If you integrate elements of Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, and Bernean Theory, a whole host of new concepts and ideas become available to us such as: 'transference complexes', 'transference scripts', and 'transference games', 'transference-projection', 'transference-identification', 'transference-introjection', 'transference compensation', 'the re-creation compulsion', 'the mastery compulsion', and the 'repetition compulsion'.
Perhaps most important in this whole 'egotistical-existential playoff' is the 'narcissistic payoff' of what might be called a 'transference-reversal-of-fortune' which involves the 'subconscious transference game' of turning of a 'childhood one down rejection situation'(either an encounter and/or a more sustained relationship) into an 'adult one up acceptance and/or rejecting situation' (meaning again, either an encounter and/or a more sustained relationship). This has been called elsewhere by the author of 'Kant's Dove' (also acknowledging an Adlerian influence) as 'The Handicap Challenge'.
This whole DGB theoretical explanation of transference integrates fairly well both with: 1. Ronald Fairbairn's dual concepts of: a) 'the rejecting object'; and b) 'the exciting object' which in my way of looking at things are essentially one and the same concept; and 2. Ferenczi's/Anna Freud's concept of 'identification with the aggressor' which in DGBN Tranference Terminololgy becomes 'identification with the rejector' (abandoner, betrayer, victimizer, distancer, seducer...etc.)
Let us back up a bit and start with 'transference-projection' -- a 'conflation' of two concepts that are usually kept apart in traditional Psychoanalysis.
Transference-Projection: A form of interpretive perception that may be distorted but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes transference-projection as interpretive-perception may show an extra amount of interpretive intuition and/or awareness. These are cases where the pot can see that the kettle is also black, or worded otherwise, we can see that someone outside of ourselves shares some portion of our inner 'transference complex and chemistry'.
It usually (but not always) takes two to tango (although this can vary depending on a person's particular transference script/complex/game).
Everything starts generally with either some kind of childhood event that stimulates a 'childhood narcissistic fixation' and/or a childhood 'narcissistic injury' which is usually the quickest way to becoming a childhood narcissistic fixation.
Childhood narcissistic (self esteem) injuries become narcissistic (self-esteem) fixations although not every narcissistic fixation necessarily revolves around a narcissistic injury -- for example, a narcissistic fixation can revolve around a childhood accomplishment and/or seeing, hearing, tasting, doing something that we find personally intriguing -- enough so, that the narcissistic fixation -- whatever it is -- becomes a lifelong obsession/compulsion/addiction.
Narcissistic fixations -- whether in the form of self-esteem injuries or the opposite -- areas of prideful self-confidence and/or areas of 'particularly focused attention and interest' -- become fixated in the mind in the form of memories, usually consciously remembered memories as far as this theorist here is concerned (with a background in Adlerian training) which in Adlerian Theory would probably be called 'lifestyle memories' but since we are working here in a 'conflict in the personality' paradigm as opposed to a 'unity in the personality' paradigm, we will call them here 'transference memories'. Classic Psychoanalysis would be more prone to either dismiss these types of memories as 'conscious memories with no diagnostic theoretical and/or therapeutic value' or alternatively as 'screen memories' with 'allusions to some other, deeper, more important and repressed, unconscious memory.
But here we give them full 'theoretical and therapeutic value' even if they are 'only' conscious early memories. To paraphrase Adler, they are clinically important precisely because in a sea of other possible conscious early memories, these and only these were remembered. They were remembered for a reason -- and that reason is what gives them full clinical, diagnostic, theoretical, and therapeutic value.
These conscious early transference memories we carry around with us subconsciously as adults -- almost like the 'script of a movie' -- and subjectively perceived as needing to be 'acted out again' (our 're-creation/repetition compulsion') for 'egotistical purposes' -- where we also need one or more actors to play in this script with us.
This whole script may become highly eroticized as a 'transference game', thus becoming a 'sexual transference game'. A 'neurotic' element of our distant past becomes both a neurotic and an erotic sexual transference game in our adult present. Furthermore, this game becomes 'serialized' as we come back to it again and again and again in similar and different encounters, in similar and different relationships.
This is how 'sex' and 'ego' often get 'married together' in our same movie-memory-fantasy script, the same transference script. There is definitely an Adlerian spin to this movie script. 'Inferiority feelings' or 'low self-esteem' (from an egotistically traumatic memory) stimulate 'an upward movement' which Adler called 'superiority striving' with a strong drive towards what might also be called a 'mastery compulsion'. (Here I am mixing Freudian and Adlerian language.)
Or if the 'egotistic success and mastery feeling ' is existent in the original childhood memory, we may just want to keep repeating this feeling of success, superiority, and mastery over and over again. Call this a 'mastery fixation' -- or a return to doing over and over again in different renditions/editions as an adult what we once also did extremely well as a child.
To give you an example from my own life (you can perhaps fill in an example from your own life), I am told by my dad that when I was a small child of 5 or 6, I stood up in front of a Church congregation and when someone -- probably my dad -- pointed to country after country on a globe, I named them all and got them all right -- a feat I could not come close to doing today without some significant practice. However, I have taken the same skill -- knowing the geographical names and relationships between different places -- and turned it into a decent middle class career of scheduling and dispatching taxis and wheelchair vehicles throughout the Greater Toronto Area. One could further argue that what I am doing here -- 'mapping out the different areas of the mind with all of their different inter-relationships with each other' is only a further extrapolation of what I was doing when I was 5 or 6 years old.
