After settling himself in an easy chair in my office, Dirk told me he was puzzled about something that had just happened. He had asked Nancy (a recently hired senior executive), to come to his office to discuss their future working relationship, nothing more. When he mentioned that she might want to deal more proactively with a number of the company’s clients, she suddenly became angry, started to cry, to ran out of his office. He wondered what he had done to cause such an explosive reaction. Nancy was a very valuable employee with much expert knowledge. It had taken quite some effort to get her on board. But given her strange, inappropriate behavior, Dirk wondered if they could really build a productive working relationship?
He learned from the HR director, who had lunch with Nancy, that she seemed to be utterly confused after the incident. She kept on repeating during the lunch, why had she reacted the way she did? What had happened? Usually, she was in control of her emotions. This time, however, Dirk’s comments about her being able to do better had somehow been a red flag. The way he had talked to her had made something snap inside, and she just could not control herself. Now she was embarrassed about her emotional outbreak—confused about what had made it happen. If only she could understand what had caused this inexplicable reaction.
Optical Illusions
The Ehrenstein illusion
The four lines produce an entirely imaginary circle at their center. When you see the picture, your brain tries to make sense of it by spontaneously creating a figure based on similar round figures you have been exposed to in the past. In short, your brain acts as a sort of pattern matching and pattern generating machine, and when things aren’t already in the expected patterns, it tries to make sense of what it sees by fitting it into familiar shapes. Like a computer program, your previous experiences are used as a shortcut to understanding and interpreting new information. And this makes a lot of sense: if a match can be found between new and old data, then your stored knowledge can be applied to the new situation at much less “cost” (energy) than your brain having to figure it all out once again.
The same kind of sense making process is at play when it comes to your relationships with other people. Drawing on your existing relationship data bank, your brain unconsciously organizes new experiences in such a way that they fit the relationships that you are familiar with. Thus, when you are trying to understand someone you don’t know well, but who reminds you of a previous acquaintance, your brain tricks you into assuming that this person will behave similarly to the familiar other. You feel good about a person who reminds you of a loved one and alarm bells will go off in your brain if a person reminds you of someone in your life who caused you pain. In this way, you often attribute to people characteristics that aren’t really there, automatically and without thinking. We tend to slot people into boxes: good boxes, bad boxes, and boxes that leave us indifferent.
Transferential Processes
Looking at in Nancy’s experience, we might imagine that she had a rather authoritarian father who often criticized her and with whom she had frequent fights. If she has this kind of history, and if Dirk happens to remind Nancy of her father, Nancy’s will respond to Dirk’s perceived criticism with a similar emotional outburst to the one she would have had with her father in the past. The same kind of pattern matching that explains why we are tricked by optical illusions is at play here: we perceive and react to people in the present based on our experiences in the past.
This erroneous interpersonal connection was first described by Sigmund Freud in his famous Dora case study. He called it transference.2 Freud understood that the reason for his unsuccessful therapeutic intervention with Dora lay in his failure to recognize the projection of emotions that pertained to a person from Dora’s past onto Freud himself. Subsequently, but belatedly, he understood that a person’s transferential reactions revealed a lot more about them than a patient could put into words. Freud realized that transference could be used as an important instrument in therapy. Like many other psychodynamically oriented therapists, coaches, or consultants, I view transference issues as central to my work. Transference reactions, like other fundamental human processes, reveal and illuminate motives and thoughts that otherwise would remain hidden, even from the person who is enacting these feelings. But these transferential reactions provide me with a window into what my clients desire and what they want to avoid. They illuminate motives they are often unaware of, or don’t want to see. They reveal their secret prejudices and their unfulfilled wishes. But knowing what I do about transference, I always keep in mind that everything that irritates me about others tells me something about myself. As the novelist Hermann Hesse put it, “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
In essence, transference is a psychological phenomenon characterized by the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. It’s really an interpretation and an illusion, generated inside the brain when it is trying to make sense of the world. It is a universal, interpersonal phenomenon—a special form of displacement—to be viewed as a kind of repetition. This repetition may be an exact duplication of the past, or it could turn into a modified or distorted version. People caught up in transference, however, are not aware what they are doing (although they can be made aware of it).
