Transference

Core Ideas

• Transference is a repetition. What cannot yet be remembered and thought about tends to be lived out again in relationships (Freud, 1914). The repeated pattern is often the most reliable clue to what still hurts.
• It is selective, not random. A present figure gets cast in an old role because something about them, often small, fits the part: an authority position, a tone of voice, a moment of distraction.
• It is two-sided. When an old scene is replayed, you may take your old part, or you may swap roles and treat the other person as you were once treated. Both sides of the scene live inside you.
• It is ordinary. Transference is not confined to therapy. It runs through friendships, marriages, workplaces, politics and, as we will see, through our dealings with institutions and machines.
• It is information. A strong reaction that seems larger than the situation is not proof that something is wrong with you. It is a pointer to a relationship that still matters.

Kinds of Transference

Positive transference

Affectionate, trusting or admiring feelings carried over from good early relationships. Freud (1912) distinguished a mild, friendly form, which helps a person cooperate and keep going when things are hard, from more intense forms that can become their own obstacle. A person who quickly feels understood by a new doctor or teacher is often drawing on this kind of reservoir.

Negative transference

Hostile, suspicious or fearful feelings carried over from painful relationships. It can look like expecting criticism, bracing for abandonment, testing whether someone will stay, or reading neutral behavior as contempt. Freud (1912) saw it as one of the main sources of resistance; later clinicians came to see it as some of the most important material there is, because it shows exactly where trust broke down.

Erotic transference

Romantic or sexual feelings toward a helper or authority figure. Freud (1915) wrote about this candidly, arguing that such love is genuine in its intensity yet shaped by the situation and by the past, and that the helper’s job is neither to gratify it nor to shame it away, but to understand it. Many later writers note that what looks erotic often carries other longings underneath: to be special, to be finally seen, or to be safe.

These are not tidy boxes. Most real transferences are mixed, and the same person can be idealized one week and feared the next. When good and bad images of the same person swing back and forth without ever meeting, that is closer to splitting of other’s image, and it tends to show up strongly in transference.

How It Shows Up in Everyday Life

• Feeling instantly small, or instantly defiant, around a certain kind of authority figure.
• Expecting a partner to leave, and treating small absences as proof that they are leaving.
• Idealizing a new mentor, then feeling crushed when they turn out to be ordinary.
• Finding yourself in the same argument with different people, often with the same lines.
• Being drawn to people who are, in some specific and recognizable way, like someone from long ago.
• Reacting to a boss’s brief email as though it carried a tone it may not have had.
• Feeling, in a group of friends, that you are the one who will be left out, and quietly competing with the friend who reminds you of a sibling who always seemed to be the favorite.

Social psychologists have studied this outside the consulting room. In a series of experiments, Susan Andersen and her colleagues showed that when people meet a stranger who resembles a significant other in a few small ways, they tend to “fill in” the stranger with that person’s traits, misremember the stranger as having them, and bring the feelings and expectations attached to the original relationship (Andersen & Cole, 1990; Andersen & Chen, 2002). Harry Stack Sullivan had a name for the everyday version decades earlier: parataxic distortion, seeing a present person through the lens of past ones (Sullivan, 1953).

How Different Thinkers See It

Freud: From Obstacle to Engine

Freud first met transference as a problem. In the case of the young woman he called “Dora,” published in 1905, treatment ended abruptly when she left after eleven weeks. In a postscript he concluded that he had failed to notice in time that she was treating him as she had treated other men in her life, and that she had acted out a kind of revenge on him rather than remembering and talking about it (Freud, 1905). In “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912) he described how each person develops a characteristic way of loving that is repeated with new people, and in “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915) he took on its most charged form. By “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), transference had become not just an obstacle but the main arena in which old conflicts could be understood and changed.

Klein and Joseph: The Total Situation

Melanie Klein argued that transference is not a series of occasional references to the past but a continuous re-creation of the person’s inner world, including its anxieties and defenses, in the present relationship (Klein, 1952). Betty Joseph (1985) developed this into the idea of transference as a “total situation”: everything the person brings, including how they speak, what they leave out, and what they subtly invite the other to feel or do, expresses their internal object relationships. The focus moved from what a person says about the past to what is happening between two people right now.

