You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The precision and flexibility of human social coordination depends upon [the] ability to perceive and act upon one another's minds. If we wish to understand social action, we must try to elucidate the complex and sometimes paradoxical mental states that can result when two minds simultaneously seek to form representations of one another.
Cognitive scientists have a history of productively using errors people make when solving problems, recognizing objects, remembering events, and generalizing from experience to gain access to the mind's internal representations and procedures. As Hofstadter and Moser (1989) put it in the title of a paper on speech errors and spreading activation models, “To err is human; to study error-making is cognitive science.” Much of the psychoanalytic enterprise was also built upon the study of errors.
Parapraxes, bungled actions perpetrated by one mind, provided important keys to Freud's understanding of the psychology of mental life. Another sort of error intrigued Freud: errors made by his patients (and, as he would eventually recognize to some degree, by himself) in the representation of other persons, situations, and events. As a clinician, he noted that old situations were transferred to current ones, affecting perception and judgment, and determining the course of subsequent behavior. This cognitive phenomenon he called “transference,” and Freud made its analysis the central concern of psychoanalytic technique (Freud, 1912/1985, 1917/1986).
Transferences, like parapraxes, are a central part of the psychopathology of everyday life. They are emotion-based generalizations about the minds of others in real or imagined relation to our goal-directed selves. Unlike slips, however, which only require one mind in dynamic interaction with parts of its self, transference is demonstrated in interpersonal