Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Transference

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

For example, if she sees you as being dependent, then you can explore why you are giving people the impression that you are dependent. So one aim of therapy is for the therapist to facilitate your realisation of what you are actually doing in any relationship. Obviously, if in a relationship you have one idea of what you are doing and the other person has a different idea of what you are doing, then confusion and disharmony are likely to be regular occurrences for you.

One important aspect of analysis is to explore any negative feelings in you towards the therapist. In therapy you need to say what you are actually feeling and thinking; do not think about what you are feeling and thinking, and then give the therapist an edited version. Subconsciously you will edit out the very bits the therapist will need to hear about.

As therapy continues, the relationship between client and therapist starts to take on a particular trend. Suppose that the therapist is a woman. She will appear to you in varying guises: as an authority figure, as a motherly figure, as a caring figure, as a friendly/unfriendly figure, etc. As you relate to the therapist, you will be relating to one of these images of her in your mind. So another aspect of therapy is for you to question how you are relating to the therapist. For example, if you at one moment see her as an authority figure and you feel unsettled with her, then this may indicate that you had problems with the authority that your parents showed towards you when you were a child. In other words, the feeling of unease that you have towards her may simply be a reflection of some unease that you had, when you were a child, with your parents and significant adults. In general, the depth of feelings that you have towards the therapist will vary at times from low-intensity to high-intensity. It is the high-intensity feelings that are of most importance and they need to be explored. The particular aspect of therapy that these ideas relate to is called transference.

Transference begins to function in the therapy situation when the client begins transferring some of his attitudes and beliefs about his parents to the therapist. The model I use to explain how transference functions is that a child uses introjection to absorb the beliefs and values of the parents, and then when he is an adult he projects onto suitable adults the same beliefs and values.

The client begins transferring some of his attitudes and beliefs about his father to the male therapist. If the therapist is a woman, then the client transfers some of his attitudes and beliefs about his mother to the female therapist. The therapist becomes a fluid canvas on which the client can paint his subconscious desires and emotions. The situation does not need to be a therapy one; it can be any situation where the person is dependent on other people and is receiving help from them. So transference applies to a patient’s feelings towards nurses and doctors as well.

The issue of transference occurs repeatedly during psychological therapy. The conventional usage of the term “transference” is the description of the client’s interaction with the therapist in the counselling relationship. Quite often, the client will transfer to the therapist intense feelings of affection, even love. More accurately, the client transfers his feelings and desires to his image of the therapist. Sexual thoughts and feelings will usually be in evidence at these times. Since these feelings and thoughts are positive, we can call this positive transference. Sometimes the transference will turn negative (negative transference) and the therapist is then regarded with hostility, even hatred, by the client.

The Analysis of Transference

The analysis of transference is a fundamental part of therapy. The reason for this is that the analysis will usually reveal the client’s feelings and attitudes that he or she had towards his/her parents when he or she was a child.

Freud originated the idea of analysing transference because he found that some of his clients developed sexual feelings towards him during the course of therapy. He thought that the stage of affection and sexuality was the start of a process, which then reversed itself to end in hostility. Perhaps this is why Freud mistakingly thought that sexual urges, or libido, underlay all personal relationships.

In fact, the sexual thoughts denote something else. The client feels that the therapist is giving him emotional support. His excitement about this belief now sets off the abreaction of guilt. Hence the episodes of affection and sexuality towards the therapist indicate that the client is experiencing the second stage in the abreaction of guilt. In this stage, jealousy in self-pity mode is dominant; this mode of jealousy means that the client is seeking some form of social or psychological support [¹]. The closeness of the relationship with the therapist means that the client’s anxiety turns into sexual anxiety, and so feelings of sexual jealousy are projected onto the analyst.

Transference itself can be split up into two broad factors, one focusing on sexuality and the other focusing on authority. Each parent is a source of both factors. I give two definitions.

Sexual transference is the pattern of the parent’s sexual attitudes that the child admires in other people.
Authority transference is the child’s admiration in other people of the pattern of authority and morality that is exerted by the parent.

When the client analyses his relationship to an older male therapist, he is thereby also analysing his relationship to his father, in terms of male sexuality and male authority. If the therapist is an older woman, then the client analyses his relationship to his mother, in terms of female sexuality and female authority.

Consider the factor of male authority. The father is an authority figure to the child. When the child grows up into an adult, some of his relationships to older men and to male authority figures will mirror his relationship to his father. When this happens, the adult is now projecting some of his attitudes and beliefs regarding his father on to these older men. In other words, he is relating to them as though they are father figures to him. This means, for example, that if as a child we were hostile towards our father, then once we become an adult we are likely to have hostile feelings towards any men in positions of authority over us. More accurately, if an older man or an authority figure is causing anxiety in us, then we are relating to that person as if he were our father.

