The truth about "transference"?

On the more pathological side of the spectrum, Akhtar (1996) categorizes certain behavior as “malignant erotic transference” which can be described in four aspects:

(1) predominance of hostility over love in the seemingly erotic overtures;
(2) intense coercion of the analyst to indulge in actual actions;
(3) inconsolability inresponse to the analyst’s depriving stance, and
(4) the absence of erotic countertransference in the analyst, who experiences such “erotic” demands as intrusive, desperately controlling, and hostile
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The above was posted upthread. Everything about this is thoroughly disgusting.

Am I to understand that in the minds of therapists it's considered reasonable to rouse intense erotic feelings in another human being, pathologize those feelings with a hateful and vile term like "malignant", and castigate the client for not having the proper response to the analyst's twisted "depriving stance"?

This conception is itself pathological. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

I think it's good to remember that therapists are likely to be as diverse as any people who might share an occupation. Like I'm sure some therapists would consider that reasonable, while others would not.

I don't say this in defense of therapists, mind you, but more as a way of keeping in mind the variabilities inherent in all human endeavors. And I do think there are therapists who would highlight some of the same issues that you do in critiquing their own profession. And then some who actively work in a very different way.

I actually didn't mean the occurrences of using the word "transference" or any other jargon. I did not mean those posts where people actively discuss any professional terms. Rather, I meant the stories told in this forum where people honestly talk about their feelings that arise in therapy, without ever mentioning any of the "dubious concepts".

And you're right, if you would go to any other forum that discusses relationships between people (not necessarily therapeutic relationship) you would most certainly find the same patterns there as well.

And you're right again - this is most certainly textbook material because it is just so natural and prevalent in human relationships. So I don't really understand what you are trying to say.

I get that this can be a problem. However, I think this is the point where the client has to be active in his therapy. The therapist can offer an interpretation but surely no therapist is a mind reader and only the client has the power to confirm or disconfirm the interpretation.

Also, the interpretation only works when it is precise enough, thus although those overly general interpretations are probably more or less true for everyone, they are therapeutically powerless. Again, it is the clients job to reject overly general interpretations. I think it is really not so that the "wise" therapist tells things to the patient and the patient then dutifully tries to adapt himself according to these interpretations. I think the process (in very simplified terms) should be more that the therapist offers some understanding about the person and the person then tries to feel these words inside himself - if the words feel true then the offered understanding was correct. If the words don't play any chord inside the person then there can be two things: either the interpretation was wrong or the timing was wrong - I think it really doesn't matter which of them, in any case the interpretation was wrong at the moment and that's the only thing that matters.

This opinion is based on my own personal experiences by having been told interpretations. I have been actually told these general ones as well and at first they didn't make any sense to me at all because I was just so cut off from my feelings and emotions. As the feelings started to emerge, these general ones have started to make more sense (not all of them - I still have to check inside of me what seems to ring true for me and what not). But along the way there have been quite a few small but very precise interpretations that, if correct, somehow I have felt even on physical level. It's like you suddenly just feel that something was said that is spot on that you were not able to put into words before. And after that you have it, all for yourself. But of course, I have also been told many things that I don't feel have anything to do with me and so I have rejected these interpretations immediately. That has been my experience with (transference) interpretations. It's a collaboration.

Agree, therapists are going to be diverse in their views. But I think you are being disingenuous here. We all know the transference construct is pervasive. Find a paper or book or client forum where this and related concepts are not dominant. Impossible.

As for the "malignant" thing. I did a quick google search and found at least 5 papers or books from different professional authors that mentioned this. These sorts of ideas are well established an accepted.

That a particular therapist does not subscribe to such things doesn't, in my opinion, change anything. I don't see any of them publicly and openly denouncing such horrors as "malignant erotic transference" so they are complicit.

Also, even if a therapist claims to bring their true self, it's a con. They are NEVER going to show up with all their needs, aversions, judgements, neuroses... because then it would not be therapy anymore.

Re: your other post, I have not done any buddhist-based therapy, though I did do a study on my own of buddhism and was practicing for a short time. I'm not looking for a therapist or a teacher though. I'd rather just be around peers and have free exchange of ideas without payment, hierarchy, etc. Have not heard of Paul Gilbert, thanks will look him up.

I thought my initial post was pretty clear (maybe you didn't read it). It is about the therapist's contribution to the therapeutic relationship being "fraudulent" (as mentioned in the quote I included), and thus distorting the nature and extent of the subsequent "transference".

I read it and it wasn't clear to me at all and it isn't any clearer now.

