Two Types of Transference

No one approaches a new situation or relationship like a blank sheet of paper; everyone tends to "transfer" feelings which originated in much earlier, formative relationships into the present --- hopes and fears, expectations and assumptions, even loves and hates. Sigmund Freud referred to this phenomenon as "transference" and spent much of his time drawing his patients' attention to it as it emerged during analytic treatment. While it occurs ubiquitously, psychoanalysis holds that two broad forms exist: the ordinary and reversible; and the pathologically destructive and rigid.

Two Types of Transference: Flexible and Rigid

• Freud's work reveals the contingency and opportunism of transference as well as its pervasiveness; superficial attributes like the sound of someone's voice, a look in the eye, or simply a fleeting resemblance to someone or something significant to us can generate immediate and intense emotions. In ordinary circumstances, most people can allow contradictory evidence to accumulate and then modify their emotional responses accordingly. But in less flexible minds, reality gets ignored in order to sustain the emotional illusion that transference fosters.

Pathological Transference

• Both ordinary and pathological transference depend on projection. Without realizing that they do it, people constantly imbue others with positive and negative characteristics stemming from their own personal histories. Categorizing types of transference solely on the basis of positive and negative feelings fails to distinguish between flexible and reversible projections on the one hand and massive, "one-way-street" projections on the other. The latter were described by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as "projective identification," whereby personal experiences are forcibly expelled on a massive scale and rigidly attributed to someone else, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.

Projective Identification and Social Evil

• Transference based on transient projection and transference based on rigid projective identification constitute two radically different versions of the process. When deployed between groups or cultures, transference generated by projective identification may result in truly malignant conflicts, including bloodshed and war. It lies behind many social evils, such as racism, misogyny and homophobia. Racists, misogynists and homophobes typically have little genuine familiarity with the real people they despise so viscerally. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek noted that anti-Semitism was at its most deadly in regions of Nazi Germany where the Jewish population was at its smallest.

Pathological Transference and False Knowledge

• The "knowledge" of others that reigns supreme in any transference governed by projective identification has no basis in reality. A product of malice and deceitful disavowal, it forces others to bear disowned aspects of a rigidly over-controlled and idealized self-image. The full humanity of those on the receiving end gets brutally ignored; instead, they become wholly identified with whatever split-off attribute has been projected onto them. At an interpersonal level, such errors of perception cause enormous confusion and suffering; at a political level, they all too frequently lead to genocide, as Zizek compellingly argues.

Transference and Personal Change

• Ordinary, everyday transference based on simple projection is reversible and subject to modification. Individuals may erroneously assume (or wish) that others resemble loved or hated figures from their past but, crucially, most people remain open to revising their beliefs if further experience disconfirms them. In pathological transference based on projective identification, people actively refuse any evidence that contradicts their violent and rigid projective activities. Generally speaking, such entrenched transference requires extensive psychoanalytic treatment whereas normal transference is much less resistant to change.