If transference isn't identified for what it is or handled well, it can overpower the therapeutic process. It can poison your relationship with your therapist and make it impossible to move forward in therapy. But if you work through it, transference can take your therapy to the next level.
With negative transference, the person receiving therapy transfers negative qualities onto the therapist. For example, they may see the therapist as hostile. They may also transfer painful feelings from the past onto their therapist. Many forms of transference can occur outside of a therapy setting.
Signs of Transference in Therapy
Strong emotional reactions: An individual blows up at another for seemingly no reason, implying that they have buried feelings toward another person. Misplaced feelings: One person tells the other what they want to tell someone from their past, such as “stop trying to control me!”
It will also give you the opportunity to explore, release, and heal some of your oldest and most painful feelings. In fact, many therapists believe that transference plays an essential role in bringing these old feelings back to the surface. And working with these feelings is at the heart of the therapeutic process.
All well trained therapists are aware of transference and countertransference and should be comfortable bringing the dynamics up, when they sense that there is some form of transference happening.
Transference usually happens because of behavioral patterns created within a childhood relationship. Seeing the therapist as a father figure who is powerful, wise, authoritative, and protecting. This may evoke feelings of admiration or agitation, depending on the relationship the client had with their father.
The transference in traumatised clients does not reflect a simple dyadic relationship but rather a triad. The therapist when working with the client will often feel the presence of the shadow victimiser, who has invaded all aspects of the clients' psyche, which in turn affects all their relationships with others.
Somatic transference is defined as the unconscious transfer of emotions, memories, and physical sensations from one person to another. It can be seen as a form of communication between two people where one person's inner experience is mirrored or reflected in the other person's body or behavior.
3. Reactive transference (or countertransference)—what the client reacts to because of what the therapist brings in the relationship.
A fallacy of illicit transference is an informal fallacy occurring when an argument assumes there is no difference between a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense.
Negative transference is when a client transfers negative feelings about someone (e.g., anger, jealousy, fear, resentment) onto their therapist. For example, someone raised by a hostile, angry father may experience their male therapist in a similar way.
Does transference happen outside of therapy? Created with Sketch. Psychologists argue that transference occurs in everyday life, even if it's more closely examined in certain forms of therapy. For example, a woman could feel overly protective of a younger friend who reminds her of her baby sister.
When a client falls in love with a therapist it is likely to be 'transference': the predisposition we all have to transfer onto people in the present experiences and related emotions and unmet longings associated with people from our past.
Transference occurs when a person being helped projects (in this case, a directee) puts upon the helper certain thoughts, feelings, or wishes that originate from a prior experience, usually from childhood.
Sigmund Freud held that transference plays a large role in male homosexuality. In The Ego and the Id, he claimed that eroticism between males can be an outcome of a "[psychically] non-economic" hostility, which is unconsciously subverted into love and sexual attraction.
Taylor draws a contrast between embodied and disembodied ways of transmitting knowledge. Thus, performances become embodied “acts of transfer.” These are stories, songs, dances, habits, customs, and other bits that communicate and preserve ways of being.
According to Rogers (1977), three characteristics, or attributes, of thetherapist form the core part of the therapeutic relationship - congruence,unconditional positive regard (UPR) and accurate empathic understanding.
in self psychology, any one of a set of transferences that involve, and are used in treatment to activate, the narcissistic needs of the patient in relation to significant others; this contrasts with the classical psychoanalytic concept of transference as a transposition of one's needs (from various stages of ...
For example, transfer of feelings towards one's parents onto one's partner or children, or repeating patterns of feelings and behavior with somebody new. This transfer is due to the unconscious inferences drawn from previous experiences with similar individuals.
Infectious diseases commonly spread through the direct transfer of bacteria, viruses or other germs from one person to another. This can happen when an individual with the bacterium or virus touches, kisses, or coughs or sneezes on someone who isn't infected.
Transference neurosis is a phenomenon of the analytic process in certain patients with adequately integrated egos and superegos in which the analysand's perception of the analyst becomes more and more recognizably entwined with core, organizing unconscious fantasy/memory complexes from childhood.
Somatic Experiencing is a body-centered approach to treating PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that, rather than focusing only on thoughts or emotions associated with a traumatic event, expands to include the natural bodily (somatic) responses. It was first conceptualized by trauma therapist Dr.