I don't understand what do you mean by saying that the therapist's contribution to the therapeutic relationship is "fraudulent". Like any contribution is fraudulent? Are you suggesting that therapy should be conducted without therapeutic relationship? Because obviously any relationship between two people involves contributions from both of them. And I totally don't understand what do you mean by distorting the nature and extent of the subsequent transference. How is this distortion done? How would the positive case look like in your eyes - the therapeutic relationship without therapist's contribution and distortion of things? I'm just asking because to me it is not clear at all what are you talking about.

I understand the OP to be saying that because therapists present the best, professionalised side of themselves - don't show up with their neuroses, aversions, judgments etc. - therefore their side of the therapeutic relationship is fraudulent.

On the one hand I think this is inevitable and not problematic - it is good for therapists to be on their best behaviour, not put the self first etc. when they are at work. And of course almost everybody does this at work, but it doesn't necessarily make every relationship taking place at work fraudulent.

On the other hand I kind of get where you are coming fromBudfox - I think - in that the therapeutic relationship is incredibly personal for the client, much more so than for the therapist, and on the clients side it involves the kinds of letting down of barriers that usually only happens in very close relationships e.g. romantic relationships. And yet it is not reciprocal for the therapist and they are not letting down all of their personal barriers to the same extent as the client. I think this is necessary, and if it were not so it would be very unethical (paying a therapist for a relationship where the therapist is gratifying themself, not necessarily putting the client first, etc.) But I do see how it can seem fraudulent - it's kind of mimicking a close personal relationship, but it's not so close or personal for the therapist.

and that's what hurts so much. especially when things blow up and it ends prematurely. like mine just did.

I think if I were to develop an attachment and have to deal with all this transference again, I'd leave...for the simple fact that it's a transaction. It's not based on something that can realistically happen.

I admit, I longed to see my former t all week. I kept notes about what to share with her, then it escalated. I couldn't wait to share some things. I wanted her to be proud of me. But to her, it was not true pride she'd feel for someone in her personal life. Even if she wanted to, she'd have to maintain that personal space. So, it becomes a bit torturous when reality kicks in and the fantasy is broke. My T told me she didn't care about some things. Last week, she lied to me.

So, here I am desiring connection to someone who can't offer me the same...but she pushed for it. Told me to lean into it. But it's kinda like if I had those feelings for someone in my regular life, but they didn't feel that way for me. It would be hard. Painful. Imagine that person I can't have that connection urging me to keep feeling that way and now, to open up even more- while they maintain their distance. They are a person that will NEVER be emotionally available to me. The healthy thing in that situation would be to walk away, to distance, and put effort into someone who is available to me.

And all of those stories, online, that I've read- they haunt me. These folks can't leave their T's because they find the thought so painful. Yet, they are in pain by staying. It's such a torturous limbo.

I'd love to read the stories where it worked.

No, I'm being totally sincere and not disingenuous in the slightest. I am not sure why you are suggesting that I was talking about the transference construct - I was responding to this question that you asked:

I stand by my statement that I believe there is likely to be a wide variety of opinion on this. Surely you can acknowledge that there is bound to be diversity of thought?

I googled "malignant erotic transference" with the words in quotes and came up with 17 results (Google having omitted duplicate results), most of them referring to the Akhtar article. The top result was from an Italian researcher who seems unaware of the Akhtar article and uses the term in a different sense. If I google without the quotes, the top result is about "malignant erotic countertransference", which is depicted as a very bad thing and which is clearly a different problem altogether.

This really doesn't seem a widely-used term at all. I suspect one reason for the lack of therapists denouncing it is that many of them have never heard of it.



Yeah, but you say that like it's a bad thing! I want my therapist to stuff down all his personal crap for our session time. I don't believe it's a con because we both openly acknowledge that he's doing it, and I understand it's necessary for the whole construct to work. This is like the best part of seeing a therapist for me - an hour of someone willing to put aside his own crap and focus on me, me, me... but I digress.

Oh yes, I wasn't thinking you would like to see a Buddhist therapist, just that I think they have made some contributions to thinking about therapy that you would really appreciate, and that do respond to some of the egregious things you criticize.

I am actually also uncomfortable with some of the things you find objectionable about therapy. And I have no desire to defend therapists as a group- I think a not-small number of them are people I wouldn't want to be alone in a room with. But I think there might be more diversity of thought about this stuff than you realize, even among therapists.

Having similar grey thoughts. Thinking how much i paid him over the years, to be an expert of my emotions and tranferences, but i am less happy than ever in my adult life.

Now that Im in touch with all my motivations, i have huge regret of the way i lived in the past, and what i could have done, but didn't do, to live the life i want
Its gone .
.

