Unresolved transference

Sorry, just seen this. You can.

My T told me how he felt numerous times but then when I called him to play his hand he played the transference card.

What do you mean?

Transference can never be fully resolved, especially whet it has to do with deep attachment. This attachment comes when the therapist is a good fit, and it represents the person who you see as your ideal self, and the one that you have been missing all your life. It becomes harder when you feel that the therapist cares about you (genuinely or not), and you can not be with her. So yes, when genuine feelings are involved, it becomes much, much harder.

Thus comes the idealization, admiration, love and pain. It breaks you even more, it can be traumatic, leading to suicidal thoughts. You forget the initial reason why you started therapy in the first place, it becomes your main issue. You feel nothing, but sadness. You get trapped in this spiral of suffering and it becomes impossible to get out.
This is the sad truth. I am talking from my own unfortunate experience .

What I bolded is exactly what was driving my pretty long transference pattern in my youth. Not so much in therapy in my early 40s as I never saw the Ts as a more ideal version of me, but there were many people earlier and usually the focus was on specific features with each. For me, the fantasy/idealization wasn't painful but rather inspirational, I used it to try to realize those things in myself, so I only "needed" each person transiently as it was really mostly about myself and my potential and development. And this latter is exactly why, I think, it would be so important in therapy to focus on improving the client's everyday life and outside of therapy satisfaction, rather than focusing on the attachment to the T (a projected, fantasy self-image) but without doing anything to make it real in ourselves. At least for those that experience this type of transference pattern. One can analyze the relationship and attachment to death even with the most competent T, but it will remain frustrating and painful as the gap between who we want to become and who we currently are never gets any narrower, let alone disappear - so the transference is never resolved in a deep, individual sense.

I really think that conventional theories often dismiss the above element of personal development and can distort the meaning of transference, assigning it to old lacks in appropriate parental care and longing for that in therapy. Even if that is true for a person, I think the interpretation is often not deep enough. Why do we need a good parent after all? An important factor is that they can inspire us and help us to strive as individuals and to develop our potentials later in life, as independent, self actualizing people. But if it gets stuck in the relationship and attachment, then such individuation cannot occur, we may continue longing for what feels missing and not realize it is our own, autonomous, accomplished adult self.

I agree with much of this post and have highlighted what I think are very important points.

In my case, I believe that my idealizations of parents and others in my early environment were "truamatically" interrupted. But then I dissociated that rage and disappointment and "pretended". I also had some good feelings for my family,so another way to look at it was the good and bad just got "split" and I didn't feel the bad.

So, it makes sense that after 6 years with a T who mimicked some of those old patterns I got into a negative transferecence that was very powerful and overcame any other feelings I had for that T. And she couldn't tolerate being the all-bad. It was possible for me to get out of that feeling and into an intellectual, problem-solving relationship with her, which I wanted to do, but she was not able to do that.

For me, using intellectual skills in partnership with her would have been an example and a working out of another type of "transference", the "alter ego" transference. I look on that, and the longing for that, as a step AFTER "successful" idealization (valuing the idealization but also realizing idealized people are not the same as the idealizations, or perfect). I'm not sure that Kohut saw it like that, but the feeling I have, and the longing for that which I can experience, gives me clues that's how it might have worked for me.

The "alter ego" transference toward adults or older children in one's environment would lead naturally into "alter ego" feelings and relationships with peers in adolescence.

My view is that my idealizations in childhood got disappointed and interrupted prematurely and I never got through the "alter ego" stage and I then "failed" adolescence. (Partially another story there, though)

However, idealistically, theoretically, (I'm still kind of stuck, there, folks!) I feel like those stages could be worked through, if I had (therapist?) people in my environment who kind of understood that, and my own "autonomous, accomplished adult self" could be found and developed. Even at 70 I feel that way, even though a lot of it didn't happen (yet). Still. . .