Transference Or Reality?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Very often, work with transference is spoken of as a kind of distortion of reality that needs to be "worked through," read to eliminate. Or, in more sophisticated vocabulary, hyphenation should be allowed. At the same time, figurative feelings are interpreted as a kind of greetings from the past, which makes it impossible to understand what is happening in the present? And all feelings are divided into objective, those that were justified by reality, and figurative

Transfer is often declared an enemy who makes it impossible to truly meet with another person, does not allow us to see his personality, does not allow speaking with the one who is the truth in front of us, but makes him hostage to the ever-playing organ from the past. As if there are some "real" relationships and "distorted" ones, in which the evil animal "transference" comes to do atrocities. At the same time, the question of how, in principle, it is legitimate to talk about "undistorted" relations, if we are all different, and there is a unique individuality of each person, remains in the shadows.

After all, any feelings that we experience are born of our subjectivity. And the close relationships we enter into always reflect our infantile conflicts in one way or another - and if this reflection were not there, we would not have the urge to enter into a close relationship with this person. Moreover, the more intense our attachment to another, the more we are involved in these relationships, the more they will be colored by our inner world, which means that any strong attachment is a transference relationship.

If this is borne in mind, then it is much more logical to speak of transference as a mold from subjectivity. About the transfer, as about the framework and boundaries of this subjectivity. About transfer, as a way to perceive, structure and organize information in interpersonal relationships.

And, of course, the second person inevitably and invariably responds to this perception, and resonates with it, and one way or another, the transference addressed to us, manifests something in ourselves. And countertransference reactions are also not a distortion of reality, but our response to the way the client perceives and organizes relationships, our way of dealing with his way of structuring.

And yes, there are such malignant ways of structuring information in interpersonal relationships, which time after time inflict traumas that destroy these relationships. Which do not give the other person the opportunity to show their separateness. Which manifest, color, launch into resonance heavy destruction. And yes, in special cases, transfers can also be accompanied by severe distortions of reality, when testing reality as a result of falling into a zone of intense internal conflicts becomes very difficult or completely impossible.

Normally, transference relationships are enriched throughout life, we are constantly learning in new relationships - new relationships. And by the end of life, we already organize and structure the information that we receive in them from another person than, say, in adolescence. At the same time, over and over again and year after year, we lose our early conflicts, our early parent-child relationships, but normally - as if we are going in a spiral, and each time during this loop - we find something new for ourselves, and through appropriation of this new one - we enter a new dimension and acquire a new degree of freedom.

However, sometimes the spiral turns into an endless run in a vicious circle, excluding any opportunity to take something from the outside world for oneself, excluding the possibility of being filled with new experience, and really makes a person a hostage of his childhood past. Actually, any serious personality disorder pulls a person into this running in a circle, when in a new relationship there is no chance for anything other than repeating and playing out old destructive patterns.

And therapy then will not consist in resolving and eliminating the transference as such, but in helping to collect and grow more complex and more adaptive forms of transferences on the basis of what is available. This can be called in different ways, depending on theoretical preferences: and the integration of partial object relations, and the internalization of the analytical object, and the cultivation of a new internal working model, etc. The transformation of the transference structure essentially means the personal transformation that has taken place in therapy.

A meeting with another occurs not when we become a spherical person in a vacuum with "worked out and allowed" transferences, but when our own subjectivity begins to allow this meeting. When, despite our own tensions and conflicts, we retain the ability to see and accept new things. Walk in a spiral, not in a vicious circle.