TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the psychotherapeutic concept of transference. Transference meaning that a client, a person, has a lot of unresolved embedded relational dynamics in their head. Meaning they have certain patterns of relationships, of behavior from their relationship with their mother in childhood, their father in childhood, other important people in their childhood, perhaps people who traumatize them in their childhood. And then when they come to therapy, they play out these exact same relational patterns with their therapist. They actually see their therapist as behaving very much like their historical, uh, people from their past. They see the therapist as being like their mother and like their father, and they end up projecting all the feelings that they had, displacing all the feelings that they had historically for their mother, their father, whoever it was, other traumatizers in their life onto the therapist.
And feeling all sorts of feelings in the therapy relationship toward the therapist that really were originally meant for their parents. People don’t just do this in therapy; also, they do it with their partners. They do it with their boyfriends and girlfriends. They do it with their friends. They can do it with their bosses at work. They can even do it with their children.
What makes therapy special, in theory, is that the therapist is supposed to start to figure out what the transference is, what the client is projecting onto the therapist, and then help the client figure out what’s going on. And then help the client sort the roots of the trauma that’s causing this transference to happen. And in so doing, the client is then supposed to wake up, realize what he or she has done, and actually dry up that pattern.
And then instead have a relationship with the therapist and, by extension, other people in his or her life—husband, wife, bosses, children—that are not based on projection, not based on displacement of historical relational patterns, traumatic relational patterns. But instead have relationships with all these people based on the truth of the person’s own inner real self. So that’s supposed to be the goal of psychotherapy in a lot of ways: to have the therapist help the client work out this transference.
The problem is it’s extremely difficult to do. Most therapists also have little or no capacity to do it, and often they’re not even aware that their clients are doing it. And by nature of the definition of transference, that it’s displacement, it’s projection, these are unconscious processes on the part of the client. So the client doesn’t even realize that he or she is doing it.
Then there’s one other thing that’s a complicating factor: therapists do the exact same thing toward their clients. They have transference too; it’s just labeled countertransference. That the therapist is unconsciously projecting and displacing a huge amount of his or her unresolved childhood issues, unresolved traumatic issues onto the client. So they can get very easily into this transference-countertransference relationship, and the therapist is doing this with lots of other people in his or her lives.
Well, this doesn’t speak very well of therapy if this is common, and this is probably a big part of why I am so critical of therapy. Certainly in my own therapeutic experiences, when I was a client, I was projecting some stuff—now I see it in hindsight—some stuff onto my therapists. But I never had a therapist even remotely help me make sense of any of what I was projecting. Instead, they started projecting feelings of rejection and nastiness and hurt and withholding onto me.
The other thing was that I was profoundly going through a self-analytical process while I was in therapy. So a self-analytical process that was completely outside of the relationship between me and the therapist. I was journaling profoundly. I was analyzing my dreams. I was reflecting on what was going on in the therapeutic relationship and in my life and in my mind in general. And I started realizing what a lot of my transference onto my therapists was.
And I started talking about it with them, and I started realizing what a lot of their transference, their countertransference onto me was. And I talked about it with them, and this didn’t go well because what I found was that their countertransference patterns were deeply and unconsciously embedded in them. They were stuck and sick people, and they didn’t like me for calling them out for their unconscious behavior.
And I started realizing, oh my God, I’m more self-analytical with me than they are self-analytical with their own selves. And yet I’m paying them money to be self-analytical enough to help me analyze myself. And then I realized they’re actually not helping me analyze myself at all. They’re not helping me analyze my transference onto them or onto anyone. They’re not helping me analyze my historical traumas and helping me realize how traumatized I am and how I’m playing this out in my life.
Instead, I think they like me being unconscious and traumatized. They just want to control my transference. The quotation about transference that sums this up best comes from the very unusual therapist Milton Erickson. In a lot of ways, I don’t like him. In a lot of ways, I really can’t stand him. But I will say this: if you want to read the book of an interesting therapist or about an interesting therapist, it’s the book called “Uncommon Therapy” about Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, and hypnotherapist.
He said, relating to transference, he goes, “I’m not really into this whole subject of transference with my clients, but if they do have transference, I want to make sure their transference onto me is positive transference.” Meaning he wants to take all of their idealizations for their parents, their historical parents—because everyone has some degree of idealization of their parents. He wants to take their idealization and have them project that, displace that onto him.
The reason for that is that then he can control them because they’re idealizing him. They have made him into a god of transferential idealization, and he can then use that to get them to do what he wants. And what he wants, according to all the writing that he does, is to help them grow and heal and become better people. But a lot of times what I gathered by reading his case studies is he was really just helping them become more normal.
