I have written before about the process of transference that the client and therapist go through.
As one can see it includes what is called the positive and negative transference. Those are the stages where the client can have quite strong feeling reactions to the therapist. In the positive transference that usually includes the liking, loving and even at times erotic feelings.
This period can vary enormously in duration. Some times it is quite short and other times it lasts for long periods. One aspect of this is the attachment changes that occur during these phases.
In the positive transference the attachment develops and in the negative transference the attachment is broken down as the psychological separation occurs.
When the client switches to the negative transference they stop being friendly, helpful, agreeable and so forth and become disagreeable and argumentative. This can include arguing about the bills, changing appointments, getting appointment times wrong and so forth.
As regards the emotional quality of this stage I came across a blog post the other day. It was an open letter that had been written from a client to her therapist. I found it captured the emotional quality of the negative transference very well and I will use it in future as a teaching piece and hence I am writing about it here. It goes as such:
“Dear J,
I’m feeling angry about therapy. Here are some of the reasons why:
You always start the session by asking, “So what are we talking about today?” even if it is very obvious what needs to be talked about.
Every week feels like the first week all over again, instead of accumulating knowledge about me and reflecting back.
There is never any silence; I like to have silence occasionally.
I trusted you to read my blog and you searched for “sex” and “job” and then lied about it.
I gave you a really long account of 2009 and you said there was enough material in there to last for a few weeks of therapy and you never brought it up again.
You try to make everything logical and rational and then I feel guilty and I feel like a failure that it’s not sinking in.
You don’t pick up on what I need or what I feel. You never ask me what I need. I don’t even know what I need, but maybe if you ask me I’ll try to figure it out.
You once said in an email, “I think that one needs to work through or resolve issues in order to avoid repeating them.” All I feel like I’m doing is repeating the same things over and over and over.
Your office is so damn beige.
Tags: anger”
(end quote)
To summarise the grievances:
She questions his therapeutic skills
He is told he lied which implies he is also unreliable and untrustworthy
She reports he made her feel bad in this case guilty and a failure
He is told he does not give her what she wants, in this case silence
But it is best summed up in her last comment about the beige office. Translated = “I am angry at you”, as her tag so accurately portrays.
One of the difficulties of defining this as negative transference is the client can take it to mean that their feelings of anger are not real or are somehow invalid. That is not the case as the client feels what they feel and they are real and valid.
However the feelings are out of proportion to what is going on in the here and now because the client is misperceiving the therapist. It is a situation of misperception not ‘unreal’ emotions. I didn’t call it a problem of misperception because such misperceptions can lead to therapeutic gain if handled correctly by the therapist. The misperception is a positive thing in this sense.
If a client states they they have strong feelings for or are in love with the therapist that of course is great for the therapist’s ego. It’s great to think that I must be so attractive that someone has such feelings for me. But alas it is not so. A client does not fall in love with me they fall in love with what I represent to them.
How can you love someone when you hardly even know them? The client therapist relationship is a very specific and restricted one. The client only gets to see the therapist in a very singular way, that is in a sympathetic, understanding, reliable, caring role. The transactions would usually be as such:
In the therapy setting these transactions would most often occur 90% of the time. This is very different to the usual male and a female relationship which in part could be drawn as such:
Whether they be just friends or married both parties are supposed to express their Child ego state wants and needs about 50% of the time. In addition they are meant to be caring of each other about equal amounts as well. Both sides get to see the other’s Child ego state in particular. Thus they know them more ‘deeply’ than a client can know a therapist as the therapist very infrequently expresses such child needs to the client.
Thus the client does not really get to know the therapist even though the level of emotional reaction in the transferences would indicate that they do. In the positive transference the client unconsciously fills in the gaps that they do not know about the therapist thus giving them the perception that they know the person well.
If you go back to that letter one finds a lot of ‘gap filling in’ being done but in a negative transference way in that case. A good deal of therapist motivations and meaning to his perceived behaviour are added in such as about the silence. Also no therapist is that bad. In the letter none of his good points are being acknowledged.
For many years my parents an I ran a counselling training institute together. They were both psychologists and trainers like I was, and we trained many hundreds of people. Not uncommonly over the years a trainee and/or client of theirs would take me aside and tell me how lucky I was to have been raised with such healthy parents. I would just look a bit stunned, (as I was), smile blankly and change the topic.
Now my parents were OK as parents but they were far from perfect, god rest their souls. The client/trainee was in a positive transference and had filled in the gaps about them without even knowing it.
Graffiti
It was a good episode of the Sopranos last night. Not only did a few people get whacked but a good deal of the show was dedicated to Tony Soprano’s relationship with his therapist. He finally came clean and told her directly in his mobster type way that he was in love with her, deeply!
Now for a female therapist that would be a hazardous thing to have happen! He had developed a fully fledged erotic transference with her. He tried his usual intimidation tactics with her to again gain control as he was the needy one in this instance, but she stood her ground. He suddenly started having erotic dreams about her and suddenly started to have some erection problems with his mistress and wife. The episode really did capture the psychology of it quite well even if it was overly dramatised a bit. I wonder if the movie makers have ‘experts’ on such matters giving advice on the psychology of it all, as technically it was quite sound.
The whole concept of erotic transference is an interesting area of study. In such transference the client falls in love with the therapist and that love gets sexualised to varying degrees. Some a lot and others very little. However I have found it to be a bit more complex than that.
Lots of things can happen to the love and sexualization of the therapist. For instance I have had clients desexualize me. I recall one woman recite a long monologue one day on how bad men were. At the end of it I stated that I was a man and not like what she reported to which she replied, “Oh you’re not a man, you’re a Tony”.
She had desexualized me to be genderless and thus she could form a attachment to me because her misandry would have otherwise not allowed that to happen.
Then there is the relationship between love and sex in the client’s mind. People usually over correlate the two and if the client mentions love then that of course it is assumed means sex as well. If they state that it does not then of course they are in denial according to many. I don’t particularly agree with that.
Without a doubt some clients do develop strong feelings of love and sexualised feelings to the therapist as well. As was shown in the Sopranos that can involve sexual dreams and fantasies about the therapist that are quite vivid.
However there maybe another type of love for instance between siblings or parents and children. This is where there can be strong feelings of love and attraction that by and large does not get sexualised. There would be some, maybe many who would definitely disagree with this view. They would say that deep down in the id or very small Child ego state there are sexual feelings. That it is normal for teenage siblings to have sexual feelings at times to each other and people who say they don’t do so because their moral system does not allow them to recognise such sexualised feelings. They are simply repressed into the unconscious.
These women dislike each other but do they
allow themselves to be aware of such things
The problem with this is it’s a circular argument. As soon as one disputes such a position one can then be told they are simply in denial as well.
However love feelings and sexual feelings are two different and discrete emotions like other feelings such as anger and sadness or scare and embarrassment. I think there are few who would dispute this.
Thus it seems not unreasonable that love and sexual feelings can behave like any other feelings. Sometimes feelings are closely linked and sometimes they are not. For some sexual feelings and feelings of love are closely linked and for others they are not.
Thus one needs to be careful with the term erotic transference as erotic specifically relates to sexual or salacious matters. It seems that it is possible to have a strong sense of love and attraction for a therapist without it necessarily being highly sexualised thus the term erotic would be a misnomer in such cases.
Graffiti
