Without transference, there is no psychoanalysis.

“I found my therapist by chance, on the Internet, and immediately realized that it was him,” says 45-year-old Sofia, who has been going to therapy for six months. – At every session, he surprises me; we laugh together, I want to know more about him: is he married, are there any children. But psychoanalysts avoid talking about the details of their personal lives. “They prefer to maintain a position of neutrality, which Freud considered the basis of psychoanalytic treatment,” notes psychoanalyst Marina Harutyunyan. Remaining a neutral figure, the analyst allows the patient to fantasize freely about himself. And this gives rise to a transfer of feelings in space and time, which is called a transfer.¹.

Understanding fantasies

There is a popular notion of psychoanalysis (and transference as an important part of it) that we draw from pop culture. The image of a psychoanalyst is present in many films: «Analyze This», «The Sopranos», «The Couch in New York», «Color of Night», almost in all Woody Allen’s films. “This simplistic view leads us to believe that the client sees the therapist as mother or father. But this is not entirely true, — specifies Marina Harutyunyan. “The client transfers to the analyst not the image of the real mother, but a fantasy about her, or perhaps a fantasy about some aspect of her.”

Thus, the «mother» can break up into an evil stepmother, who wishes the child to die or torments him, and a kind, impeccably loving mother. It can also be represented in part, in the form of a fantasy of an ideal, always available breast. What determines which particular fantasy of the client will be projected onto the psychoanalyst? “From what his trauma is, where the logic of the development of his life was violated,” Marina Harutyunyan explains, “and what exactly is the center of his unconscious experiences and aspirations. Whether as a single «beam of light» or separate «beams», all this manifests itself in a long analytic therapy.

Over time, the client discovers and becomes aware of his fantasies (related to childhood experiences) as the cause of his difficulties in the present. Therefore, transference can be called the driving force of psychotherapy.

Not only love

Prompted by the analyst, the client begins to understand his feelings in the transference and understand what they are connected with. The client makes the mistake of mistaking the therapist for the object of his feelings, but the feelings themselves are real. “We have no right to dispute the nature of “true” love in falling in love, which manifests itself in analytic treatment,” wrote Sigmund Freud. And again: “This falling in love consists of new editions of old traits and repeats children’s reactions. But this is an essential feature of any love. There is no love that does not repeat the child’s pattern.².

Transference generates dreams and supports the client’s desire to talk about himself and to understand himself in order to do this. However, too much love can interfere. The client begins to avoid confessing to such fantasies, which, from his point of view, will make him less attractive in the eyes of the therapist. He forgets his original purpose — to be healed. Therefore, the therapist brings the client back to the tasks of therapy. “My analyst explained to me how transference works when I confessed my love to him,” recalls 42-year-old Lyudmila.

We almost automatically associate transference with being in love, but there are other experiences in transference that begin in early childhood. “After all, it cannot be said that a child is in love with his parents, this is only part of the feelings,” emphasizes Marina Harutyunyan. — He depends on his parents, he is afraid of losing them, these are figures that evoke strong emotions, and not only positive ones. Therefore, fear, rage, hatred arise in the transference. And then the client can accuse the therapist of deafness, incompetence, greed, consider him responsible for his failures … This is also a transference, only negative. Sometimes it is so strong that the client wants to interrupt the therapy process. The task of the analyst in this case, as in the case of falling in love, is to remind the client that his goal is healing and to help him make feelings the subject of analysis.

The therapist needs to «manage» the transference. “This control consists in the fact that he acts according to the signals unconsciously given by the client, when he puts us in the position of his mother, his brother, or tries on the role of a tyrant father, forcing us to be a child, which he himself was,” explains the psychoanalyst Virginie Meggle (Virginie Meggle). — We’re falling for this game. We act as if. During therapy, we are on a stage trying to guess the silent requests for love. Not answering them to let the client find their way and their voice.” This task requires the psychotherapist to experience an uncomfortable balance.

Should I be afraid of transfer?

For some clients, transference and attachment to the therapist is apprehensive. “I would undergo psychoanalysis, but I’m afraid to experience a transference and again suffer from unrequited love,” admits 36-year-old Stella, who wants to seek help after a breakup. But there is no psychoanalysis without transference.

“You need to go through this period of dependence so that week after week you come again and again and talk,” Virginie Meggle is convinced. “Life problems cannot be cured in six months or according to a psychological book.” But there is a grain of common sense in the caution of clients: psychotherapists who themselves have not undergone sufficient psychoanalysis themselves may indeed not be able to cope with the transference. By responding to the client’s feelings with his own feelings, the therapist runs the risk of violating his personal boundaries and destroying the therapeutic situation.

“If the client’s problem falls into the area of ​​uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe personal underdevelopment of the therapist, then the latter may lose his composure, Marina Harutyunyan clarifies. “And instead of analyzing the transference, the therapist and the client act it out.” In this case, therapy is not possible. The only way out is to stop it immediately. And for the client — to turn to another psychoanalyst for help, and for the therapist — to resort to supervision: to discuss their work with more experienced colleagues.

Client training

If our habitual love stories are rich in passions and disappointments, we will experience all this in the process of therapy. By his silence, by his refusal to respond to the client’s feelings, the analyst deliberately provokes the awakening of ghosts from our past. The therapy space serves as a laboratory in which we invoke the ghosts of the past, but under control. To avoid painful repetition of past situations and relationships. Transference in the exact sense of the word is observed in psychoanalysis and classical forms of psychotherapy that grew out of psychoanalysis. It begins when the client believes that he has found a person who is able to understand the cause of his troubles.

Transference can occur even before the first session: for example, when a client reads a book by his future psychotherapist. At the beginning of psychotherapy, the attitude towards the therapist is most often idealized, he is seen by the client as a supernatural being. And the more the client feels progress, the more he appreciates the therapist, admires him, sometimes even wants to give him gifts. But as the analysis progresses, the client becomes more aware of his feelings.

«The analyst helps him process those knots that are tied in the unconscious, are not understood and not reflected, — reminds Marina Harutyunyan. – A specialist in the process of his psychoanalytic training, working with more experienced colleagues, develops a special analytical structure of the mind. The therapy process helps to develop a similar structure in the patient. Gradually, the value shifts from the psychoanalyst as a person to the process of their joint work. The client becomes more attentive to himself, begins to be interested in how his spiritual life works, and to separate his fantasies from real relationships. Awareness grows, the habit of self-observation appears, and the client needs less and less analytics, turning into an «analyst to himself.»

He understands that the images that he tried on the therapist belong to himself and his personal history. Therapists often compare this phase to the moment a parent releases a child’s hand to allow the child to walk on its own. “The client and the analyst are people who have done important, deep, serious work together,” says Marina Harutyunyan. – And one of the results of this work is precisely that the client no longer needs the constant presence of an analyst in his daily life. But the analyst will not be forgotten and will not become a passing figure.” Warm feelings and memories will remain for a long time.

¹ «Transfer» is the Russian equivalent of the term «transfer». The word «transfer» was used in pre-revolutionary translations of the works of Sigmund Freud. Which of the terms is used more often at the present time, it is difficult to say, perhaps equally. But we prefer the word «transfer» and in the future in the article we use it.

² Z. Freud «Notes on Transference Love». The first edition appeared in 1915.