A Systems Therapist Looks at Transference: Widening the Lens

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists who use the transference as a major treatment tool often focus too exclusively on the patient-therapist relationship and do not sufficiently take into account other intimate relationships during the process of therapy. As a consequence they have sometimes missed important elements of the transference neurosis that get split off and are acted out with a “significant other” rather than with the therapist.

Since Freud's discovery (1905) that human beings repeat with the analyst patterns of relationship originating with crucial figures in their childhood, therapists have focused on this phenomenon (the transference) as an essential component of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. Freud did question whether the transference was an artifact of the analytic situation, hence a transference neurosis, or whether this was simply a universal aspect of all human relations. Ferenczi's point of view was that transference was ubiquitous in life and that it made its most explicit appearance in the relationship of the patient to the physician, within or without psychoanalysis. August Aichorn (1963) also believed that all human relationships contained transference elements. He was the first analyst who deliberately used the transference outside the analytic situation. As an educator, Aichorn used the positive transference to help the delinquent adolescents with whom he was working introject a more positive self-object. Because he worked outside the treatment room and needed to intervene with his students in a concrete way, his approach was different from the interpretive approach used by analysts.

If transference is universal, it follows that the more intimate the present relationship the more it would contain fantasies, conflicts, and patterns of attachment typical of the individual's childhood. In all our relationships we can tolerate a range of difference