Actually, transference doesn't only happen in therapy. It's a very common phenomenon but usually tends to be analyzed in the therapeutic relationship and not others. My perspective is that transference appears because we all have our own understanding of the world and patterns of relating. We do what we know in relationships, after trying to understand those around us usually based on previous experience. We often say about others that someone is like a mother figure or a big brother or a daughter ... Perhaps even more often, we make assumptions about people based on our experience with others rather than (just) moment-to-moment communication. I think that in a good therapeutic relationship, transference has the safe space to be explored and used in a healthy way, but transference happens whether or not there is a safe space. In my experience, even whether or not the therapist uses self-disclosure, because one can always find different ways to interpret and relate to the therapist's disclosure.

I'm not saying there is no diversity of thought. I'm saying the transference construct dominates. And I don't mean just those who use the jargon explicitly. Can you think of any other concept that is so ubiquitous in the profession? I can't. It's mentioned in every book and article. For many of them it's like a nervous tic or mantra. Of course there will be exceptions and outliers, and I get that there are decent therapists who do not spout the nonsense.

I didn't say widely used. I said it appears to be an established term. Big difference.

Some guy named Richard Chessick PhD MD wrote a scholarly article with the title "Malignant Eroticized Countertransference", and there are a few dozen pages referring to it. I found other sources as well.

I also found similar references on various therapy sites:
"Erotic Transference & Malignant Bonding"
"In the grip of a malignant regression, the transference loses its representational, or as if status"
"malignant seduction"

Also, there is a huge mass of other writings that are only slightly less warped on the subject of transference and erotic stuff.

I understand some people like it and that it might even be helpful. But that doesn't change the fact that many therapists are charging people big money and in return giving them a staged performance, a contrived persona, feigned caring, artificial empathy. And then they talk about it in a very different way, as if the whole thing is pure as the driven snow. It's deeply dishonest. I don't expect them to compromise their livelihood by admitting their fakery, but among therapy consumers/peers I think there ought to be honest and frank discussion.

Also, presenting something contrived as something authentic, especially with vulnerable people, is risky and clearly in no small number of cases leads to serious emotional disfigurement when the client comes to grips with various deceptions that have been taking place outside conscious awareness. Some people are just not going to be in a position to untangle the therapist's games, and thus they get burned to a crisp.

Calilady, for me it has worked. I've had a very close relationship with my T for five year - close in the terms given above, entirely therapeutic etc. We've been doing schema therapy for five years. It has entirely transformed my life. I feel better in ways that I never knew it was possible to feel better in, because I had always assumed that those awful feelings were the feelings of being alive.

The thing about the relationship as discussed in my previous post, has been difficult and painful at times, but overall a very very good and amazingly healing experience. We have had arguments, including when I get upset and say this is just for the money, you don't really care, etc. But T has stuck with me patiently through thick and thin. We've both stuck with it. Truly, this therapy has changed my life for the better and I can envisage not going one day as well.

I'm glad it has worked for you. That's awesome. I, however, didn't have such a lucky go at it and feel re-traumatized. I am handling it much better than before, but that isn't entirely due to my individual therapy. Going through the DBT course has helped.

Hmmmm. I've posted on Dr. Smith's site before and he's always posted my comments. This time, when I discussed my therapist lying and the fallout of that along with being jaded about the entire therapeutic process...he hasn't authorized that post.

Still, i am returning to the male T I saw last week. This time, I hope to not get attached. We shall see.

This is just a general definition of transference. Not what this thread is about.

The original point is that the intensity of therapeutic transference is in direct proportion to how fake the therapist is.

Budfox-

Your original point, how I understood it, was that blank slate demeanor correlated with relational fakeness, no?

I think blank slate crap does draw out more transferences, by far. But I also think it makes the therapy more one-sided rather than fake. The therapy becomes all about your stuff, your projections, your needs, your perceptions, your inner world. So that's one way to do therapy, which isn't the reparenting type. It's more safe in some or many ways...

If you and your T are in a more two-sided relationship, therapy will include the therapist's needs (which btw are just as ****ed up as many of ours as patients). It wouldn't really be therapy, and enmeshment would be most harmful.

I don't think of it as fake, but if that's how you view it, wouldn't fake be better given the above? If not, what would your ideal therapy relationship be like (or have been like)?