He was helping them fit in better, helping them get married and have normal marriages and have normal children and work normal, dead boring jobs, and not become true and real self-reflective individuals. That wasn’t his goal for psychotherapy at all. His goal was to help people who were maladjusted to become people who were adjusted. And I don’t know if I agree that that’s really the role of a psychotherapist at all. That sounds more like an agent of a very troubled society.
And then I think about my time as a therapist and how sometimes I did have clients who idealized me. They saw me as an ideal parent figure, sometimes just because I had a license and I dressed well and I had an office. They came in just looking at me as someone who was an absolutist healer, the person who knew the answers. “Tell me what to do, and I will do it.”
And I was uncomfortable with this positive transference. In fact, I felt it was a hindrance to therapy. My conception of therapy, my conception of my job is to help people get to know themselves better, know their histories, know who they were, know who they are, know where they came from. To be able to see what they are projecting onto me, even if it supposedly makes me look great.
In a lot of ways, when I have met therapists—because I’ve known a lot—who actually really like being idealized by their clients, these types of therapists to me are not real psychotherapists. Instead, they’re cult leaders, and their therapy practices are a practice of them gathering a bunch of people together who pay them money to idealize them. It makes the therapists feel really, really good.
Now when I think about it, that kind of projected idealization, that super positive transference that so many therapists like to cultivate in their clients, that made me feel icky. Now, is that to say that I liked it when my clients projected negative things on me from their past? It’s like no, I didn’t like it. It didn’t make me comfortable or happy. It made me feel anxious and uncomfortable and sad sometimes, and made me feel even guilty sometimes or rotten, like I was a bad therapist. Brought up all sorts of…
Self-doubt in me, and I’ve talked to a lot of therapists who describe how that feels. It’s very similar. What I have seen, though, is a lot of therapists, when they start getting this negative projection from their clients, their goal immediately is to get rid of the client, make them go somewhere else, cancel the therapy, refer them elsewhere, refer them to a doctor, make this person take medication, raise their diagnosis, give them a personality disorder.
My feeling was that yes, it was uncomfortable. No, I didn’t like it. No, it didn’t make me happy. But this is why those people were paying me. This is what my job is. My job is to receive these feelings. My job is not to react negatively to these feelings. My job is to reflect: how do I feel? What is this bringing up for me? What is it in their negative transference onto me that is accurate?
Because often what I found is people, clients, people out in the world who have these urges to displace, to project, the urge to negatively transfer, people have a genius for being very sensitive to picking up when others have some small part of them that actually accurately reflects the negative qualities of the people who harmed them in the past.
So when my clients were having strong negative transferences onto me, or even mild negative transferences onto me, my job was to figure out, first and foremost, what parts of me have they accurately perceived and realize, ah, those are the parts of me that are like the negative parts of their traumatizers. And then immediately, in relationship with my clients, admit it. Say yes, you are correct in this part. So let’s just start at a base of saying part of your projections are actually not projections; they are accurate.
But now, and this would take a long time sometimes, and it took a lot of gentleness and patience on my part, but slowly to help people see that this is what they’re projecting, that not all of their transference was completely accurate, and that through this, this is a window for people to begin to look more accurately at how they were traumatized.
Lots of people realized that they were traumatized, but to realize the full dimension of their traumas, the full scope of it, how it affected their personality, warped them in different ways, took them away from an inner relationship with their healthiness, that’s quite a long journey to figure this out. In fact, I’m still on this journey.
But this is a way that I found that people could get their money’s worth in therapy with me: to not dissuade themselves from having these negative feelings toward me, this negative transference, but to have this and to talk about it, to be open about it.
And part of why I know that this is a good thing, this is where people can get their money’s worth in therapy, is that I realize this as a client. I realized that a big part of my job as a client when I was in therapy was to do this with my therapists. This is what I was paying them for. But actually, really, what I was paying them for was to have them help me make sense of it, and they couldn’t do it.
The main reason was that they really didn’t have the motivation or maybe even the capacity to look at themselves. I think they actually overly identified with my transferences onto them, my negative projections onto them. I think it rang a few too many bells of truth in their own heads, in their own moments of self-doubt, and they had to push that away. It was too painful. They were, in a way, too weak to grow.
And I like to think that when I was a therapist, I had a much stronger capacity, motivation to grow and to look at the negative sides of myself, and I feel that that benefited my clients.