Let the drama -- the same essential drama and/or soap opera that we bring with us from our childhood into our adulthood --
replay itself again -- and again, and again, and again.
Only this time -- at least in those cases involving 'negative' (confidence shattering as opposed to confidence-enhancing childhood memories -- generally we are looking for a much better ending, a more 'ego-satisfying' ending to our usually much less satisfying neurotic childhood memory-movie.
The question then might be asked: 'Why is love, lust, passion, and sex often so 'neurotic'? Or alternatively -- why is the neurotically compulsive often so erotically compulsive as well?
For one simple reason. We are trying to 'undo' and/or 're-do' our childhood neurotic transference scripts and resulting 'low self-esteem complex' based on the ego-traumatizing memory(or memories) that led to these partly deterministic, partly existential scripts -- and turn them into something much more ego-satisfying, a 'transference will to power and/or self-empowerment' if you wish.
Sometimes we end up with a more 'satisfying adult movie' -- or worded otherwise -- a more satisfying ending to our unsatisfying and therefore 'perpetually unfinished and unsatisfied' childhood script movie.
Often we don't.
As stated earlier, it often depends if we are starting from a position of a low or high childhood self-esteem movie -- which creates a type of 'transference self-fulfilling prophecy' for us as adults.
In low self-esteem memory movies, our 'transference game' is to move from a position of low self-esteem to a position of much higher self-esteem as we hopefully begin to 'master the movie-fantasy-memory-fixation' -- with 'constant repetition' (which still can bring the same bad ending).
Worst case scenario: The 'transference-villain or culprit' who 'traumatized our ego' in childhood comes back to life again in another associated
'projective-form', and traumatizes us all over again in adulthood too!' We metaphorically return to the scene of our own childhood self-esteem victimization.
Our transference self-fulfilling prophecy at its worst often results in a complete crash into emotional/egotistic despair. A nightmarish return to the scene of our childhood crime and to a replaying of an egotistical and emotional disaster scene!
If you want to play with 'transference-fire', then you risk the very real possibility of getting severely burnt again -- particularly if you take on a very strong projective rendition of your childhood transference rejector (and exciter at the same time). See the Object Relations work of Ronald Fairbairn.
This is how the neurotic becomes the erotic -- like silly fools we often take on formidable adult lover-renditions of our childhood rejector only to end up right back at square one again. Looking up from the mat at this newest edition of our oldest significant rejector, still we often get up off the mat and want more. We both 'idolize' and 'idealize' our projected transference rejector, sometimes even more so, the more they reject us! As long as they at least seem to 'love' us a little too!
Such folly in the minds of men and women!! Transference rejection becomes our biggest sexual aphrodisiac! As long as we eventually think that we can win him or her over. And/or eventually come out on top. Reject our rejector.
Our transference scripts and games can have a number of different endings -- including our doing a 'complete role reversal' and rejecting our 'clone imagined transference rejector-exciter before he or she can potentially reject us'!!! Transference neuroses usually come with a certain amount of paranoia which paradoxically adds some of the relationship excitement we are often looking for.
This is what Freud called the 'repetition compulsion' which he connected with the 'death instinct' or sometimes worded differently as a 'death wish'.
When things go wrong -- so very wrong -- in the deepest, darkest throes of of 'the return of our worst childhood ego nightmare', the return of the suppressed or the repressed, the return of our deepest, darkest childhood transference neurosis, it may feel indeed, very much like we are in an 'egotistic-existential death spiral'.
This may result in a spiral into self-destruction.
And/or a trip to the psychotherapist.
Or our best friend.
Or our family.
Or jail.
Or the hospital.
Or the morgue.
One never really knows which way our transference neurosis is going to take us -- to the gates of heaven, or the gates of hell -- and beyond. Or both.
Indeed, usually it is both.
That is what a 'transference-complex-script-and-game' is.
Sometimes -- oftentimes -- it is simply better to get off the merry-go-round, off the transference-ride before we do ourselves in -- again.
The biggest problem is that it is highly addictive, highly obsessive-compulsive -- and worst of all perhaps, highly emotionally, romantically, and sexually exciting.
Who wants to get off that type of ride?
This is equally true for the 'normal neurotics' amongst us and for the more 'extreme neurotics' that may or may not make the newspapers for greater or lesser reasons, from different types of manipulations and 'control fetishes', sado-masochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, to all of the different 'serial crimes': serial fraud, serial assaults, serial arson, serial rape, serial killings...
These are all generally fantasy and/or behavioral demonstrations of extremely serious and pathological underlying transference complexes.
However, on the other side of things, so too are all 'creative projections' of the most individually and culturally brilliant types. The longer and more persistently a person is working on a creative project, the more likely there is to be the underlying 'drive' of a transference complex at work.
Freud called these types of creative and/or work transferences -- 'sublimation' -- which may or may not contain underlying subconscious sexual components.