Overall, transference refers to our beliefs and values towards other people, derived from our childhood experiences. We can have both good and bad beliefs and values, and so transference has both good and bad effects.

Uniformity of Social Values

In the parent-child relationship, the transference is mutual. It is the interpretation by the infant of the parent’s feelings and actions. It is the interpretation by the parent of the child’s feelings and actions. In infancy it is the child’s understanding that has paramount importance. In later childhood it is the parent’s views that dominate the child, as that child becomes subject to discipline and rewards and punishments. If the parent feels positive transference, then it will usually care for the child; if it feels negative transference, then it will probably neglect the child.

Transference is the transfer of the parents’ beliefs and values to the child. Then once the child has become an adult, he will transfer these views to his family too. For example, suppose your father was always finding fault with you and scolding you. Now you have married and are the father in your home. What do you do?  You find fault and scold your wife and children. To be more accurate, when you are not under much stress, you may act as you like in your family home. But once your stress level rises high enough, then you will automatically begin to act from transference, since the stress indicates that your subconscious mind has become active and is influencing your behaviour.

The process of transference is both conscious and subconscious in its operation. It is easy to notice when the child consciously absorbs the values and beliefs of the parents. What is often not noticed is that the child also absorbs subconsciously the parents’ subconscious values and beliefs. This subconscious transfer will contain any confused and conflicting values and beliefs that the parents have but are not aware of having. In this case, the psychological confusions of the parents are transferred to the child.

The parent transfers beliefs and values to the child. The real social significance of this fact is this: transference is the transfer of concepts of good and evil to the child. So another way of regarding transference is that it is moral dependency – the child assumes the moral values of the parents, who in their turn had assumed the moral values of their parents. The process works for amoral and immoral values too. Parents usually treat their children in the same way that they themselves have been treated by their parents (the child’s grandparents). This is how traditional values are passed down a family line, by transference (and not by genetics). When a teenager leaves home he or she may become mentally independent but not morally so. Transference provides the inter-personal bonds that maintain social relationships. Hence society is usually cemented together by transference rather than by any self-chosen values.

It is transference that produces the apparent uniformity of social values in any community or nation. Yet there are different levels to transference. When society is class-based, the classes have different domains of conscious and subconscious values and attitudes, hence different domains of repression and internal conflict. The differences in class values mean that transference always has a class base to it. The same remarks apply to a society that is caste-based, or has any other rigid hierarchy to social status.

When a child rebels in some ways against its parents, then it is rebelling against aspects of bonding. The child needs to try and establish its own identity, perhaps by aligning itself with peer groups. It usually has to reject some of the transference values, and hence reject some aspects of identification too. This is a blind process, since the child has no clear idea of what it wants. Once it finalises an acceptable mixture of parental values and peer-group values then it usually reinstates some degree of identification with the parents.

During this process, the subconscious attempt to repudiate the influence of identification usually gives rise to the problem of hostile and aggressive behaviour. The reasons for this hostility often originate in the abreactional process. If the child’s attempt to follow peer values, instead of parental values, institutes a period of excitement and catharsis, then the consequent stages of resentment and bitterness focus on the restraints to freedom that the parental values are felt to have.

Negative Effects of Transference

The initial impulse that started my self-analysis was the desire to eliminate my social conditioning. Social conditioning is the imposition on the child of social rules that regulate social values and social behaviour: the child has no choice over these values and behaviours, and so absorbs them automatically. I wanted to have free choice over which social values I could accept. I preferred learning that is free from compulsion; this is commonly called social learning.

Societies in the west are changing, and the speed of change is gradually increasing with each new generation. In addition, there is a movement of various cultures coming together, which alters the social mix of values and standards. Because of this change, social abreaction is an ever-present factor of social life. The backlash stages of social resentment last for years or even decades, so that a new morality is created for each new generation, along with a new sexuality. The new ideas and values are a blend of old ones from social conditioning, and new ones from the cultural mix and social learning. When blended together, they form the basis of the social conditioning for the next generation still to come. These values are transferred to the next generation by transference. Hence social conditioning has a factor of transference.

In the family situation, the values of transference are imposed on a child. Some of these values are admired and some are feared. The child who is socially-orientated, which usually means that it is also insensitive, may have no problems with this conditioning. However, for a child of sensitive character the transference is a source of internal conflict. Moral and sexual values that are grafted onto the child without its consent are just second-hand values.

