What is Transference?
In order to understand what the transference is, it will be helpful to first understand how human connection evolves over time. We start connecting to others from the time we are young infants. In his book The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Daniel Stern draws our attention to the two-month-old infant’s repertoire of social behaviors such as cooing, smiling when we smile, and also smiling to elicit a smile from us.
Over time the infant comes to recognize certain patterns of behavior and anticipate them, such as mealtime interactions or playing a game of peek-a-boo. As time passes, the infant develops schemas in his mind for what types of interactions he can expect from Mommy and what kinds of interactions he can expect from Daddy. These expectations get formulated early—at the pre-verbal level.
Over time these expectations and how we respond to them get expanded and generalized. As infants and later on we come to know what to expect. Formally, these patterns of relating are called Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized, or RIGs, but we can simply call them “ways-of-being-with.”
As we get older, these ways-of-being-with will become further elaborated. We unconsciously take these ways-of-being-with into our interactions with people in the outside world. Sometimes we think we are understanding the person in front of us, but because we are bringing our old ways-of-being-with to later relationships, we may discover that we are making a mistake.
We are not perceiving the person correctly. These ways-of-being-with form the basis of the transference. Transference can be defined as those patterns of interaction through which we came to know our mother and our father, and we then use these patterns to relate to others in the outside world.
By maintaining a neutral stance towards the patient, the therapist creates a “blank canvas” of sorts on which the patient will display his ways-of-being-with in his interactions with the therapist. He will have internal reactions to the therapist’s words, tone, and body language. Because the therapist is not one of the patient’s parents, these patterns will be observable to the therapist.
He will then be in a position to draw the patient’s attention to those aspects of their connection in which the patient is seeing the therapist in a way that is not real—rather, it is a repeat of past, unfulfilling interactions with one of his parents. The concept of the transference (and countertransference, below) was discovered by Sigmund Freud. He formulated his observations in the paper The Dynamics of Transference, which he wrote in 1912.
What is Countertransference?
Countertransference is the internal reaction that the therapist has towards the patient. Over the years there has been some confusion about what this encompasses. When Freud first used the term, he understood it as the subjective effect that the patient has on the therapist—something that belongs exclusively to the therapist and is the therapist’s problem to solve.
However, the concept of countertransference has been extended by others (notably Paula Heinemann) to include what the therapist’s countertransference tells us about the patient. That is, if I am having this inner emotional response to the patient, what is it that the patient is unconsciously communicating to me about themselves? Freud wrote that we listen to our patients with evenly hovering attention.
We are also attending to how we are emotionally receiving what the patient is saying, because our inner responses are a reaction to the patient’s unconscious wishes and fantasies. It is the unconscious mind speaking to the unconscious mind. To be sure, in order for us to effectively use the countertransference to understand the patient, we must first do our own work in order to ensure that what we are feeling and observing is coming from the patient, and not from a part of ourselves that is reacting to the patient because it hits a raw nerve in us.