Transference relationships develop in the psychoanalyst’s office. The patient’s love or hatred for his analyst is necessary to start the process of change.
“From the first sessions with a psychoanalyst, I began to look forward to these meetings,” says 36-year-old Anna. “She immediately gained my confidence. After the death of my mother, for the first time I met a person whom I could trust.
And 30-year-old Veronika speaks of her acquaintance with a psychoanalyst as follows: “I chose her according to quite objective criteria: a female analyst, a good education, and extensive work experience. But I think that it was her final decision to undergo analysis that arose thanks to the details: a friendly look, a calm soft voice … And most importantly, her office was furnished with comfortable furniture, the smell of coffee came from the kitchen. I immediately remembered the apartment of my grandmother, with whom I lived in my childhood for several years. And I felt very calm, completely safe. ”
In other words, Anna and Veronica “transferred” the traits of their loved ones onto their analysts.
Return to childhood
Transference develops when, in communication with a psychoanalyst, we unconsciously reproduce those patterns of relationships that we had in childhood with our mother, father, grandmother, or someone else from significant relatives. Strictly speaking – and this is important to understand – this happens not only in the office of a psychoanalyst (and, more broadly, a psychotherapist).
In general, in our adult relationships, we repeat the relationships of early childhood – of course, in new versions (which makes them completely unrecognizable).
“On the one hand, we want to prolong the pleasure that relationships with someone close to us gave us in childhood,” explains psychoanalytic psychotherapist Svetlana Fedorova. – On the other hand, any relationship, even the most “good”, not to mention the “bad”, is always in conflict. And we unconsciously hope in a new, adult relationship to resolve that long-standing conflict by losing it again.
And this means that we experience the same feelings, fears, impulses and defenses again and again.
But the transference that develops in the psychoanalyst’s office is quite special. “The patient gets the opportunity to relive his feelings, desires, anxieties, internal conflicts in a safe environment,” says Svetlana Fedorova. – He knows that the analyst will not show aggression, will not evaluate and condemn him. Because the task of the analyst is, by listening and feeling the patient, to help him understand himself better.
In addition, the patient-analyst relationship is strictly limited. This makes it possible not to confuse the therapeutic relationship with the real one.
From love to hate
In classical psychoanalysis, the patient lies on the couch during the session and says whatever comes to his mind. This passive position immerses oneself in a childish state and helps the transference to manifest itself. This allows the patient to talk about his feelings, and the analyst to accept them and connect them with real figures from the patient’s past.
Moreover, regardless of the gender of the analyst, the patient can project onto him his feelings both for his father (grandfather, brother) and for his mother (grandmother, sister, nanny) – to those first beings whom he fell in love with and to whom he began to ask key questions: “Who I am? Where did I come from? What is happening to me?” And the most important of them: “Can you love me?”
Now the psychoanalyst must help him find the answers.
At the beginning of the work, feelings towards the analyst are most often positive, this is the so-called positive transference, which is a condition for establishing a therapeutic alliance. The patient develops a sort of infatuation with the analyst.
“But this “honeymoon” cannot last forever,” notes Svetlana Fedorova, “simply because there are no ideal good figures in life. The most beloved and wonderful mother still cannot be perfect. And at some stage of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, warm feelings can transform into irritation, aggression, even hatred.”
There may be an erotic connotation in the patient’s feelings for the analyst. “Most often this manifests itself as an infantile expectation of some kind of satisfaction,” notes Svetlana Fedorova. “Hence the insatiable desire for the analyst to free from mental suffering, to give a “magic wand” with which all problems will be solved.” And this is also natural for the process of therapy.
Sometimes the patient may become convinced that he really loves the analyst and wants to enter into a close relationship with him (so-called eroticized transference). In fact, behind this is a reluctance to work through their problems, an attempt to escape from the awareness of their internal conflict.
That is why the Code of Ethics forbids any relationship with a patient other than psychotherapeutic.
Life after psychoanalysis
In the process of work, the patient begins to better interpret his feelings, to talk about them. And the deeper this understanding becomes, the weaker becomes his attachment, his transference feelings towards the analyst.
“In a sense, the analyst conveys his analytical view to the patient,” says Svetlana Fedorova. Gradually acquiring a psychoanalytic “I”, the patient becomes an analyst for himself. Then there is the issue of completion.
Realizing that no one but himself can tell who he is or what he should do, the patient is now ready to move on on his own.
countertransference
The patient’s words evoke response feelings in the analyst’s unconscious. They constitute his countertransference. Suppose, at some point, while listening to the patient’s story, the analyst feels an unexpected irritation, a desire for him to leave as soon as possible. And then he asks himself the question: what is happening? “If I am a “good mother” for him at the moment, why did irritation suddenly rise in me? Most likely, this speaks of those ambiguous, contradictory feelings of the patient, which until this moment did not manifest themselves in any way during the analysis. So, not everything was so cloudless in his relationship with his mother, as he says. Thus countertransference feelings give the analyst a clue to understanding the patient. G. Ch.
Svetlana Fedorova – Senior Lecturer at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.