The parents transfer their moral and sexual values to the child. But this transfer is enmeshed in confusion, a confusion caused by the repression existing in the parents’ minds. The parents’ attitudes and emotional responses exist in two forms, those openly expressed and those which are repressed. The expressed ones represent acceptable (to the family’s social network) moral and sexual values, and the repressed ones represent problematic, even immoral, values. The repressed ones, because they are considered to be undesirable in the existing state of society, are in conflict with the acceptable ones. If there were no conflict there would be no need for repression. But the repressed ones are still sources of various motivations for the parent, though he or she is unaware of these motivations because they are subconscious.

Repression creates problems

Repression may work well as a moral discipline in low-stress societies; in modern high-stress ones it is not very effective – repression will always fail when the level of stress becomes intolerable. When this occurs then the repressed attitudes and values will frequently rise, erupt, and even explode into the person’s relationships. The function of repression is to reject a problem from awareness. This does not eliminate the problem. The person just ceases to be aware of it. This can mean that a person, when he is being influenced by his repressed values, may still express (to others) what he or she considers to be undesirable, but he or she is no longer aware that they do so. For example, I may look at a person and see that he is being motivated by hate. The person may be either looking hateful or else making remarks that are sarcastic, ridiculing, demeaning, etc. However, if I questioned the person about his hateful attitudes, the person would deny being hateful.

Whatever is repressed can reappear in consciousness in an unrecognised form. Repression means that the parent is usually unaware of when he or she is acting from a stimulus that is derived from their problematic values. For example: one common consequence of denying guilt (in its self-pity mode) is to become obsessed with non-stop activity. The person turns into a workaholic. Another person may be obsessed with cleanliness, picking up litter from pavements and public spaces and putting it into bins; he is being motivated by the self-hate mode of guilt. Whilst such activity may be valuable, it still indicates confusion within the mind.

The young child is more receptive to the subconscious mind than an adult is, since the child has not yet built a superstructure of conditioning and rationality that effectively isolates its conscious mind from its subconscious mind. So the ambivalence and confusion in the parents’ values produces ambiguous feelings in the young child, since it is aware of the parent’s repressed emotions and attitudes, whilst the parent is not. If the child responds to the conscious attitudes of the parent, then it may be rewarded; but if it responds instead to the subconscious attitudes of the parent then it is likely to get punished. To ensure its own survival, the child has to learn to deny its awareness of the subconscious mind and of the parents’ ambiguity. By this denial of awareness the child ceases to be aware of subconscious confusion and becomes like the parent. So the confusions of the parent are absorbed by the child. Therefore, although the child absorbs the parents’ moral values, it also absorbs the corresponding conflict caused by their repressed immoral values.

Repression means that the parent is unaware of the ambivalence of his responses; if the ambivalence is brought to the parent’s attention then he will either deny it or else (if he cannot deny it) find some way to rationalise and justify it, rather than alter his response. For example, anger in the child will not be acceptable to the parent, yet the parent will often get angry with the child; or the mother will expect the child to be considerate to her, whilst she finds fault with the child. The parent sees nothing contradictory in these responses, yet the child will be punished if it shows contradictory behaviour. This confusion, which the child has to deny and keep subconscious unless it wants to get punished, is a main source of conflict in the individual and in society.

Transference and social conditioning have some positive effects. Even confused values may be better than no values. If there are few limits to the ego, then it will find it very difficult to establish an harmonious life in society. A life within society always requires rules in order to create tolerable boundaries in each person’s relationships. But I am mainly interested in understanding the negative effects. Only by understanding the negative effects can the confusion be removed from ethical debate.

I summarise the negative effects of Transference.
In the drama of family life the young child can detect the repressed aspects of the parent’s consciousness, but it is forced to deny this awareness. So the subconscious internal conflicts and confusions of the parents are transferred to the child, and become a part of its subconscious mind too.

Origin of Transference

Transference is created during the early years of a child’s life, around the period when it is beginning to create an ego [²]. The basis of transference are the feelings of dependency and helplessness and the need for emotional support. Transference is the transfer of beliefs and attitudes, and so it acts as a source of social conditioning. Initially the parents are the source of transference for the young child, but at a later date other sources of transference are friends and schools.

I formulate the problem in the following way, using a perspective of reincarnation. The infant is very susceptible to the state of mind of the mother and her feelings (assuming that it is the mother who initially cares for the infant). The mind of the baby is not a “blank page” or a “blank slate”, unformed and waiting to receive impressions and sensations. Instead, the baby brings with it into incarnation its desires and abilities plus strengths, limitations,  sensitivities, weaknesses and conflicts from its past lives.

