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Transference

Transference 101: Why a Blank Screen and Not a Real Person?

How the strange method is for real.

In my last post, "Is Your Glass Half Empty or Half Full?", I put forth the idea that transference is the special feature of psychoanalysis that makes it different from other kinds of psychotherapy. I suggested that a patient's transference reactions to the analyst show what her unconscious inner world is like. The analyst's job is to make room for these transference reactions to come to life and then to help show patients how their unconscious inner world affects how they make sense of their lives—often in a distorted way. As people become more aware of their unconscious filters, they are able to step back and begin to see their lives in a more realistic, objective way. Not only does this shift tend to bring relief from depression, anxiety, and all sorts of other troubles in life, but I believe it also can mobilize deep and lasting change at the root of the personality.

I received a lot of really interesting comments on the post that got me thinking more about how transference works and if it really measures up to all the hype. One reader asked whether or not transference is a myth. Another wondered if it sets up a kind of false, laboratory-sterile relationship that can't carry over into the nitty gritty of the real world. Having spent a lot of years on both sides of the couch, I know the feeling. "Come on, doc," we say, "Can't you just be a real person and tell me what you really think?"

I believe there is a place for dealing with reality in therapy—and in analysis, too. After all, living in reality is what we all have to do. But there is so much more to our lives than reality. Now that may sound kind of strange, but I think it is true. Our troubles don't actually lay so much in reality as they lay in psychic reality.

Think about it this way. If we could take and put into practice all the good advice and wise counsel that we have received over the years, we wouldn't have the troubles that we do. St. Paul put it this way, "I do the very thing I don't want to do; and I don't do what I want to do." The task of analysis is to figure out what is going on underneath the reality of our lives. We want to better understand psychic reality—meaning unconscious reality—because that is what gets in the way of our ability to do what we want to do and not do what we don't want to do.

In all of our other relationships, there is an agreement we all make to keep the unconscious buried. That is a natural human instinct—and a protective one. We intuitively help each other keep our greatest worries and fears under wraps. In good relationships, we are polite, friendly, tactful, and reassuring. We don't talk about sex, money, or our wish to murder our mothers. If someone has a problem, we listen and try to help them solve it. We try to make our loved ones feel better, not worse. These are what real relationships are like. We are lucky to have them. But when it comes to helping someone make lasting changes, these kinds of real relationships don't make room for the real problems to show themselves.

Freud discovered that there is a way to shed light on the psychically real problems. And that is for the patient to get into a relationship with an analyst in which the analyst does his best to take out of the equation all of the things we do in all of our other social interactions to keep the unconscious tucked away. That is what he meant by the therapist being like a "blank screen" or a "mirror." It does not mean being cold, remote, and superior—although sometimes it sure can feel that way (and some analysts can be that way)! In contrast, I think my patients would tell you that they experience me as a warm, caring person. But they would also tell you that our relationship is unlike any other relationship they have in their lives, because I help them make contact with what they try not to know about in themselves—what is going on underneath the surface.

Working in the transference means that both analyst and patient must do their best to set aside the natural human tendency to keep the psyche buttoned up. It involves a disciplined effort to make room for a person's deepest fears, distorted beliefs, and unrealistic expectations to be revealed. We need to see and understand these messier parts of the psyche because they are the basic psychological operating system of our lives—the source of our troubles and our best hope for change.

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke put it this way, "Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another." While the analyst-patient relationship can feel unreal, it also can make room for our deepest reality to be known and understood. And perhaps that is ultimately what really matters and what makes the strange method so worthwhile.

Copyright 2012 Jennifer L. Kunst, Ph.D.

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