Transference - The Make Up of Our Lives

The following information will be from The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.

Transference is the “complete control over external circumstances… in all its variety and multiplicity of manifestation.” This is William V. Silverberg’s definition of it, found in The Denial of Death. I agree to this definition. I have had an urge to make a post that gives great detail and a variety of definitions to this term, but it all comes down to the same thing. We project our own emotions and thoughts onto others so that we can control the circumstance that we are in – we create our own illusion of reality. This is why I call Transference the make up of our lives – it is the make up of our external “illusionary” life that we present to the world daily. This means we resist reality daily – a true reality that is – that we do not want to see. So we create what we want by following leaders, or being the leader ourselves.

This brings on the question of ignorance. “We ask each other, why are most men blind and stupid?” Freud’s response to this question is as follows: “Because they demand illusions… they constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” Becker’s view on why we create our illusion of reality is because we are in the denial of our true nature – which is animal like. The world tells us that we aren’t as strong as we appear to be, and that there is death and decay. Most men fear these two objects because they know one day they will have to become them. First: death, Second: decay. This illusion of our reality helps us to think of our bodies as immortal, that we are important here on earth and have a purpose beyond other animals.

This illusion may be presented by our parents, but perfected once we interact with society beyond our families. This is where the creation of “groups” comes about, and every group has a leader: “The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader Okays it. It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn’t censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father.” This shows the vulnerability of the human character.

We are vulnerable, the majority of us, because we “pull the world around our shoulders” as we try to grasp for protection and support, and at the same time trying to understand the little power we know we have. So, we project our problems onto a leader, someone who can take control and “resolve these matters” in a way that we, so we tell ourselves, could not. At the same time we do this the leader projects his own vulnerability: the inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation. The same fear we all have. Becker states, “We must say that if there were not natural leaders possessing the magic of charisma, men would have to invent them, just as leaders must create followers if there are none available.” I will post more on this in a later post.

Inside we feel, at some point, a ping of emptiness and loneliness. This “alienation” is reflected through our projections: “In order to overcome his sense of inner emptiness and impotence, [man]… chooses an object onto whom he projects all his own human qualities: his love, intelligence, courage, etc. by submitting to this object, he feels in touch with his own qualities; he feels strong, wise, courageous, and secure. To lose the object means the danger of losing himself,” this is Erich Fromm’s point of view of transference. The Adlerian view: “[transference]… is basically a maneuver of tactic by which the patient seeks to perpetuate his familiar mode of existence that depends on a continuing attempt to divest himself of power and place it in the hands of the “Other.”” These three similar yet different points of view come down to the same thing: transference is “the basic problems of an organismic life, problems of power and control”. That is Becker’s way of saying the controlling (and opposing) the reality we see for our own fulfillment and expansion.

Transference of Hate, Illness, and fetishism

Transference helps us fix ourselves into the world and create targets for our emotions, even if they are negative and destructive. Hate and submission are ways we can establish our own “organismic footing”. Hate is a strong negative emotion that enlivens us more, which is why it is stronger in the weaker ego states (what some call the “weak minded” individual). Hate is a strong negative emotion – loves counter part. Once one accepts this emotion inside them, it is hard to get rid of because it creates archetypes (I’ll mention in another post) that have their own personalities that can easily control an individual if one lets them. I’ll expand on this at another time. Hate makes the object it is projected toward larger than it is; hate gives this object power. We need our own object to control, even if it is our own bodies.

The pains we feel, and the illnesses that are real or imaginary, gives us something to relate to, they keep us from slipping out of the world, from “bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness. In a word, illness is an object,” states Becker. “We transfer illness to our own body as if it were a friend on whom we can lean for strength or an enemy who threatens us with danger.” This makes us feel more real, gives us a purpose for being here on Earth in a body that doesn’t truly belong to us, but just a machine that we have to figure out how it works with the soul – it gives “a little purchase on our fate.”