Its sensitivities, weaknesses and conflicts formed its previous pattern of fears and anxiety, the pattern that it had when it finished its previous life on Earth. It brings this pattern with it when it is born again on Earth.

During the early months of its life (before it creates its ego) the infant has no conscious mind; it only has a subconscious one. This makes it easy for the infant to attune to the mother’s subconscious mind, and to her internal conflicts too. One reason for this is that the subconscious mind operates without the limitations of rationality and social convention: the subconscious mind functions only through intuition. The mother’s intuition enables her to understand what the infant needs, but also the infant’s intuition enables it to attune to the mother’s mind too.

The infant’s pattern of fears and anxiety then blends with the mother’s subconscious negative motivations and anxieties to produce a new pattern of fears and anxiety for that infant. This new pattern generates new phantasies and gives a different emphasis to its subconscious conflicts. The effects of this new pattern will cause the infant to bond with the mother and perhaps with other significant adults. The greater the degree of fear and anxiety that the baby brings with it at birth, the greater will be the intensity of bonding. Since its pattern of fears and anxiety is now different from that of its previous life, so therefore the effects of transference in this life will be different in some ways from the effects of transference in the previous life.

Another way of attunement between the subconscious minds of infant and mother occurs when they are near to each other, typically when the mother is holding the infant. Then the subconscious minds can interact directly through the auras.

A child, as it grows up, is taught what are acceptable values and what are not acceptable ones by the parents, and so this kind of social conditioning is conscious. However, by the time that the child is an adult it is not usually adequately aware of its degree of social conditioning. Much conditioning is repressed and subconscious, and reflects the internal conflicts and confusions of the parents, and so the motivations based on such repressed conditioning are therefore subconscious too. These subconscious motivations may remain dormant or they may become active and influential.

During eras when the overall stress in society is low, then people function primarily on conscious desires and intentions. The low level of stress means that the activities of subconscious minds are low too. However, this changes when the stress within society starts to escalate to high levels. Now subconscious minds become influential. Modern society is a high-stress society. In my view the intensity of emotional factors in the modern person is greater than the intensity of his or her conscious desires and intentions. In this situation, dominant desires and intentions usually become just a response to or a rationalisation of the subconscious motivations. The conscious desire derives its power from the underlying subconscious motive, either from harmony with it or from being antagonistic to it. Any conscious desire that is free from subconscious forces has little power to motivate a person consistently and regularly. For example, moral and noble ideals are usually a reaction against strong subconscious feelings of self-hate (as a mode of guilt).

Can the undesirable effects of social conditioning be eliminated?  Most of them can be; perhaps even all of them. But it is often necessary for the individual to work alone, since he or she will be involved in the process of examining, and perhaps changing, some or all of their values. Subconscious motivation is eliminated only by insight into its cause and never by the use of discipline or rationality or suggestion (these three uses may enable a person to control his subconscious motivation but they will not enable him to change it). When social conditioning is not so intense, it can be changed (rather than eliminated) for better or for worse. The influence of friends, a partner, and new environments can effect such change.

The Emotional Dynamics of Transference

Any state of mind that is important to the person is always underpinned by strong emotional factors. These factors I call the emotional dynamics of the state of mind. I analyse the emotions that underlie transference, in its sexual and authority forms. First I look at sexual transference. It is simply the effect of anxiety on sexual jealousy.
Jealousy = self-pity + love.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

Sexual transference = jealousy + anxiety.
    = self-pity + love + fear + vanity.
    = (fear + love) + (self-pity + vanity).

Since self-pity and vanity form a binary, they will cancel out each other when each is equal in intensity to the other one. When the intensities are unequal then whichever emotion is temporarily greater in intensity will prevail, reduced in effectiveness by the intensity of the lesser one. Hence the simplest form of sexual transference is the combination of fear and love.

The emotional dynamics of sexual transference = fear + love.

Authority transference has the same factors of fear and love, since the only difference is that jealousy now focuses on authority rather than on sexuality.

This result means that when a relationship is harmonious, love is emphasised and so positive transference is in the ascendant. Then transference focuses mainly on admired values; in the subconscious mind these values are associated with “reward”. If the relationship is inharmonious, then fear is emphasised and negative transference holds sway. Now transference highlights the feared values; subconsciously these values are associated with “punishment”.

It is through the emphasis on the fear factor that transference plays its part in social conditioning. By contrast, the admired values (if they are “good” ones) can lead to social learning, which is learning that is guided by personal choice.

[¹]. My ideas on Emotion are on the Home page. [1]

[²]. See the article The Ego and Relativity, section Creation of the Ego, in the philosophy section. [2]

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