Two Forms of Transference: Implications for Religious Experience

“You must think I’m a terrible human being,” my patient Susan said to me. “You see me pretending that I’m a nice person but then look what really goes on in my mind. I’m selfish and awful. I’ll bet you sit there and think, ‘She deserves to burn in hell forever’.”

The words a short time later from another patient, John, had a very different tone. “I feel so much better after I come here. I feel like, well, like you care for me. I know this must sound funny, since I’m older than you, but you’re almost like a father to me. Or a father confessor. It’s like you have faith in me and then I have more faith in myself.”

Anyone who has done psychoanalytic therapy will find these patients to be familiar in that they exemplify two ways of relating to the therapist, that is, two types of transference. After describing these two types of transference, I will consider their relation to religious experience.

Surprisingly, given their many differences, a wide variety of psychoanalytic theorists recognize that there are two basic forms of transference. Although these theorists do not use the same terminology nor agree on the dynamic origins, they have reached similar conclusions about the main outlines of these two types of transference. (For the most in-depth discussion, see Steven Stern, “Needed Relationships and Repeated Relationships: An Integrated Perspective,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1994, 4, pp. 317-345.) I use the term transference in the sense of a patient’s patterned way of relating to the therapist, a way of relating that has deeper, earlier origins. It reflects the patient’s thought, feeling, and behavior toward caretakers in early childhood, and it also expresses yearnings, desires, and wishes that the patient had toward caretakers.

Susan’s comments are an example of replayed transference. It did not take any leaps of fancy for me to see that she viewed me much as she had viewed her parents, particularly her mother. She was replaying with me the troublesome relationship she had had with her mother. Her parents were often critical of her and regularly accused her of being a selfish pest and a bad girl. She imagined that I saw her in much the same way.

John’s words illustrate something very different, what I call the need-fulfilling transference. The individual mobilizes needs with the therapist, typically those of being accepted, loved, appreciated, and having one’s growth nourished. John experienced these same needs with his parents but was usually frustrated. Earlier in therapy his transference was similar to Susan’s, but after several years his usual stance was to visualize me as caring for him and helping him.

Although these two forms of transference appear dramatically different, the urge behind each of them is similar. In the need-fulfilling transference, the situation is simple: the individual is in touch with basic, legitimate needs and seeks, in therapy, to have these needs met. With the replayed transference, the individual repeats early relationship patterns with the (unconscious) hope that there will be a different outcome. She is familiar only with certain ways of being connected, ways she experienced with her parents. So she is drawn to people like them. She also is seeking to have her basic, legitimate needs fulfilled. She wants someone similar to her parent to treat her in the way she always wanted her parent to treat her. In therapy, she becomes convinced the therapist is

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 like her parent (as Susan did in imagining that I saw her as bad and a pest).

With both Susan and John, there was a religious aspect to their transference—we could speak of both of them as having a transference to religion and to God. Susan feared that God would judge her harshly, much as her parents had, and would consign her to hell as a fitting punishment for the person she was. John could visualize a father confessor, God’s representative on earth, as accepting him and nourishing him, much as he had hoped his parents would have done.

One advantage of my thesis is that it is usable by both those who have religious faith and those who do not. An atheist might conclude that religion is nothing but transference. A believing person might take the view that the urges behind transference—to make connection with those who will love, accept, and nourish us—result from an inherent, God-given receptivity to just that kind of relationship with the Deity.

To state my argument directly: religion, at its best, nourishes and satisfies the need-fulfilling transference, but many central patterns in religions developed on the basis of their ability to exploit the replayed transference.

An equivalent of the replayed transference takes place when religion offers a dead-ended repetition of typical parent-child relationship patterns. The chief disadvantage of this situation is that it tends to leave the individual locked into a non-nourishing, devitalizing cycle. