About Transference & Psychoanalysis

From his earliest days Sigmund Freud noticed that patients undergoing psychotherapy frequently develop strong feelings about their therapists. As his thinking deepened and psychoanalysis began to emerge, he realized that many patients re-live, within the analytic relationship, powerful emotional experiences originating in the past. At first he regarded such "transference" of emotions as an impediment to the work of analysis, but later he came to regard it as the driving force of psychoanalytic progress.

Transference as the Legacy of Bad Parenting

• Freud's discovery of transference generated much confusion among later generations of psychoanalysts. How can something act both as an obstacle to and a facilitator of analytic progress? Psychoanalysts as diverse as Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Franz Alexander and Heinz Kohut believed that negative, destructive transference arises from poor parenting. That is, the patient compulsively transfers fears and anxieties from childhood into present-day relationships. But these neuroses can be corrected in analytic treatment if the analyst functions as a parental figure who is more empathic and understanding than the original parent.

Transference from the Inner World

• Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that transference occurs when images and beliefs generated in the more primitive and infantile layers of the mind contaminate and compromise the more mature and rational layers. These primitive layers replace rational evaluation with exaggerated emotional reactions. In other words, Klein suggests that transference involves the active generation of new irrational or excessive emotional states in the here and now of the inner world and does not merely repeat internalized experiences. Kleinian psychoanalysis involves relentlessly naming and interpreting such primitive manifestations of transference as they appear in a patient's verbal associations.

Lacan on Transference

• Perhaps the most rigorous development of Freud's thinking on transference came from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His contribution helps pinpoint precisely how transference functions as an obstacle and how it can drive analysis forward. Closely reading Freud's texts in the light of modern linguistics and structural anthropology, Lacan concluded that human beings live in three distinct but overlapping realms of experience simultaneously, which he called the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Lacanian Realms of Experience

• The psychoanalyst Bruce Fink further explicates Lacan's theories, explaining that the Symbolic Order incorporates law, authority and morality, while the Imaginary Order covers all the illusions of sameness and difference (i.e., "just like me" and "not like me") people routinely attribute to others. Lacan suggests that the most enigmatic dimension of human experience is the Real. Like severe trauma, the Real resists symbolization. This unsymbolizable residue is everything that language cannot express.

Symbolic Transference

• Symbolic transference covers the patient's relationship to authority--how he feels about his parents, his employer, the law, and so forth. Symbolic transference can facilitate analytic work because it remains open to reinterpretation. Through reinterpretation the patient frees himself from rigid and life-blighting beliefs. Lacan argues that patients often invest their analysts with symbolic authority, assuming that they are "the ones who are supposed to know," or that they have complete and infallible knowledge. This resembles a small child's attitude toward adults, especially parents. The analyst, however, must resist falling into the trap of believing in his personal wisdom; rather, he must accept the position the patient casts him in but refuse to deliver authoritative explanations.

Imaginary Transference as Resistance

• Imaginary transference arises when, for example, the patient tries to liken himself to the analyst ("You have exactly the same books on your shelves as me.") or to disparage him ("You know no more about this problem than I do!"). Lacan maintains that imaginary transference blocks progress. The analyst must not, he insists, respond from an imaginary position, either by getting defensive or by accepting idealizations. Instead, he should endeavor to remain as the placeholder for the Real by verbally noting the appearance of unconscious communications in the conscious flow of talk--questioning slips of the tongue, asking tangential questions about the manifest content of dreams, or interpreting alternative meanings in authoritative statements. These analytic interventions, Lacan argues, foster insight and growth.