Is it always 'transference'?

Are romantic/erotic feelings for one's T always based in transference? My T and I have had numerous conversations about how I feel. T says my erotic feelings are getting in the way of therapy - that I can feel much closer to her/him if I didn't always leave our sessions feeling hurt and disappointed. I can agree with T on that, but I don't know how to change how I feel. So, tonight, I began journaling how I might change how I feel, but more importantly, why I feel this way.

So...are romantic/erotic feelings for our Ts always a transference issue? Why do you think they are or are not? The only way for me to get a handle on this is to view my feelings as transference or perhaps something else.

Thanks for any and all insights you might have.

i dont believe so no, i do believe it's possible to have a REAL actual connection as any two humans may have.... but its probably rare that it is something like that

I don't believe the romantic/erotic feelings are always based entirely on transference. Yes, they are often a big part of it but I agree with @DP_2017 that it is possible some of the feelings are about the person sitting in front of them. Yes, we never really know who the therapist really is or what they like don't like etc bit if they are being their authentic selves and showing us genuine care, empathy and kindness etc it is possible some of these feelings are real IMO.

I've read many articles that suggest that the transference feelings ARE the therapy and exploring them further can help reveal things that can be helpful to your therapy and growth. On the other hand, some articles also suggest that the feelings can get in the way of therapy when the client focuses on them too much as a form of resistance to exploring other areas. Perhaps this is what your T meant. It sounds like you are focusing so much on the relationship and what your T is and isn't doing. It's hard to know from your post if it is helping you or hindering you. I found journaling help me to explore the feelings further. I think for me they are a mix of both. They are a big part of my therapy but also at times I think I focus on them to distract me from other things. Not sure that helps at all.

No, feelings towards your therapist are not just about transference. It's a complex situation, based on many different factors. In short, the therapy situation itself encourages the feelings - being listened to, being thought about, being made to feel important, even if it's only for an hour. Then there's the possible transference; feelings for people in our past that we project onto the therapist - fear of abandonment, rejection, longing to be loved and accepted for who we are. And then there is the here and now connection with our therapists; whether we find them attractive, whether we have things in common. They say that in order for therapy to work, there has to be a 'click' between client and therapist. So I think it's natural for that 'click' feeling to also be alluring.

On the flip side, all relationships are influenced by transference/projection because we can only relate to people based on what we know and what we have experienced. Therapists tend to work with the transference because it can give us clues as to where our issues might be.

It bothers me that your therapist has told you that your feelings are getting in the way. Feelings are what therapy is all about. If you still feel it, you still need to talk about it. How can anyone just change the way they feel?! It doesn't work like that. Your feelings are trying to tell you something and you both need to listen. He/she sounds either inexperienced or struggling with some challenging feelings themselves. Telling you that you shouldn't feel hurt or disappointing is not good therapy. They are not providing any 'holding' or containment for your negative feelings. You are allowed to feel those things... ET is very painful. You do not need to change the way you feel to make your therapist feel better. Seriously, it's their job!

My tip for moving forward is to not use theory because it's just another way of distancing yourself from your feelings. Listen to what your feelings are trying to tell you and trust yourself... and maybe look for another T.

Thank you for your thoughtful insight/opinions. I did ask T to tell me how my feelings were getting in the way of our therapy and T said that outside of therapy (and in therapy to some degree) I focus too much on her/him. I haven't talked about how I feel after our initial conversations six months ago. The biggest challenge for me is coming to terms with how I am and who I am when I can't recall the first 12 years of my life - mostly. T has asked me to write letters to everyone who has failed me (not for actual mailing, of course), which will hopefully give insight to my earliest relationships - or if I can't recall the people, like my mother or father, what feelings I have about them not being there for me, etc. I do believe my T is being authentic and showing her/his true self, so some of what I feel is probably not transference. I've been journaling since I began therapy almost three years ago - it's been helpful, for the most part. However, because of my repressed memories, a lot of what I journal is about T and/or how I felt during sessions regarding the topic we were hashing over.

Thank you for responding. You've given me more to think about. This past session was particularly stressful for me and following our therapy, triggered a reaction in me similar to one that T and I have been trying to understand from a dream I had six weeks or so ago. I didn't contact T, which I'm sure she/he will say would have been preferable, but I'm trying to sort some of it out myself first (too, it's T's birthday today and the whole family from places unknown are here). I'm journaling everything I felt and my reaction, so T will get the full impact of what happened.

Gosh, I wish these feelings weren't so painful and difficult to get over. I refuse to give in or give up. Thanks, again ~~

I think that everyday life romantic attraction also often has strong elements of transference in it. It's normal and definitely not a phenomenon created by therapy, just sometimes used in therapy for analysis. I also think that attraction to a T is not necessarily pure transference at all but that aspect is often expanded and intensified as the T typically (in a good case) does not engage in that way or reveal as much about themselves as in usual encounters between people. In everyday life, most often when attraction is one-sided, it will gradually dissipate and people will stop engaging as they don't have matching interests. In therapy though, the client keeps going and talking about very personal things and the T will not reject the client straight, which can reinforce the feelings and fantasies.

