Making Sense of Transference

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


Take someone who comes to therapy who wants to get to the root of a particular problem and who tries as best they can to speak about the ‘issues’. But at every turn they backtrack on themselves and question why they are doing it and whether they really need to put themselves through any self-examination and whether what they have just told you a moment ago is relevant or accurate or truthful in any way.
Or take someone who comes to therapy and apologies for being there and who wonders if they are taking up your time and whether there is someone with more important issues waiting to come in for the next session.
Or take someone who knows in their heart of hearts broadly what it is they should be talking about but who takes months and months trying to get even close to it.
Or, and I’ve used this example before, take someone who really wants to do therapy but who comes and finds they have a huge inability to speak?
At first sight these various examples might not seem to have anything in common. And in terms of the particularity of the clients on which they might be based, they don’t. Each is a separate condition that needs a separate and particular approach. And, yet, there is one thing they do have in common.
The therapeutic concept of transference is not a word that you hear very often in popular culture. You are more likely to hear terms such as repression, fixation, obsession, and so on. And yet transference describes something that goes to the very heart of the therapeutic process. In fact, if I remember correctly it was Freud who said that without transference there is no therapy.
What the above examples have in common is this concept of transference, the process whereby the client unconsciously relates to the person of the therapist/analyst as if they were someone significant from an earlier part of their life. When Freud first considered this concept he thought of it as a block to the eventual cure. How can the therapist help if the client comes in a has a conversation with someone from his past? Or who refuses to speak freely because the therapist is seen as such?
In this light, it is no wonder Freud first saw it as a stumbling block. It manifests as a shirking away from speaking about the issues that are real for the client. It is, just like any form of resistance, something that can put us back into the place of silence.
The therapist sitting opposite or behind us becomes a stern, judgemental figure who will look unkindly on what it is we want to say. And so we do not say it. That is transference.
Or equally, the therapist becomes an all-forgiving patient listener who knows a great deal and who will not mind whatever it is we want to say. Not only will he/she not mind, but they will forgive us. That too is transference.
Or the therapist is a fool who knows nothing and who only wants to hear me spill out my secrets so that he can get pleasure from seeing me suffer. I am not going to give him/her that pleasure and so I’m quitting. That too is transference.
Or, who do you think you are making an interpretation like that based on the little you know about me? What gives you the right to suggest such a thing? That too is transference.
It can be an impediment to progress in all but the most positive aspects of it. But then Freud discovered something else about it.
When you move away from the single notion that it is just feelings that are being transferred onto the therapist, and consider that the therapist is being transformed into someone from the past, then it can be used as a tool to help therapy along. And this is the second discovery that Freud made about transference. It now becomes a therapeutic tool.
How? In paying close attention to how a client interacts with the therapist through the transference it can be possible to gain an understanding of their position in terms of a significant relationship from their past. This can sometimes take time and involves building up a degree of knowledge about the person themselves.
As Jacques Lacan points out in his Seminar I, transference is not simply about feelings. Nor is it about simply swapping out the person of the therapist for some other human object from the client’s past.
No, it is about meaning and speech. As human beings we are essentially composed of speech and language and so we enter into a therapeutic setting – which is at base a human relationship – using the same medium. Our entire lives have been more or less spent doing the same thing, entering into relationships using the medium of speech.
But in therapy, no more than in ordinary life, speech has the power to define us, transform us, and convey and conceal meanings we don’t always notice. In that context, Lacan defined transference as ‘a hidden discourse’ taking the place of ‘an apparent discourse’.
Transference is one of the things that makes psychoanalytic psychotherapy unique in that it directs the therapist to listen for this hidden discourse, to attend to its nuances, to pick out in the various demands that people make of themselves and others, the ultimate demand for love.
Transference is not a cure. It is a tool that allows the therapist guide the treatment in the most fruitful direction. It is not the final destination, merely the compass that points the way.