Transference is a form of fetishism. We take our helplessness, guilt, and our conflicts and we “fix them to a spot in the environment.” By doing this we can create anything by projecting our cares onto the world. It’s our own cares that we focus on, that we form and mold into something of our created external reality. Carl Jung puts it this way, “…unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.” This statement is true because by projecting our cares to the world, we are projecting parts of ourselves, which we meet in the people we interact with daily – we attract what we project.

Art of Control

The transference object, according to Otto Rank, represents “the great biological forces of nature, to which the ego binds itself emotionally and which then form the essence of the human and his fate.” The child, according to this definition, then can control his fate. Power means power over life and death, and as a child we learn this “art of control”. This art of control is to conform in ways that one learns from childhood; we learn how to control the emotions we project. Some ways we do this are as such: “conciliate it if it becomes terrible; use it serenely for automatic daily activities. For this reason Andras Angyal could well say that transference is not an “emotional mistake” but the experience of the other as one’s whole world – just as the home actually is, for the child, his whole world.”

The above paragraph points out the many problems that the transference object poses. One, the child partly controls his fate in the larger picture, but that then becomes his new fate. This is done by the projection of our emotions. The child binds himself to one person to control his terror, “mediate wonder, and defeat the thought of death by the person’s strength.” This person (the parent or caregiver) then becomes his safety. On the other hand, he experiences the “Transference Terror”, the terror of losing the object, of not being able to live without it. He then becomes torn because “the terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object.”

Since the transference object represents all of life, it also represents one’s fate. Since it controls our reality, it also hinders our freedom, which is why it becomes “the focus of the problem of one’s freedom.” It does this both in the positive and negative transference. In the negative transference, “the object becomes the focalization of terror.” It is also the source of much of our bitter memories of childhood and “our accusations of our parents.” This is why we blame them for our unhappiness; they were the ones who first introduced the art of control to us by conforming us to society and the reality they wanted us to be in. This is why we then “attempt to control our fate in an automatic way.”

The Neurotic and Schizophrenic Transference

Transference shows that we are all neurotic. Being neurotic is a distortion of reality by the “artificial fixation of it”. The more fear one has, and less power over the ego, the stronger the transference. This is how one becomes schizophrenic. In the schizophrenic transference the images of the unconscious come to the conscious mind, this happens to us all, but in the so-called schizophrenic these images take total control of the person’s life; the protective veil we place between the conscious and unconscious out of protection of our so-called sanity is lifted in the schizophrenic, and they have no way of controlling what they perceive. Even in “normal transference” we remain uncontrollably “glued to an object” such as: “all the power to cure the diseases of life, the ills of the world.” We all have our own illusions we follow, our own fantasy world we create for our own, just like the so-called neurotics and schizophrenics.

Transference of Immortality

It seems the more others have, the more it rubs off on us. Either we want what they have, and get it, or we just dream of it. We place certain people on pedestals, like celebrities, and aspire to be like them. This is part of us trying to be immortal by taking all we can from the material external world so that we can form and mold it the way we wish to. Rank says that “man is always hungry for his own immortalization.” This is seen in groups as well, which is why there is the “constant hung for heroes: Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an “individual” impulse for externalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes… the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse…”

Conclusion

The only way most of us have to overcome “the sense of helpless limitation inherent” in our real situation is to torture ourselves with dissatisfaction and constant self-criticism. “Dictators, revivalists, and sadists know that people like to be lashed with accusations of their own basic unworthiness because it reflects how they truly feel about themselves. The sadist doesn’t create a masochist; he finds him ready-made.” There is one way, though, to overcome “unworthiness” and that is to “idealize the self.” This is where the “complementary dialogue” with our selves comes about. According to Becker, we criticize ourselves because we “fall short of the heroic ideals [we] need to meet in order to be a really imposing creation.” This means, to me, that we fall short of the importance we create for ourselves and the obligations we think we should fulfill in our created reality.