With my last T, there was some clear mutual attraction that kinda lingered throughout my seeing him but it remained mild and kinda pleasant/energizing. It was just present and we never really addressed it in depth as that was not my interest - I knew very well why I found him attractive. It was not unique at all, there have been many similar attractions in my life before. So it was clearly part transference but also real in a sense that at the time he and our interactions triggered it.

I totally understand where you are coming from as I have a somewhat similar situation in that I can't remember a lot of the first 10 years of my life. I also tend to focus on my relationship with my T and have often worried if it was perhaps too much. Sometimes I think it is resistance but mostly I think it has actually been helpful. I try to find how things that occur in our relationship may be a reflection of other areas of my life both past and present though. e.g I got really annoyed with my T recently about something they did. In hindsight, some annoyance was warranted but I did overreact somewhat. After exploring it further I realized that the overreaction was actually related to something similar that had occurred in my childhood and it was really helpful to explore this. Focusing on the relationship with T and how it impacts me gives me a safe space to voice my concerns and work through whatever feelings arise which are similar to situations that arise in my day to day life that I may not have the chance to explore so safely. This has helped to improve my outside relationships. So I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing to focus on the relationship if you are able to explore what the feelings are and where they come from etc. You say you haven't brought up the feelings since you first spoke about them. It might be worth trying to bring them up again. Your T really should be willing to explore them and try and help you to figure out if it is resistance or worth looking further at. Simply saying you focus too much on him/her is not very helpful as feelings are feelings and won't just disappear because he/she wants them to.

I find the term "transference" kind of pretentious (therapists use it in a way that seems to imply that this phenomenon only happens in therapy) so I tend to not use it. But if you mean by transference that the feelings you're having are not really about your therapist, then yes I believe romantic feelings for a therapist are transference. Of course a client can find their therapist attractive at first sight but the kind of anguish, torture and longing for a therapist often described on this forum, it's obvious to me that this is some sort of fantasy or a distraction for the client. I think these kinds of feelings often reveal that something is missing in the client's life and they sort of latch onto that attraction (consciously or unconsciously). If the client met the therapist in another context, I highly doubt they would have this attraction but that's because the therapist in real life is probably boring. A regular, ordinary person whereas in therapy everything gets heightened, including the therapist's supposed desirability. Like I said, I believe these feelings are a fantasy, a distraction and often the sign something is missing from the client's (romantic) life.

If I had to do it over again, I'd worry less about what label to apply, and more about the psychological effects. Being provoked into strong feelings, then encouraged to see the feelings as a problem, then feeling compelled to change or repress or hide the feelings, in order to preserve the relationship that induced the feelings... seems like a path to madness.

Plus, provoking basic needs, then substituting clinical analysis for gratification of of the needs... i dont think evolution equipped us for such a thing, and playing this game is dangerous and in my view not worth whatever meagre insights are generated by viewing things in terms of "transference", which is such a vague concept.

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".

Love this response...This is how I see it too I just am not able to articulate it so well

I agree, but have a problem with how this is usually framed. It's implied to be all about the client's complexes rather than therapy itself. It's like giving someone a strange drug and then suggesting their response is due to their "issues". Maybe the client is responding in a fairly normal way to a very abnormal stimulus -- the ambiguous behavior of the therapist.

Yes, therapy has a lot to do with it. I would never deny that. That's one of the major factors contributing into the harm of clients.

But the "natural" process of falling in love, as I described it, for me personally has nothing to do with "complexes", but rather with why we are wired to obsess about the person A as opposed to the person B. I think, it's incredibly important to understand the reasons for seeking out a specific type of people to fall in love with. It was crucial for me to understand this. When I did, I understood why I had the tendency to get attracted to people who were in some ways emotionally exploitative.

The therapists who emotionally exploited me were by no means the only ones who traumatized me. There were people in my life I "fell in love" with before them who inflicted almost as much damage. The therapists were just a continuation of the same drama I was playing over and over again. They were the same type of person I was looking for, and so they neatly fit into the pattern or the sequence of experiences I needed, I guess, to learn eventually that I didn't need this **** anymore. As soon as I recognized the game I engaged myself in, I realized what the game was about and to what end. I realized that I would never reach the goal I wanted to reach by playing that game. So I stopped. I no longer needed the same type of person to make my life happy or any type of person to make me happy for that matter.

All of the above (the inner process of mine I described) is no excuse for my therapists' behavior and no justification for harmful therapy methods. The therapists who harmed me and the system who harmed me are responsible for the damage they've done regardless of what my process or my "issues" or my "complexes" were.

But equally, my own inner process is still mine. It belongs to me no matter what particular therapists did or what the system did as a whole.

Those two things are completely separate to me. I judge each one on its own merit.

