If you did not have the motherly mother, and motherly can be sexual (tell me sucking on a breast is not sexual to an adult?) then it's going to transfer into something you can understand, at whatever age you are starting with trying to understand. It is all part of the unconscious and how you experience dreams, that's going to be similar to transference.

I had a dream about my therapist and a former group therapist (also a female) and the two of them were lesbians standing in the doorway of their two identical town houses as I walked down the sidewalk past them. That looks "sexual" but was actually not, in my subconscious shorthand they were my mother (who died when I was 3) and my stepmother, "identical" and very all the same sex, mother/daughter, need-to-look-here at "mothers"/pair.

I had my mothers merged; I wanted a/my mother so badly when my father remarried that I just lumped them together psychologically. Until I was 50+ I could not call my stepmother, "stepmother", she was "Mom" and my poor, dead mother was my "biological mother".

I had dreams for 2-3 years, several almost every night, where there were "pairs" of things; one night it was the lesbian therapists standing in for my two mothers, another night it was wedding dresses, my mother's 1940 wedding dress (I had at the time) getting "spoiled" after I tried it on for fit and came back for a second fitting.

In another dream, my father was remarrying my stepmother, a second time (1955), and the entire dream was in sepia colors, just like the photos I have of my parents 1940 marriage (now that was freaky!) and my uncle, my father's brother was my father's best man in the 1940's wedding (not sure who was in the 1955 one?) and he was in the dream, organizing the second wedding, etc.

I think transference is very much like that; our head does a "conscious" story, just like day dreaming? One thinks sexual thoughts of one's T symbolically of something else (or could be sexual) just like one would dream a story with T in it? If you don't work much with your dreams, don't remember them or want to work with them, the subconscious has to figure out other ways out and your "imagination" and the stories/thoughts you have while awake can be like that.