Kohut: Selfobject Transferences

Heinz Kohut, founder of self psychology, noticed transferences that were less about desire or hostility and more about holding the self together. He described them as selfobject transferences, in which the other is experienced as a function the self needs (Kohut, 1971, 1984). See selfobjects.

• Mirroring: the need to be seen, recognized and responded to with pleasure, so that one’s worth feels real.
• Idealizing: the need to look up to a calm, strong figure and borrow their steadiness.
• Twinship (alter ego): the need to feel essentially alike, that someone is “one of us.” Kohut first treated this as a form of mirroring and later described it as its own type (Kohut, 1984).

Kohut saw these needs as normal and lifelong, not as immaturity. When they are disrupted, people may feel deflated, enraged or empty, which links transference closely to self-esteem regulation and to the narcissistic style.

Kernberg and Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

Otto Kernberg built a model in which the units of the mind are paired images of self and other linked by a feeling, and in which these dyads become activated in the relationship with the therapist (Kernberg, 1975). Transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) works by identifying the dyad currently in play, for example a helpless, mistreated self facing a cold, withholding authority, and noticing when the roles reverse, so that the person who felt mistreated becomes the cold one (Clarkin, Yeomans & Kernberg, 2006). In people whose good and bad images are kept apart by splitting, these dyads can switch fast and feel absolutely real while they last.

Relational Views: Gill, Mitchell and Aron

Merton Gill (1982) challenged the idea that transference is pure distortion. People respond to real features of the other person, he argued, and transference is often a plausible, if selective, reading of what is actually there. Stephen Mitchell (1988) and Lewis Aron (1996), central figures in relational psychoanalysis, took this further: transference is co-created. Both people bring their histories, both shape the encounter, and neither has a privileged view of the “real” relationship. This shift matters. It means the first question about a strong reaction is not “what is wrong with you?” but “what is going on between us, and what does it remind you of?” Paul Wachtel’s cyclical psychodynamics (Wachtel, 1997) puts the same point in terms of loops: the expectation you bring draws a response that seems to confirm it, so transference is kept alive by the present as much as by the past. See vicious circles.

Luborsky: Transference as a Measurable Pattern

Lester Luborsky operationalized transference as the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme: a recurring sequence of a wish, an expected response from others, and the response of the self, which can be identified reliably from the stories people tell about their relationships (Luborsky & Crits-Christoph, 1990). His research supported Freud’s observation that each person has a small number of such themes that recur across very different relationships. See core relational themes.

Transference Beyond People

Institutions

People transfer onto institutions as readily as onto individuals. A company can be experienced as a withholding parent, a university as a judge, a government as a protector or a persecutor. Wilfred Bion’s work on groups (Bion, 1961) and Isabel Menzies’s study of nursing services (Menzies, 1960) showed how organizations become containers for their members’ anxieties, and how people relate to them with the feelings once directed at early caregivers. Losing a job can hurt in a way that has as much to do with this transferred attachment as with the paycheck.

Technology and AI

People also transfer onto machines, and they do it quickly. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum published ELIZA, a simple program that imitated a therapist by reflecting users’ statements back as questions (Weizenbaum, 1966). He was disturbed by how readily people confided in it and treated it as though it understood them, even people who knew how it worked. A decade later he wrote a book-length warning about this tendency (Weizenbaum, 1976). The habit of reading understanding into a responsive program came to be called the ELIZA effect (Hofstadter, 1995).

Later research found the same thing more broadly: people apply social rules to computers and media almost automatically (Reeves & Nass, 1996), and are especially likely to attribute minds to non-human things when those things behave unpredictably or when the person is lonely or wants to feel understood (Epley, Waytz & Cacioppo, 2007). Modern chatbots are far more convincing than ELIZA, so this pull is stronger. A person may feel judged by a chatbot, try to please it, be hurt by it, or hear in its replies the voice of someone from their past. That is transference, and it is worth taking seriously, both for what it reveals and for the caution it demands.

Examples

These are composite vignettes, not real people.

