Transference involves a symbolic re-creation or reincarnation of an old, emotional dialectic. It can be good and/or bad depending on which way it turns. It can be used creatively and/or destructively. In the sphere of love and sex, it is very obsessive-compulsive, very addictive -- the essence of erotic psychology and biochemistry all rolled into one -- and thus, very hard to avoid. Some transferences are much more dangerous than others -- transferences connected to alcoholic, drug-using, and/or abusive fathers and/or moms, transferences connected to abandoning fathers and/or mothers, transferences connected to violent fathers and/or mothers. Every child eventually has to run into the phenomenon of 'rejection' in some form or another at an early age, some worse than others, some construed worse than others, and these early rejections often 'trigger' the onset of life-lasting transference neurosis.
The difference between a 'traumacy neurosis' and a 'transference neurosis' from a DGB perspective is the difference between symbolically returning to the 'scene of the childhood traumacy/rejection' -- and not. In a traumacy neurosis, there is usually simply 'avoidance behavior' -- a fear of repeating the same traumatic problem all over again, and taking precautionary steps aimed at preventing this from happening. There is no element of 'attraction', 'excitement' 'romantic infatuation' or 'sexuality'.
However, in a transference neurosis, we have the paradoxical addition of 'attraction' and 'excitement' as well as fear, anxiety, and usually underlying anger or even rage. So a transference neurosis or complex -- and the type of relationship that it feeds off of -- entails a huge, and very intense, bag of emotions that swing back and forth in bi-polar fashion from anxiety to excitement and back to anxiety, and from love to hate and back to love again, with 'romantic infatuation' and strong sexual feelings all mixed up in the middle of this smorgasboard of emotions. In a transference complex or neurosis, there is usually but not always the subconscious wish to 'undo a childhood rejection' by 'playing out the childhood scene differently in adulthood' -- with a better 'self-esteem satisfying' result.
When transference is involved in self-growth, it involves a 'healing' and 'patching' of the self-esteem -- it involves an evolutionary progression from environmental support to self-support (in Gestalt terminology). It involves a 'creative dialectic negotiation and integration' in the personality that is usually highly connected to the creative dialectic negotiation and integration that is happening in the transference relationship at the same time. This adult transference relationship is both similar and/or different than the old transference relationship(s). It is like the Myth of The Phoenix where out of the old, we rise and fly into the new...and are reborn in the process...From a 'caterpillar', we become a 'butterfly'.
When transference is self-destructive and pathological, it involves not only a re-creation of the past, but also a repetition of the past. It involves a regression into 'earlier states of being' that are not self-supportive. Rather than healing and/or patching the 'gap' or 'void' in self-esteem, instead through a recurrence or repetition of adult events similar to childhood events, that gap or void is reinforced and widened until once again it becomes a 'chasm' or an 'abyss' or an 'absess' in the the self-esteem and personality. Transference repeated in this most negative sense involves the re-creation of a 'huge gaping pit in the stomach' or wherever one chooses to 'lock up' one's 'transferred dialectic rage, anxiety, and/or grief'.
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009.
-- david gordon bain
