Excerpt –
Transference
Freud’s original definition of transference referred to how the patient perceived in his analyst the return of some important figure from his childhood or past, and consequently transferred onto him or her feelings and reactions that undoubtedly applied to this role model, whether it was a positive or negative experience.
In truth, all our relationships can be sources of transference and not just with analysts or counselors, but with any person or situation that triggers our unresolved, buried emotions.
Transference is related to the human capacity to learn from, and compare our personal history with, judgments about possible outcomes in our current and future situations. This is a useful tool and is, in fact, part of the remarkable makeup of our human psyche.
In daily life, we naturally evaluate and continually update how our experiences affect us and how we feel in response to them. As we grow and collect more life experiences, we learn to use memory, emotions, and our five senses to give us hints about what to expect and how to interpret an upcoming situation. Much of this happens below the level of conscious thought. Problems can arise when we find ourselves reacting on autopilot, unable to truly evaluate our situation at all. When we do find ourselves in transference, our minds are too busy with emotional reactions relating to past, remembered experiences to be fully aware and present.
Transference can be positive or negative. For example, we might have fond memories of a favorite aunt; when we go into a store and the salesperson has similar mannerisms or body build, or wears the same cologne or perfume, or perhaps has a way about her that reminds us of the way Aunt Helen used to be, we may think positively about that person and assume they can do no wrong; we may even find ourselves willing to buy anything they have to sell. We may be vaguely aware of the transference or completely unaware of it on a conscious level. While positive transference can be pleasant and lead to new and positive relationships, it can also lead to unfair expectations on our part, i.e., an unconscious questioning “Why doesn’t she treat me the way Aunt Helen did?” Con men running scams rely heavily on “hooking” us by striving to strike a “positive chord,” substituting themselves for a trusted person in our memory. If they can get us into positive transference they can get under our guard.
Negative transference is recollecting some difficult or traumatic experience from the past and transferring it onto our present situation or onto a person in our present environment, who may have nothing to do with our past experience, as if the two experiences were the same. The triggered emotions may undoubtedly be the same, and feel just as real in the present time as they did when they first occurred, evoking actual distress, anger, or pain. Transference can go from mild irritation to paralyzing fear of experiencing repeated abuse or direct violence.
Transference is often not logical in an everyday conscious sense. The logic of repressed emotion plays by its own rules. Soldiers returning from combat duty often experience transference known as posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. One of the hallmarks of PTSD is that simple things, a tactile impression, a scent, or seeing someone of a particular ethnicityócan be enough to call up vivid and painful memories of combat.
The ability to recognize transference can be powerful tool for healing. Original traumatic experiences with significant people in our childhood are echoed throughout our life, and they reflect the degree of intensity of those early experiences. Each automatic reaction and response to the impressions left in our minds and bodies compounds the effects of transference. As a result, our misconceptions are strengthened as we “re-experience” the same sequence, again and again.
From DEEP Origin Healing and the Origin of Personality Distoriton
Chapter Five
Energetic Configurations of the Five Personality Distortions