Freud, Adler, Jung, Fairbairn, Kohut, Berne, Perls -- they all captured essential elements of the underlying dynamics of the transference, even as they sometimes gave them other names such as 'lifestyle', 'projection', 'complexes', 'scripts', 'games'...
The creatively brilliant and/or the devastatingly destructive elements of transference complexes at work cannot be understated by anyone who has seriously studied this phenomenon.
Quite simply put, transference by whatever name we choose to use to study and describe this phenomenon -- for example, 'transference' (Freud), 'lifestyle' (Adler), 'complex' (Jung), 'script' (Berne), 'projection' (Gestalt Therapy) -- is the most important motivational force -- or network of forces -- in the study and the understanding of human behavior.
Here is a quote from the highly esteemed psychoanalyst, Brian Bird from his classic 1972 essay on transference -- Notes on Transference: Universal Phenomenon and Hardest Part of Analysis:
'Transference, in my view, is a very special mental quality that has never been satisfactorily explained. I am not satisfied, for instance, either with what has been written about it or with its use in analysis. To me, our knowledge seems slight, and our use limited. This view, admittedly extreme, is possible only because transference is such a very remarkable phenomenon, with a great and largely undeveloped potential. I am particularly taken with the as yet unexplored idea that transference is a universal mental function which may well be the basis of all human relationships. I even suspect it of being one of the mind's main agencies for giving birth to new ideas, and new life to old ones. In these several respects, transference would seem to me to assume characteristics of a major ego function.'
Quoted from the book, 'Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique, Robert Langs, Editor, 1981, 1990.
I would like to think that my work from the 'shadows of academia' through the 1980s, the 1990s, and now the 2000s, will add some new light to the phenomenon of transference with an 'integrative, cross-school' approach.
One can see just from my short essay above, that I have both re-emphasized Bird's comments and taken them a few steps further with:
1. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between creativity, transference and sublimation;
2. My statement regarding the inter-relationship between projection and transference;
3. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'identification with the aggressor', identification with the rejector', 'identification with the abandoner', 'identification with the victimizer', 'identification with the violent and the violator' -- and transference.
This, in my own terminology, I started calling 'transference-reversal' in my unpublished writing in the 1980s;
4. My statement -- only lightly hinted at here -- regarding the inter-relationship between 'ego-splitting', 'ego-states', and transference. That goes back to my studies in Object Relations in the 1980s (Fairbairn, Guntrip), as well as Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne, 'The Games People Play');
5. My statement -- to be developed later -- on the inter-relationship between 'conscious early memories' (Adler), 'lifestyle' (Adler), and 'transference. (That goes back to my studies at The Adlerian Institute in 1980,81, and my general influence from Adlerian psychology ('ego-traumacy' from Freud's traumacy-seduction theory; 'inferiority-feelings', 'superiority striving' from Adler, and the 'mastery compulsion', Freud, 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle');
6. My statement -- to be developed later and showing my influence by Perls and Gestalt Therapy, including my involvement at The Gestalt Institute in Toronto from 1979-1991 -- on the inter-relationship between transference, projection, and 'the unfinished situation'. Also, on the inter-connection between 'ego-splitting' and 'topdog-righteousness' vs. 'underdog approval-seeking' or 'underdog-rebelliosness', all as products of transference-serial behavior patterns;
7. My statement -- just hinted at here -- on the inter-relationship between 'narcissistic transference complexes, scripts, and games' -- and 'serial crimes' of every type that can be seen to have 'an individual memory signature' that is metaphorically and/or symbolically similar to the 'essence' and/or 'nature' -- the 'Method of Operation or MO' if you will -- of the 'serial crimes'. In particular, much more can be said about the inter-connection between 'serial rapes', 'serial killings' -- and transference -- usually through a process of either 'identification with the paternal or maternal aggressor, victimizer, rejector, abandoner... from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent topdog ego-state' and/or through a process of 'compensatory, narcissistic rage' (transference-reversal) from the internalized 'narcissistic-violent underdog' ego-state position. While I was working in this particular direction in the 1980s and/or early 1990s, I found the Psychoanalytic work of Heinz Kohut and saw that I was simply developing his idea of 'narcissistic transference' -- in contra-distinction to Freud who believed basically that narcissistic personalities could not develop transference relationships because they were too absorbed in themselves. I preferred Kohut's way of looking at things when he argued essentially -- and I am paraphrasing from the commonality in our perspectives -- that 'narcissistic transferences' and 'narcissistic transference relationships' do indeed exist and can essentially be described and defined by their 'narcissistic' -- meaning 'self-infatuated' or 'self-absorbed' (and lack of social empathy, lack of social sensitivity, lack of social conscience, lack of moral-ethics) component.
8. Freud once wrote something to the extent that 'we are all psychotic (or schizophrenic) when we dream. In a similar fashion, we are all walking, talking 'serial rejectors' in a clone-like fashion to the way that we can remember our earliest rejections...our earliest self-esteem injuries.
Such is transference -- probably Freud's most important discovery in human behavior.
-- dgb, revised, updated, modified, June 22nd, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
