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 or transference complex.
The difference between a 'transference neurosis' and a 'traumacy neurosis' from a DGB perspective is the difference between obsessively wanting to symbolically return to the 'scene of the childhood traumacy/rejection' -- and not.
In a traumacy neurosis, there is usually simply 'avoidance behavior' -- a fear of repeating some traumatic scene all over again, and thus, taking precautionary steps aimed at preventing this type of traumacy from happening again. There is no element of 'attraction', 'excitement' 'romantic infatuation' and/or 'sexuality'.
However, in a transference neurosis -- at least the type of transference encounter and/or relationship that we are talking about here -- we have the paradoxical addition of 'attraction', 'excitement', and 'self-esteem celebration' as well as underlying opposing feelings of fear or anxiety, grief -- and resentment, anger, hate, even to the point of unleashed narcissistic-transference rage (overt or covert) over issues such as perceived abandonment, betrayal, etc.
So a transference love 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 also often mixed up in the middle of this smorgasboard of emotions and sensations.
Underlying this paradoxical mixture of emotions, there is usually but not always the subconscious wish to 'undo or repair a childhood rejection' by 'wishing to play out the childhood scene differently in adulthood' -- with a more satisfying 'self-esteem result. But this does not always work; indeed, oftentimes it backfires, as once again, our 'transference protagonist' gets the best of us, and/or alternatively, sometimes also, we can 'lose interest' in our transference protagonist if he or she becomes 'too accepting' of us -- which 'diminishes the original transference excitement around the similarity to the childhood rejector' and then we start subconsciously looking for a newer and more 'challenging' transference figure/protagonist to start the process all over again.
Alternatively again, sometimes we might spend five or ten years 'playing out a particular type of transference drama with a particular type of transference figure/protagonist' until we get to a point where we reject this person, reject this style of relationship -- the person and the process -- and then go bouncing like a pinball machine into the opposite type of transference relationship with an opposite type of 'transference-lover'.
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 hole in our heart and/or stomach' or wherever we choose to 'lock up' our 'transferred dialectic grief, anxiety, guilt, anger, rage'...
-- dgbn, Feb. 1st, 2009, updated and modified Feb. 13th, 2009.
-- david gordon bain
