Quote:
Originally Posted by Ididitmyway
To me love in and of itself is transference whether it happens in therapy or outside of therapy. We have some mental schema in our minds already set up in place for choosing what type of person we will fall in love with, what kind of qualities in the person will attract us. I don't believe it is ever random or "accidental" or "just happens".
So to me love=transference under any circumstances. In therapy, however, there is less opportunity for us to see the person that the therapist is for who they are. I understand that we might never be able to see anyone for who they are. That's why people often get disappointed sometime after they start dating someone. But, in "real life" we can observe the person's behavior in different situations, we know much more about their life than we will ever know about the therapist's life, we have much more reality based information about the person to base our feelings on. So, outside therapy, our love for someone is much more based on the objective reality of who the person is. This is not to say that the information we have is enough to make a completely conscious choice, but it's much more sufficient than in the situation when you only see the person in the specific context of therapy which doesn't allow a lot of information to come through. So, yeah, in therapy, as I see it, our feelings are produced more by our wishful thinking and fantasies that we use to paint the portrait of the person we don't know well enough to see if they are "the one".
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Personally I see it the other way around, there is no transference, only love/friendship/human attachment and relating in various forms and shades. I think the concept of transference was created by Freud to justify and define a social division of labour between paid practitioners of skilled human contact and suport, and the rest of civil society, in order that this be attached to professional roles and ultimately monetised. I think in a healthy functioning society almost everyone who is of reasonable capacity would have the communication and life skills to create healthy safe and supportive relationships that nurture human growth and potential, therapists would only be needed by a small minority who really require specialist treatment at most. However our current capitalistic and patriarchal society distorts and debases human contact, people do not learn how to tune into each other, empathy is not valued, people are alienated from themselves and each other, and therapy exists to pick up the fallout and keep it all going (not always particularly effectively, ultimately it's a limited approach).