As transference reactions concern reliving the past, often (as in the case of Nancy) the reaction can become inappropriate, even bizarre, in the context of the present. Of course, the original sources of transference reactions are the important people in our early years. They usually are our parents and other caregivers, siblings, and other close family members, in short, the dispensers of love, comfort, and punishment. Given the important role they play in our inner theater, it will not come as a surprise that transference reactions tend to be directed toward people who perform similar roles to those originally carried out by our parents. Physicians, teachers, performers, celebrities, and in general, authority figures are particularly prone to activate transference responses. In my role as a helping professional, I am highly conscious that I am an easy subject of transference reactions. Coming back to my expression of “using myself as an instrument,” it is one of the most important “tools” in my repertoire. In the various roles I play vis-à-vis clients, my greatest instrument is myself.
It is transference when you fall in love at first sight with a person who reminds you of someone with whom you had once an intense relationship. It is transference when you trust someone immediately, without realizing that this person reminds you of a trusted figure from the past. It is transference if you are enthralled by a politician who resembles an encouraging and supportive grandfather. It is transference when you instantly mistrust someone because that person bears some resemblance to the black sheep of the family in manners, appearance, or demeanor. And you might also have an instant “negative” transference reaction when being introduced to a complete stranger, as this person may remind you of your overbearing mother or a critical father. Thus, in any interpersonal encounter, there are many people present, in reality and in fantasy. There will be the other person, but also looming in the background are memories of significant people from the past, which distorts our perceptions of the other. Actually, from the point of view of perception, in every two-person encounter, there are not two, but six people in the room: what each person is; what each person thinks he or she is; and what each person thinks the other is. This is why interpersonal relations can be so complex.
Transference reactions can be very seductive. In projecting magical qualities on me—being connected to someone bigger and more powerful than they imagine themselves to be—my clients hope they will be transformed. It helps boost their self-esteem and well-being. This is the idealizing transference that I mentioned in Chap. 9. My challenge becomes to bring these people back to reality. If I accept their fantasies, gratifying as they might be to me, my clients will remain diminished. This means I need to pay sharp attention to my own countertransference reactions. I need to hold what my clients transfer toward me, make sense of it, and not be seduced by it. I need to keep my head, in spite of some very powerful projections.
Recognizing Transference
All of us should be able to recognize transference reactions due to their inappropriateness (they don’t fit the current situation), intensity (they are characterized by intense emotional reactions), ambivalence (simultaneous opposing feelings), capriciousness (a inconstant, erratic, whimsical aspect), and tenacity (a rigid holding on to them). The most outstanding characteristic, however, is the complete inappropriateness of the reaction.
Transference reactions happen all the time and in moderation are not worrisome. They can create problems, however, when our reactions become excessive, and when they prevent us from building an appropriate relationship with someone who can have a strong influence on our lives, whether privately or at work. And when we are prone to repetitive, excessive transference reactions, they are a sign that we are troubled by deeper issues or unfinished business from the past.
While your unconscious transference reactions can easily lead you astray, creating awareness of them can make you more appreciative of your hidden motivations and help you to avoid or repeat mistakes and so be more in control of your life. Without this awareness, unchecked transference reactions can easily wreak havoc on important professional relationships. In Nancy’s case, Dirk’s response was colored by her strong and inappropriate reaction, making it hard for both of them to build a healthy working relationship based on their real-time interactions and personalities.
Creating Awareness
Reflect on patterns of behavior that have gotten you into trouble, and where you feel your judgment has been repeatedly poor. To help you with this self-analysis, ask yourself the following questions: What kinds of people make me feel mad, sad, bad, or glad? What do I like or dislike about these people? Who in your past do these people remind you of? In what way are they similar/different?
Find a psychologically astute executive coach or therapist who can help you recognize your transference reactions. I am always aware that clients will bring the template for how they deal with relationships into the consulting space and transfer them to me. If I handle these reactions correctly, my transference interpretations allow my clients to re-experience childhood conflicts in the safety of the space in which we are working. Working with emerging relationship patterns will point out that clients might be angry at me because I remind them of their dominating father, or that I’m being idealized because I remind my client of a much-loved grandmother. With the help of these kinds of interpretations, these past conflicts can be worked through to a satisfactory conclusion.
To cut a long story short, recognizing transferential reactions helps me (and everyone dealing with the complexities of interpersonal relationship) to be more effective. Taking the client’s perspective, it’s also quite helpful for them to separate the past from the present so that the ghosts and imprints of the past no longer interfere with their life in the present. By becoming aware of the reasons why repetitive and inappropriate behavior occurs, they may be encouraged to find new ways to deal with old dangers—a belated mastery of old anxieties. In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”