Questions from Rainbow8:
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Thank you, Moonlitsky, for explaining transference so well. I have a question about what you posted above. WHY do we need the transference to do the work in therapy?
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I work psychodynamically - the transference is a way in which we can find out what happened to the client very early on, often preverbally, how that felt and how it shaped who we are as adults. We don't consciously remember what it was like for us when we were babies and little ones - but the memories are there stored in our unconscious (neuroscience has proven that memory is set from the second trimester in the womb) In a transferential therapy the relationship (transference) is worked with as a way to understand unconscious material - other windows to the unconscious are dreams and fantasies - whether waking or sleeping - that are worked with to help us understand. If the therapist doesn't work transferentially I feel it excludes so much potential for understanding and working through. For me it was useless to only work with what I knew consciously because the main damage that occured was very early and preverbal - i didn't even consciously know about it other than I felt only half alive. It wasn't until all my fears came into the relationship with my therapist that we could piece together what happened.
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WHY does the frame need to be that way to enable healing? Not everyone goes through this "agony" of love for their Ts, yet they are helped by their Ts. What good is it for me to care so much about my T, and want her to be with me forever, and all the rest of the feelings?
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Not all of us need to do this type of work because we don't all have the same early traumas. For many of us, that early attachment didn't go so bad so we don't need to go back there to work anything through. The psyche(unconscious) will always take us back to the point just before the trauma occured - so, for me, because the trauma was so early - i have had to go back to being a helpless infant with fantasies and dreams indicating a return to the womb - and that is where the painful and frightening dependancy that we are all talking about comes from - because without it an infant would die - the transference connects us to that horror - the horror of what already happened to us. We wont have these fears or need to do this work if they didn't happen to us in the first place (although all of us will have experienced early trauma just in the process of being born!) One of the most useful pieces of writing I have ever found was a quote from Donald Winnicott about the fear of breakdown:
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"Winnicott (1974 ["Fear of Breakdown"]) has shown that, when people in analysis speak seriously of a fear of a breakdown or a fear of death, they are projecting into future time what has already been experienced in the infantile past. One can only truly fear what one knows about through experience. Terrifying and often disabling fears of breakdown and death are distinct ways of remembering traumatic experiences that actually happened in a person's infancy. What is dreaded and feared as a potentially calamitous future event is the necessity of experiencing through the memory of the evolving psychoanalytic transference the horrible, regressive, and once death-threatening breakdown the person experienced in a dependent state in infancy.... [/] One way for a therapist to collude with resistance to therapeutic progress is to focus on external perpetrators or long ago traumas to prevent having to live through [with the patient] deeply distressing, and frightening breakdown recreations together in the here and now therapeutic relationship. [/] The breakdown fear a person felt in infancy lives on as the somatic underpinning of all subsequent emotional relatedness but cannot be recalled because: (a) No memory of the experience per se is recorded -- only a nameless dread of re-experiencing the dangers of infantile dependence and breakdown, (b) the memory of the breakdown experience itself is guarded with intense pain, somatic terror, and physical symptoms of all types, (c) the trauma occurred before it was possible to record pictures, words, or stories so it cannot be recalled in ordinary ways, but only as bodily terrors of approaching breakdown and death. If one way of conceptualizing attachment status is that it is a form of affect regulation that occurs in the context of relationships in general, and how individuals deal with emotions associated with separation, loss and reunion specifically, it seems that attachment theory would be relevant to one of the most significant areas affecting the work of psychotherapists: the therapeutic alliance.
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The frame is there to enable the transference to develop - too much information or disclosure by the therapist weakens the transference and therefore the potential to use it to heal. The way a client reacts and feels about the frame is an indication too of what happened - and their transference - e.g. for some the frame and the boundaries will feel ok and safe, for others they may feel punitive or withholding, cruel or unkind - according to their own stories. As we say - 'it's all grist for the mill'.
The feelings you have for your therapist, although very painful, are what will enable you to work through your pain - because you have accessed the feelings of the infant and now something can be reworked for you within the relationship with your therapist.
Hope this makes some sense
Moon
