Transference: One Concept or Many?

Transference is one of the keystone concepts of psychoanalytic theory, with roots going back to Freud's and Breuer's early work on hysteria. Yet it remains a confused, problematic, and controversial concept (cf. Friedman, 1969; Lowenstein, 1969; Sandler et al, 1969; Adler, 1980; Gill, 1982). Transference, as the term has usually been used, is not a simple, unitary concept; efforts to use it as if it were lead to a series of paradoxes. It is also blurred somewhat by its close but poorly defined relationship to other key psychoanalytic constructs such as defense, resistance, distortion, acting out, and character. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to theoretical clarification, however, is the proliferation of conceptualizations of transference that has characterized recent psychoanalytic debate. Where once there was a single transference (however problematic the concept), now there are many phenomena that have been described as varieties of transference, including selfobject transferences, idealizing transferences, archaic bonds, borderline transferences, prestages of transference, and holding environment.

To talk about transference, we must be specific. The first step in developing a coherent theory of transference is to clarify the multiple usages of the term and to investigate their relations to one another. In this paper, I shall survey the major conceptions of “transference” in current usage and seek to distinguish them in terms of: (1) what it is that gets “transferred”; (2) when that “whatever-it-is” arises in the course of a person's development; and (3) the mechanism by which early experience gets transferred to a later interpersonal interaction. These distinctions will highlight the need to identify more sharply the group of “transference-like” clinical phenomena, phenomena that are easily mistaken for transference but that differ in significant ways from all of the other behaviors that are called transference.