Posted by Dinah on April 10, 2006, at 20:19:05
In reply to that brand of therapy ;-) » special_k, posted by pseudoname on April 8, 2006, at 14:47:18
I rather think that transference isn't a useless or baseless theory.
If you look at Babble, you can see it in action every day. Dr. Bob is the same person, yet different people see him so wildly differently. He's a rather distant figure, so we don't have a lot of information to do reality checks on, and we tend to shove him into whatever template we have for people who exhibit the bits of information we know about him. And for many of us, those same templates might contain a lot of other people we meet in our life. And we might have other templates we shove other people into. And we might react to them with all the stored up perceptions we have to anyone stuffed in the same template. Perceptions that probably aren't all that accurate. If we can see past our own transference templates and into the real world, wouldn't that be helpful?
I don't think a therapist could do that by concentrating only on transference in the therapeutic relationship, but if they bring up distortions of reality in our views of various people, or if we learn to start considering that ourselves...
I'm not entirely convinced that therapy love is transference though. I tend to think it's the unintended consequence of the setup of therapy. The artificial intimacy of the therapy room, the undivided attention, all are things that our minds confuse with the situations that we're evolutionarily wired to associate with those conditions. Parent child (particularly mother child) and courtship and mating. It doesn't seem fair to mimic those situations then call the resulting feelings transference.
poster:Dinah
thread:628935
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060406/msgs/631546.html