Transference

Transference is the phenomenon by which a person unconsciously redirects onto someone in the present feelings, attitudes, desires or fantasies that belong to earlier relationships, above all those of childhood. In psychotherapy the term refers in particular to the way a patient transfers onto the therapist his or her bonds with significant figures from the past.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, first described the phenomenon in his early clinical work. At first he took it as a form of patient resistance, since it appeared when a patient refused to take part in free association. He later understood that analysing the transference was in fact the work that needed to be done: what seemed the greatest threat to treatment, whether affectionate or hostile, became its most valuable tool. Since then, psychodynamic psychotherapy has focused largely on recognising the transference relationship and exploring its meaning, using it to reveal unresolved conflicts with childhood figures.

Carl Jung observed that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a range of opposites, and that psychological growth depends on enduring the tension between them without abandoning the process. In the Lacanian account, transference emerges in the full speech of free association and reveals, in the here and now, the inverse of the subject's past. In classical Adlerian psychotherapy, by contrast, positive or negative transference is not used strategically but is pointed out and explained as an obstacle to cooperation and improvement.

A simple example: a person who distrusts someone who resembles a former partner in voice or manner. From a modern social-cognitive perspective, transference is not only a clinical matter. In everyday life, meeting someone who reminds us of another person leads us to infer unconsciously that they share similar traits, and we tend to repeat past relational patterns in the present.

Countertransference, the redirection of the therapist's feelings toward the patient, is equally important, since attending to it helps regulate the emotions of the therapeutic relationship and reveals what the patient may be trying to elicit. How analysts should use their own countertransference remains a matter of debate.