We want the impossible: we want to lose our isolation and keep it at the same time; we cant stand “the sense of separateness” and yet we can’t allow the “complete suffocation of our vitality”; we want to expand by merging with “the powerful beyond” that transcends us, and yet we want, while merging with it, to remain “individual and aloof”, working out our own private and “small-scale self-expansion.” This is impossible to do, because we can’t merge in “the power of another thing” and develop our own personal power at the same time. It is one, or the other. One way we can get around this problem is this: “control the kind of beyond, the one in which you find it most natural to practice self-criticism and self-idealization. In other words, you try to keep your beyond safe.” This is the “fundamental use of transference” that Becker calls “transferences heroics” which is the practice of a “safe heroism.” In this we see the problem of transference and heroism. There is no one way of control. In order to “reach the great beyond” inside our selves, we have to let go of our control of this physical world, and that means getting rid of attachments.

 

Here is a video on attachments and why we should get rid of them, posted by TheSpiritScience on Youtube: 

The above was information from Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death. Below will be information I collected from Carl Jung’s autobiography, Dreams, Reflections, Memories.

Jung’s View of Transference

“In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference ,a dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.^”

The above quote was taken from Wikipedia, and it is only just a slim explanation of Jung’s view of the transference. It is a good explanation, sure, but there’s more to transference than just that.

The Make up of Transference.

Jung spoke in great description of the make up of the psyche, which is the make up of transference. He is the one who defined analytical psychology, which is the study of the unconscious mind and how the forces that make up it interacts with us on a daily bases; these very forces are what create our personalities.

Loss of Connection with the Past

Our ancestors helped build the functioning process of the unconscious mind; what they knew resides in us still, we just have to know how to unlock it again. They left it open to us, and some of our ancestors are around us still, guiding us to uncover the knowledge that only appears to be hidden, but really is not.

There is no “newness” in our psyche; it is just “an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.” This gives it a “historical character and finds no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.” Our bodies and souls are “composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.” Meaning, has always been present. Our so-called “modern psyches” is still composed of components from “the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitively.” Our “Modern psyches” like to pretend we are done with these eras and that they are no longer part of us, but this is wrong. Yet, on the outside, it appears that “we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future.” This only brings us “ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.” This “loss of connection with the past, our up rootedness” has caused more violence and destruction than progress. It has “given rise to the “discontents” of civilization.” We live more in the future than in the present, we aren’t looking at what is happening before our eyes, but what is happening beyond. We are looking at the “promises of a golden age” than in the present, and haven’t given “our whole evolutionary background” a chance to catch up. Many of us don’t realize that “everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.” For example, “the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.” The less we understand the history of our ancestors, what our “fathers and forefathers sought” the less we understand ourselves, because they are a part of our unconscious minds. By not understanding our past histories, our ancestors past histories as well, the more we rob ourselves of our roots and our “guiding instincts”. By doing this we become “a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called “the spirit of gravity”,” meaning we become the object society forms us to become, ruled only by what others keep us rooted to the ground; rooted to the spot with no room to grow.

“If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.”

We have to find the balance between the present, and the past that still is inside us. We can not move forward without knowing what went on in the past, and we have to focus on what is happening in the present before we can focus on the coming future. Today is yesterday’s future, we can not look passed today for a future we are to create. We create the future in the present.

Characteristic of Childhood

“The emotional nature of these unreflective people (Arabs/Eastern world) who are so much closer to life than we are exerts a strong suggestive influence upon those historical layers in ourselves which we have just overcome and left behind, or which we think we have overcome. It is like the paradise of childhood from which we imagine we have emerged, but which at the slightest provocation imposes fresh defeats upon us. Indeed, our cult of progress is in danger of imposing on us even more childish dreams of the future, the harder it presses us to escape from the past.”

A “characteristic of childhood” is that it “sketches a more complete picture of the self, of the whole man in his pure individuality” than does adulthood. It is this way in childhood because of “naïveté and unconsciousness.” On one hand it is good to be naïve because then we know to look at the images of the unconsciousness as real, not imaginary. On the other hand it’s not good to be too naïve because then the unconscious images (archetypes) will take total control and we then no longer have control of our life or reality. Then again, there is bliss into this too, because we need the heart of a child to be able to accept the archetypes of the unconscious so that we can interact with them in our lives, but without letting them have complete control. Because of this characteristic of childhood – “naïveté and unconsciousness” – the sight of a child “or a primitive will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons – longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.” We need to let these personalities come to life, and accept that they are there, so that they won’t come out at random in an uncontrolled matter that may cause catastrophe.

