Firstly today let’s discuss transference in counselling, and then we can explore it’s origins.
Have you ever met someone for the first time and they immediately appear to dislike you? Alternatively have you ever met someone who you immediately have a connection with? I think the majority of us have experienced both scenarios in life.
In both situations that could be transference, in layman’s terms it means you subconsciously remind someone of a person from their past, and they proceed to treat you in a way that they felt about the other person. It has nothing to do with you at all.
Sometimes it’s a conscious response but mostly it’s unconscious.
As a counsellor being aware of transference is vital in navigating difficulties that may come up within the therapeutic relationship, it also offers us opportunities and insights into a clients unconscious.
So when was this first discovered?
Transference in counselling or psychotherapy, was first observed by Freud at the start of his long career.
He witnessed an event that happened to one of his friends Josef Breuer, as he was treating an attractive young lady for hysteria.
Breuer saw his client Bertha twice a day and mostly in her bedroom, and he talked about her incessantly.
Freud could see clearly that his friend was fascinated with her, and it then became obvious to Freud that the fascination went both ways.
What happened next was even more curious. One night Bertha summoned Breuer to her home and announced she was pregnant with his child.
The curious part is Bertha was a virgin and they had never been intimate. So it wasn’t actually true and Bertha was being hysterical.
After witnessing this strange phenomenon of Transference, Freud started to see that the therapeutic relationship went much deeper than that of the doctor and patient relationship.
It’s fair to say that he spent the rest of his life struggling to understand the nature of the patient-therapist relationship and Transference, and to increase his knowledge he constantly looked at his own and his colleagues patients. From this he made two important discoveries.
The Theory of Templates
In our childhood experiences, we establish templates for all of our future relationships, and we tend to fit most of our fundamental relationships into them.
Lets say you had a wonderful relationship with your father then it is likely that you will view male relationships in a positive light.
You will have an optimistic idea of them and expect good things from them, and you behave in ways that actually ensures this outcome.
If on the other hand your father was critical with you, you may tend to see men as cold and critical and that will determine the way you interact with men throughout your life.
You would most likley hold back sensitive information as there would be a subconscious fear of being criticised for your decisions and choices.
If we go back to Bertha for a second, and explore how this theory of templates could fit with her story with what happened with Breuer.
A theory is when she was a child she may have experienced sexual feeling towards her father.
She may then tend to relate similarly to any man she meets who she has sexual feelings for, and as the desire has been repressed as it was seen as incestuous, she would see it as forbidden.
It is easy to imagine how her unconscious ambivalence would cause her serious issues in her life.
To be honest the tendency for us all to try and fit all contemporary relationships into a template causes us all huge issues in life.
Using this theory I took at look at some of my own templates, I encourage you to see if you can do the same as awareness is one step closer to the freedom from them.
Repetition Compulsion
The second discovery of Freuds that can help you as a therapist is one he called the repetition compulsion. It seems we all have a need to create repeated replays of situations from our past that caused us pain, this was one of Freuds amazing discoveries.
I have met people in my life who seem to relish in reliving the same painful experiences, myself included in that. When you see it in someone else its very confusing to witness, and when you see yourself doing this its completely jarring.
Why do we go to so much trouble to find situations that are going to cause us pain and frustration?
Well it could be that we are trying to create a happy ending in an old painful situation, but then again not, as sadly if a situation works positively you’re more likely too leave it and go back to start again, as you’re actually looking for the painful recreation.
Freud said actually what is happening is the original painful situation is so fixating for us that we are trying to make sense of what actually happened by re-creating it (subconsciously we are trying to work out what happened, and why).
Lets return to Bertha for a second, it’s no surprise that her father had acted seductively towards her, so in Breuer she had found a man who was willing to play the role of the forbidden seducer.
As we have said the person playing in repetition compulsion isn’t looking for a happy ending as that is too far removed from the original situation.
If Bertha had found a older man who she desired who adored her and loved her, and who her family approved off, she would very quickly find a reason to loose interest, as she was actually searching for a desirable but forbidden man.
As repetition compulsion operates everywhere in your clients life’s, it presents you as a therapist many wonderful opportunities to see important parts of your clients lives, at close range.
Transference
So now if you apply this theory in your client work, Freud believed that when your clients come into the therapy room, they will see and respond to you in ways to provoke replays of painful and frustrating past relationships.
When explaining those perceptions, responses and provocations Freud called this transference.