This is precisely the problem. So I, for instance, who felt, or had been told, I had issues, went to the therapy "expert" only to get involved in messed up "relationships", which caused distress and confusion and all the kinds of stress that any messed up relationship can. Only I was paying money for it. Or sometimes my insurance was. And part of the issue for me was that I had very few, or no, real "healthy" relationships (you might say that the relationship with my soulmate late husband was "enmeshed" but it worked) so I had no clue what was going on. Finally after many years I kind of got one. But with a lot of c***p that went down in the meantime.

Blank slate therapy, which is what they mostly had 50 years ago when I started on my therapy "journey" didn't work well for me because I was too disconnected/dissociated from many of my feelings. Then, when I got "in touch" with them, they were still kind of separate and unsocialized. So I became dysfunctional in a different, not necessarily better, way.

I didn't realize that you were a therapist, though. So from now on, when reading your posts, I will consider the source.

Oops, so sorry, Blanche, I apologize! I misread your post!

The trouble was, again, that I didn't know the therapists were as as ****ed up as me, I didn't even know I how and in what ways I was *****ed. That presumably was what therapy was partly for, I thought. And when some of ****ed-ness came out the therapists "blamed" me over and over, and I took it because that's what I had always done and after all, I was coming because I felt and believed and "admitted" that I was somewhat ****ed up.

And what happened in the end, after 50 years in therapy on and off, was that I came to the frightening and "traumatic" realization that the therapist, on whom I had been depending, was ******ed in one way worse than me, probably. And hurt me. And there was nothing that I could do about that it was just her.

That turns out not to have been a transference exactly -- or maybe it was was a dual acting-out of transferences. Which was very hurtful. But the reenactment eventually led me to connect with a way I had felt that way in childhood about some relatives, and that had been cut off for many, many years. The therapist treated me in a cold, snobby, condescending, blaming way, like female relative from my past. Which I couldn't handle at the time. And which without PC and some other in-person support group support I probably could not have handled this last year.

Whether it's because the therapy relationship is "fake" or something else, I'm not sure.

But again, I'm sorry. When I misread your post and felt like you were talking as a therapist, so sorry, I think it triggered me.

But that's not a PTSD trigger that I went INTO therapy with but something which I have now. And will hopefully find a way to let it go sometime soon, now that I'm aware of it.

I think blank slate is only part of it. Real people are not so magically accepting and understanding and selfless. These are characteristics of a staged performance. I'm not suggesting therapists should NOT do these things. I don't have an opinion on the ideal therapy arrangement, because that kind of engineered relationship doesn't make sense to me now.

To me the point of the original quote is that client projections are of dubious value, because they are driven in part by something artificial. The sort of persona most therapists adopt does not exist in nature (between adults). It's an anomaly. I also think it is a huge manipulation. Therapists have a lot of nerve passing off the premise that from something contrived will emerge something genuine.

The one therapist I saw for a while was clearly acting, and I was responding to THAT. Later she behaved like just another wounded ego. She was defensive and hostile and erratic. That was more real than any of the previous BS role playing.

I read something online, before Bud posted about this, from some random psychoanalysis book that said the therapist should redirect the patient back to his own life and help him/her identify opportunities where emotional attachments can develop. The client's attachment to the therapist cannot be reciprocated, so he/she should find instances where it can be reflected back to them.

My ex-t basically said (about my attachment/transference issues), "This is good. We're an "us" and lean into it!" but it failed because she couldn't deal with it. She avoided me. I became too much for her, as is the running theme for me and the women in my life that began with my mutha (mother). It just reinforced it.

Dr. Smith is telling me to stay with a woman who is re-enacting all of this childhood crap? Which isn't a problem if it gets me to the point of having some value in myself and saying, "I'm out! Deuces!"
But the way he makes it sound, like you MUST stay with them FOREVERRRRRRRR and hire a mediator if you must...yeah, not getting it.

Once the client has been drawn into enmeshment with the therapist, how do you end this without making a complete mess of the client's life? It's easy to start a fire. Not so easy to put it out. This might become a bigger problem than the client's original problems.

Seems like a lot of risk (and poorly elaborated) for low-probably benefit (i.e. something about this engineered relationship will translate to real life). Just my take...

Very painful for the client either way. Well...at least it was for me. I just don't know what you do at the point. I certainly can see why people stay and I understand why they leave (like I eventually did, because she would have always "taken me back," according to her). And in my case, it became this dramatic pseudo-relationship for 50 minutes a week, but she remained detached (which I get, it's her job) and distanced herself occasionally for "self care," but dang it that it didn't work that way for me. Not in the least. Now, i can't help but feel the whole thing was a charade. A fabrication of my own mind. I don't even really KNOW this woman, but there I went...

I'm reeling. The ending really just happened this past Friday. Ugh...