The Question of Immortality

“In the majority of cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how? My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of things sent to us from the unconscious – in dreams, for example.”

In Jung’s view we can find answers to everyday life through our dreams, and also through our dreams can we find bits and pieces that help us understand our true self our “higher Self”. We usually dismiss these hints from our dreams because “we are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer.” In response to this Jung suggests the following considerations:

1. If there is something we cannot know, we must abandon it as an intellectual problem. An example of this is: “I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know. Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem.”
2. If an idea about it (i.e. universe) is offered to me – in dreams or in mythic traditions – I ought to take note of it. “I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved

Our unconscious presents what we are to learn, what we chose to learn for our selves before we entered our mother’s womb and was birthed to this earth. The unconscious interacts with us through our dreams because that is when our conscious mind is shut off; we have to be awake for our conscious mind to work. The bits and pieces that our unconscious presents to us in our dreams, if written down or described in some way, can add up to a hypothesis that will help answer those “mysteries” of the world that we have never completely understood.

Neurotic Myth

Many of the “so-called neurotics of our day” in other ages would not have been neurotic “that is, divided against themselves.” If they had lived in a time in which man was still “linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside,” they wouldn’t have this division with themselves that we have today. This means, those who experience the world through their interior world versus “merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.” We call such people who live inside themselves, and projecting what’s inside them unchanged, neurotic. To me, they are the only ones who truly see the world as it, not in the transference version most of us see it.

Wherever the psyche is moved by a “divine” experience, there is a danger that one may be torn between what they find true and the belief system that was created for them by society, the object of transference. When this torn happens, when one is in the middle of believing the truth of reality or the illusion of it, they are in an “in-between-state”. The Orient’s remedy for this is “Nirdvandva [nirvana] (freedom of the opposites)”. The mind becomes then a pendulum, which goes between sense and nonsense. This <a numinosum (or divine experience as I call it) “lures men to extremes” which can be very dangerous, because only a “partial truth” tends to be believed as the truth, and that “partial truth” becomes set in stone when it should not be. This can cause a “fatal error, not only in the individual, but also in the society the individual may present this “partial truth”.

“Yesterday may be tomorrow’s revelation. This is particularly so in psychological matters, of which, if truth were told, we still know very little. We are still a long way from understanding what signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small – and oh, so transitory – consciousness has become aware of it.”

Conclusion – How to Help the Undiscovered Self

According to Jung, for psychotherapists to truly help their patients, they must not “shut [their] eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering. The rapport consists, after all, in a constant comparison and mutual comprehension, in the dialectical confrontation of two opposing psychic realities.” If, for what ever reason, these “mutual impressions” don’t have an effect on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced. “Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found.”

The doctor has to have a different view as the patient, in order to fully help guide the patient. This holds true to anyone who is trying to help any other human being with the problem of their self – like say, dealing with an emotion or a traumatic event – you have to have a different view than the other person. We all have our different views on reality, and one can not have the same view as the other when one is helping with the Self. In order to truly help someone, one must be ok with going into their unconscious minds and facing the images and listening to the words that come to them. Only then can they understand the other person enough to help them through the problem of the self.

This video was posted by obiwan1947 on Youtube. It is a piece of 2 interviews from Carl Jung on Transference and the Archetype. There are subtitles so that you can have a better idea of what he is saying. I suggest watching it somewhere quiet so you can better understand the words.

I put a variety of examples and explanations of this broad term into this post to help one understand, somewhat, why we view the reality the way we do and what may cause it. Knowing the images that control our world, that we project from our unconscious, is a step closer to knowing our selves – all sides – including the shadow self - that demands to be noticed.

Click the words underlined in bold if you want to learn more about them.