatment and "it" hardly captures it - "they" even seems too puny.  What we are trying to get at is how the person constructs their interpersonal world - and this cannot be reduced to a single or even a few perspective - even though there may be a single or a few dominant perspective(s).  But even when that is the case - once those dominant perspectives are interrogated, in my experience, they turn out to be fronts for much more nuanced and situation specific expectations - that get expressed and experienced in manifold complexly intertwined interactions.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  The problem is, it is very hard to teach an old dog new tricks – and it is even hard to teach a new puppy tricks.  You have to be patient and do it over and over again.  If you will pardon the pun, we are re-RIGging the machinery.  And, as Solms notes, muscle memory is hard to gain, and even harder to forget.  For this and other reasons, psychoanalytic treatments take time.  This time is called “working through” and involves engaging in the automatic behavior – having a transference reaction – having it interpreted or pointed out – and saying, in effect, “There I go again” in a slightly different way with a slightly different situation and, once again, interrupting it.

 

Part of the analytic process, then, becomes internalized and is self-analysis.  This part of self-analysis is self-checking for the ways that we are taking this particular situation and turning it into my particular situation.  When we get far enough along in the interpersonal process of psychoanalysis, we can begin to sense, in other relationships, without the presence of the analyst (except, if you will, as a transference figure), we can be curious about why we are reacting so powerfully in this particular situation.  This interruption in our functioning means that we are necessarily less efficient, but we are likely to feel more confident about whatever it is that we have to say or do in a situation, or repairing it in the aftermath of having messed it up, once we have gone through the process of checking out what the situation calls up in us.

 

Transference is, I think, ubiquitous.  We have to operate on auto-pilot most of the time because it would be tremendously inefficient to handle all of the nuances of interpersonal interactions consciously.  Instead, we simple do what is called for.  And when we do this, we advertise to the world how we (unconsciously) configure human interactions and our part in them.  Especially in intimate relationships transference is like pushing down on the sustain pedal on a piano that takes the pads off all the strings.  When we strike one key, many strings beside the one that the hammer hits resonate with it.  We hear the richness of the unconscious formation of the mind if we listen carefully for it when we really listen to and engage with another person.  

Related posts:  Countertransference;  What is Psychoanalysis?  

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