Reflection

What is Transference in Psychology?

Transference is the unconscious redirection of feelings, expectations and relational patterns from earlier relationships, most often with parents or other significant figures, onto someone in the present. In therapy, that someone is the therapist. Outside it, it is a partner, a manager, a colleague, or anyone who occupies a position of authority or intimacy.

It is not a mistake or a symptom. It is one of the most reliable things the mind does, and in the consulting room it is the most useful.

What it looks like from the therapist’s chair

As a clinician you know it when it happens.

You are sitting in front of the patient and suddenly you have the impression that somebody has come into the room and taken your place. The patient is speaking to someone else. Treating you as someone else. Experiencing someone else. It is not you they are talking to.

That is the moment. Nothing has changed in the room. Everything has changed in the relationship.

What is an example of transference?

Take someone who has been abused, in one way or another.

At some point they will transfer the abuse onto you. What happens then is that they express to you what they never had the chance to express to the abuser, and feel what they never had time to feel.

This is not a malfunction of the therapy. It is the therapy arriving at the thing it was for. But what happens next depends entirely on who is sitting opposite them.

A less experienced therapist gets caught in it. Placed in the shoes of the abuser, they behave like the abuser. It rarely looks like cruelty. It looks like an ungenerous interpretation, an unkind observation, a correction delivered a fraction too sharply. The countertransference has taken over, and the patient is being treated once again the way they were treated before.

A more careful therapist hands it back. They say: you are transferring this onto me, it was not me who abused you, it was your abuser. Every word of that is true. It is also the end of the work. The patient is returned to their own history, correctly labelled and safely filed, and the thing that was about to be said is not said.

A therapist who can hold it keeps the suit on. They stay in the shoes of the abuser, deliberately, and ask: how is it for you to be abused by me, right now?

That question is the work. It lets the patient say the thing they never got to say, to a figure standing in for the person who should have heard it, in a room where it is finally safe to say it. The therapist holds the role rather than stepping out of it, because stepping out protects the therapist and abandons the patient.

This needs saying plainly. Holding a transference is a deliberate, contained clinical technique, carried out by someone trained and in supervision, and it ends when the work is done. It is not a licence for a therapist to be unkind. If you are being treated badly in a consulting room and it does not feel like it is going anywhere, that is worth raising, or worth leaving over. The distinction between the first therapist and the third is not a fine one.

What are the signs of transference?

For the person in the chair rather than the therapist, the usual signs are these. A reaction that is larger than the situation deserves. A feeling about someone you barely know that arrives fully formed. Finding yourself unusually eager to please a particular person, or unusually ready to be disappointed by them. Noticing that a manager, a doctor or a partner produces in you something you recognise from much longer ago.

Most people do not notice it at the time. That is what unconscious means.

How a therapist notices it, and what happens when they do not

Experience helps, because we are trained to watch ourselves in the room as well as the patient. But I want to be honest about this: even an experienced therapist misses it. Sometimes you only see what happened afterwards, in supervision.

What matters is what you do in the moment you realise.

It is like a tennis match. You miss a ball. If you stop to think about why you missed it, you miss the next one too. A good player lets it go and plays the next ball. For a therapist, the next ball is the next opportunity to be in emotional contact with the patient, and that opportunity is only seconds away.

Then, at the end of the match, the player watches the video. The therapist takes the session to supervision, or to their own analysis, and that is where the missed ball is understood. Not during the point. Afterwards, so that the next session is better, with that patient or with another one.

This is also why a therapist who is not in supervision is working without the video. They may be perfectly competent in the room. They simply have no way of seeing what they did not see.

What triggers transference?

Anything that resembles the original relationship closely enough. Authority is the most common trigger, which is why it appears so readily with doctors, managers, teachers and therapists. So is dependency, which is why it appears in intimate relationships. So is the particular combination of attention and asymmetry that a consulting room creates: someone listening closely to you, week after week, who does not tell you about themselves.

What are the three types of transference?

The usual divisions are three.

Positive transference, where the therapist is experienced as the good parent, the ally, the one who finally understands. It is comfortable, and it is not harmless: it can make a patient agreeable rather than honest.

Negative transference, where the therapist becomes the withholding, critical or dangerous figure. Uncomfortable, and usually where the useful work is.

Erotic transference, where the feelings arriving are romantic or sexual. It is more common than people expect, it is not shameful, and it is not about the therapist as a person.

The divisions are convenient rather than exact. In practice they move, and often all three appear in the same treatment.

Countertransference

Countertransference is what the therapist feels in response. Boredom, irritation, protectiveness, attraction, a wish to rescue, a wish for the hour to end.

It is not a failure of professionalism. It is information, and often the earliest information available about what the patient does to people. The failure is not having it. The failure is not noticing it, and letting it drive the room.

That is what supervision is for, and it is why a therapist who tells you they never experience countertransference is either not paying attention or not telling you the truth.

There is more on this in the article on countertransference, including how a therapist tells their own feeling from the patient’s.

Where the concept comes from

Freud noticed it first, as an obstacle. Patients kept treating him as somebody else, and he initially regarded this as interference with the real work. It took him some years to conclude that it was the real work.

Jung took it further. In analytical psychology the therapeutic relationship is not the setting in which the treatment happens; it is the treatment. Transference and countertransference together create a field between two people in which material can arise that belongs to neither of them alone, and to both.

Why it matters outside the consulting room

Most transference does not happen in therapy. It happens with the manager who produces in you a feeling of being twelve years old. With the friend you are inexplicably careful around. With the partner you find yourself arguing with in a voice that is not quite yours.

Recognising it does not dissolve it. But it introduces a gap between the feeling and the response, and in that gap there is a choice that was not there before.

If you are in distress, Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 999 or go to A&E.

This page is for information and does not replace assessment or treatment.

Transference is worked with directly rather than avoided: Jungian analysis and psychotherapy.