I very much agree with ididitmyway's posts about the mechanics of attraction, love and even interpersonal obsession. I actually experienced a mostly positive, constructive pattern of this in my life (which mildly manifested in my second therapy experience as well), so what is usually described as "repetition compulsion" is not always necessarily harmful and negative IMO or stems from past hurt/abuse. But probably the negative kind is more common, or we just generally pay more attention to it due to its nature and effects.

Just to share - I was very aware of my pattern and the mechanisms behind it when I first decided to try therapy at age 40, also out of it to a significant degree. So I consciously decided to choose a T that did not fit my pattern whatsoever beyond the facts that he was an older male. His personal qualities and style was very unlike the people I characteristically tended to be drawn to in my youth and I thought that might be interesting to try, maybe beneficial in some ways? Well, not in my case - it ended up a gigantic personality clash, we had almost nothing in common apart from an interest in psychology and arts (but even in those quite different interests). It was very hard to understand each-other and he misinterpreted me all the time, even after my many attempts to clarify and explain. I also found him an extremely manipulative, insecure man. I've never been drawn to similar people in my life and I also could not develop any attachment to him.

When I was looking for another therapist, I decided to consciously go with my familiar pattern. That ended up being a very pleasant relationship, mutually respectful, benign, with interesting conversations - but not really therapy. It was like a paid superficial friendship.

So, I am not sure at this point if going against or with familiar transference patterns has anything to do with the efficacy of therapy - not in my experience. When I rolled with it, I had a much better interpersonal experience with some occasional very mild ET flaring up, but I did not find it actively therapeutic per se. It had some initially unexpected mild benefits in more passive ways, which is interesting. It actually helped decrease my obsessional tendencies somewhat, I think.

I never had an erotic transference but I think the principles above are well-stated and can apply to any type of transferenence. Thanks!!

I see a difference between the "transference" that occurs within context of real life, and that which occurs in the psychological cage that is the therapy room, where things tend to be distorted and exaggerated and where the other person is actively dispensing psych theories and closely analyzing your behavior and feelings and implying they are just a passive observer.

I've gone through some kind of crucible, and woken up to the true fact that I am less important as an individual to my T than my students were to me back when I taught high school. Because we discussed intimate topics, I got confused ( although not erotic transference- more seeing it as a special bond) that we had some kind of intimate connection. We just don't have that. As I gather the idea I am nt special to my T, he becomes less special and meaningful to me too. It is kind of sad.

No, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the efficacy of therapy. I was not actually suggesting that it's necessary to go against those patterns. My point is that whether the pattern manifests itself in helpful or unhelpful ways, it's important to be aware of its existence, of how it operates, where it comes from and what is its end goal to be able to make a conscious choice of how much to go along with it and where to stop or whether it's beneficial to go along with it at all. Awareness, in and of itself, is the most important thing. What you do with this awareness is secondary.

I also would say that it's counter-productive to go against the established pattern when one still feels the need to continue it. If there is still the need to repeat something, that means there is still the need to learn, to understand something important from it.

I gave up doing the same thing when I no longer felt the need to continue. I would've never given up only because my intellect understood that continuing to do this thing is unhelpful and irrational. That's why prudent and rational advice we get from other people doesn't help. We don't follow it even if we know that the advice is sound. What we "know" intellectually, on the rational level is not the real knowledge we need to be able to make wise choices. We really know something only when our emotions finally "get it". Until then the drama continues..And it needs to continue because that's how we learn..

Were you an only child? What if you have more than one child? Do you see love as a non-renewable limited resource? Maybe letting yourself feel special to your t will be generative.

Personally I hate the word "transference" can't it be as simple as sometimes you get a "crush" on someone? For me it started about halfway through my first session, seems rather quick for "transference" to happen.

Not quick at all It could happen even when you talk on the phone with the person the first time before you even see them

Whether you call it "crush" or "transference" makes no difference. It's all about the mechanics of the process, not the labels. It's just when people prefer to think of it as just a "crush" it allows them to think that it "just happens" for no reason, which, in my experience, is never the case. But it's much easier to think of it just as a crush, because, in that case, no self-reflection is needed. If it's a crush then it is something that is happening TO me, as opposed to something I AM CREATING.

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).

Carmina - as Freud himself admitted, "Ah! But where would one find such a friend?!"

Yes, agree that is proper context. But I think the transference concept is not just for division of labor and monetization; it's also used to bewilder the client and set up a hierarchy wherein the therapist gains psychological power by claiming to be gatekeeper of reality. And I think, back to OP's question, the feeling themselves become secondary to the therapist's framing of the feelings.

Also i found that therapy did not pick up any pieces. It made more pieces.

I don’t think think it’s always transference. I went to a therapist and I thought he was just the cutest little hipster dude. He was half my age and yes I was flat out hot for him. I knew right off the bat that this was not going to be a good thing. And not one I wanted to “work through” like I had a problem. I just got another therapist ASAP.