The Short Email

Priya’s new team lead replies to her proposal with a single line: “Let’s discuss Monday.” She spends the weekend certain she is about to be criticized, rehearsing defenses. On Monday the lead says the proposal is good and wants to expand it. Looking back, Priya recognizes the weekend’s feeling: it is exactly how she felt waiting for her father to come home and review her report card. The lead had cast no such role. Priya had brought it.

The Mentor Who Fell

Daniel idolizes a senior colleague for his first year, copying her habits and seeking her approval. When she forgets a promise to introduce him at a conference, he feels betrayed out of all proportion and decides she was never really on his side. In hindsight he sees an old pattern: an idealized parent, then a sudden fall. Kohut would call the first phase an idealizing transference and the fall a disruption of it; Kernberg would notice the flip from idealized to devalued figure.

Bracing at the Keyboard

Marisol starts talking things through with an AI. Her first messages are careful and apologetic: “Sorry, this is probably a stupid thing to worry about.” She is bracing for a judgment the program has not made. The apology is a clue, not to anything about the program, but to how she expects to be received when she brings her worries to anyone.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Projection

Projection attributes one’s own unacknowledged feeling to someone else (“she’s angry at me” when the anger is one’s own). Transference carries over a whole relationship from the past. The two often occur together, but transference need not involve disowning anything.

Displacement

Displacement redirects a feeling from its real target to a safer one, like snapping at a partner after a bad day at work. Transference is more a matter of template than of redirection: the new person is experienced as being like the old one.

Realistic perception

Not every strong reaction is transference. Sometimes the boss really is harsh. Gill’s point holds: a reaction can be shaped by the past and still be a fair reading of the present. The question is fit and proportion, not whether the past is involved at all.

Countertransference

The helper’s reactions to the person being helped. See countertransference.

History

Freud first used the term in Studies on Hysteria (1895, with Breuer), describing how patients could link the physician to wishes from their past through what he called a false connection. The Dora case (1905) made transference a central clinical problem, and the papers on technique of 1912 to 1915 laid out its forms and its role in treatment. Sándor Ferenczi, Klein and Anna Freud extended the concept in different directions, Anna Freud adding the transference of defenses. In the 1950s Klein reframed it as the externalization of a whole inner world, and in the 1970s Kohut and Kernberg each made it the center of a major treatment model. From the 1980s, Gill and the relational school recast it as a joint creation of both participants. Meanwhile Luborsky’s research and Andersen’s experiments brought transference into the laboratory, showing it to be a general feature of human social thinking. With the arrival of conversational AI, the question Weizenbaum raised in 1966, why people so readily treat a responsive machine as a mind, has become newly urgent.

Sources

• Andersen, S. M., & Chen, S. (2002). The relational self: An interpersonal social-cognitive theory. Psychological Review, 109(4), 619–645.
• Andersen, S. M., & Cole, S. W. (1990). “Do I know you?”: The role of significant others in general social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(3), 384–399.
• Aron, L. (1996). A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. Analytic Press.
• Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. Tavistock.
• Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition, 2.
• Clarkin, J. F., Yeomans, F. E., & Kernberg, O. F. (2006). Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations. American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886.
• Freud, S. (1905). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Standard Edition, 7.
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• Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working-through. Standard Edition, 12.
• Freud, S. (1915). Observations on transference-love. Standard Edition, 12.
• Gill, M. M. (1982). Analysis of Transference, Vol. 1: Theory and Technique. International Universities Press.
• Hofstadter, D. R. (1995). Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Basic Books.
• Joseph, B. (1985). Transference: The total situation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 447–454.
• Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.
• Klein, M. (1952). The origins of transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 33, 433–438.
• Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.
• Kohut, H. (1984). How Does Analysis Cure? University of Chicago Press.
• Luborsky, L., & Crits-Christoph, P. (1990). Understanding Transference: The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme Method. Basic Books.
• Menzies, I. E. P. (1960). A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations, 13, 95–121.
• Mitchell, S. A. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Harvard University Press.
• Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge University Press.
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• Wachtel, P. L. (1997). Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World. American Psychological Association.
• Weizenbaum, J. (1966). ELIZA: A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36–45. doi:10.1145/365153.365168
• Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. W. H. Freeman.