Transference in psychology has managed to establish itself as one of the fundamental points of the analytical process by allowing us to find the biographical origin of the symptoms after having been interpreted. In Psychology-Online we explain to you What is transfer in psychology: types and examples each.
What is psychological transfer
In Dora’s case, it dealt with the issue of transference. He defined it as:
Reissues, reconstructions of emotions and fantasies that would be awakened and made conscious with the progress of the analysis, with a characteristic substitution of an earlier person for the person of the doctor.
To put it another way: a whole series of early psychic experiences are revitalizednot as past, but as a current relationship with the doctor.
As Celedonio Castanedo (2008) explains, Freud mentioned that transference can involve simple or unmodified reissues of childhood experiences, or complex and sublimated reworkings. While in Studies on Hysteria (1895), the topic of transference had been treated as an obstacle, while Freud expressed its intimate connection with resistance, it is now characterized as the most effective auxiliary means of psychoanalysis. .
The analytical situation acquires its therapeutic possibility through transferences, but above all in those that become understandable and experiential for the patient. Thus, these transfers correspond to the center of the psychoanalytic process, since the analyst will refrain from transmitting prohibitions, advice, opinions, prescriptions and personal opinions. The transference experiences can manifest continuously, but they can also be rejected and repressed by the patient, so the analyst will point them out and interpret them so that their nature can be found and then dissolved by the interpretive work.
Transfer reactions can take the form of positive, negative or ambivalent feelings, thus achieving full development in the transference neurosis. Resistance processes are generated against therapeutic intentions, which can take on variable forms, for example exoactuation (living the transference contents in action instead of interpreting, elaborating and dissolving them).
Transference as a defense mechanism
Freud proposed that every human being has a specific specificity in the exercise of his or her love life. This specificity determined in the way of exercising love life is for Freud the result of a sum: of innate dispositions and experiences in childhood, which result in a specificity that is practiced in love (for example, what are the conditions of that love, what are the goals that are set in that line of love).
This results in a cliché, something that is repeated/reprinted regularly throughout life. This allows us to understand the fundamental problem, that if this particular need or way of living, needing and thinking about love is not satisfied by reality, what the person will do is be forced to dump all those expectations on what they consider to be around them. love – that is, all the clichés of love towards a person who appears – in order to force that new person with whom he maintains a loving bond (partner) to somehow meet the needs of the clichés.
All of this is related to transference because just as this specific way of loving occurs, when it is not satisfied by reality, it forces the person to fill that place with the people you meet. It is normal in a certain way that this unsatisfied libidinal cathexis is directed directly towards the place of the doctor (towards the figure of the doctor) during its analytical treatment. Freud said that it will depend on the real ties with the doctor – whether this sensation is based – for example, on the paternal imago or is based on the maternal imago or on that of the brother. Thus, it will not be the same if the therapist is male or not (the patient says something like “I would like him to be a woman and young” from here the transference fantasies are already present revolving around the analyst’s idea).
Thus, transference, in Sigmund Freud’s system, is a way of loving only that what is repeated is the selection of which are going to be the objects that are going to be taken by that way of loving. For this reason the transfer is interesting to analyze.
- For example, a patient who has been associating well and suddenly stops. For Freud, it is necessary to indicate that he is thinking at that moment about an occurrence related to the therapist (for example “when you stop, it is because you are thinking about something of mine”). In that silence or pause, in the Freudian approach you have to ask – are you thinking about something?
In other psi techniques they do not give weight to the transference as something that can be analyzed (for example, the patient reports that he is falling in love with his therapist) in these psi techniques they interrupt the treatment or end up sleeping with their patients.
For psychoanalysis, when this positive transference in its eroticized branch is installed, it is not recommended that the treatment be interrupted, but rather, it must be directly analyze this transfer as a resistance. If we interrupt the treatment, the resistance wins.
Types of transfer in psychology
We must remember that for Freud any element that stops the normal associative flow of the device is resistance, even if that transfer is in loving terms.
- For example, the patient says: “Oh, how nice the analyst dressed today” or “How pretty the analyst looks today.” And the moment he thinks it and doesn’t say it, that is already resistance for Freud (even if it is love).
Transference is the best way to interrupt a treatment, because you can probably handle it relatively well when a patient attacks you in the sense of a negative transference, but it is much more complicated when a patient uses love as a form of resistance. Freud thus proposes that there are two types of transference that we must know how to differentiate:
- Positive transfer: corresponds to all the tender feelings that the patient may have towards the therapist or analyst. These are divided into two more: erotic feelings and friendly/tender feelings.
- Negative transfer: corresponds to feelings of hostility towards the analyst.
Transfer Examples
Below we will see examples of different types of transfer to see more clearly the concept and how it is applied.
Eroticized positive transfers
In a positive transference with erotic feelings, the scene offered in the following example can be presented:
A patient who came to the office and spoke and associated relatively well, suddenly the treatment stopped caring (suddenly he writes to say that the next session he has to attend a wedding, and the next one says that he has no money and cannot come to avoid saying or analyzing its occurrence). It can also be presented in another way where resistance is very evident in the sense that eroticizing the link eliminates the analytical part (because one is not going to analyze the boyfriend or the wife). The change has to do with eroticizing the bond so that we stop working analytically and instead start doing things as a couple.
And here we can mention examples where analysts end up sleeping or even marrying their patients – thus leading to very serious iatrogenic issues. If they sleep, the resistance of the eroticized positive transference worked.
Positive transfers with friendly feelings
For example, this is when patients realize that the analyst receives them, listens to them, gives them his time to listen to them and considers it as a friendly gift.
Negative transfer
Here the patients, for example, say that the analyst is a fool, that he doesn’t love him and that he doesn’t care. Even sometimes when they change therapists, they begin the new process with the new therapist saying things like “I realized that my previous analyst didn’t know as much, didn’t read as much, didn’t understand as much.” These intellectual attacks can also be resistant elements. The problem with negative transference is that, if not interpreted, they end in treatment interruption.
Here Freud was clear in saying that transference is only resistance when it is negative or when it is eroticized (only in those cases should the transfer be interpreted). Freud takes a term from Bleuler to establish a particular mark in neurotic people: ambivalence. Ambivalence is the coincidence on the one hand of negative transferences together with tender (non-eroticized) positive transferences.
The great Freudian advice is that, if you as analysts see the negative transference, interpret it, and you have to do it quickly and not wait until the next session because perhaps there will not be another session (the next session you were invited to a wedding or birthday and the next time you won’t have any money).
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Castanedo Secadas, C. (2008). Six psychotherapeutic approaches. Modern manual. Mexico.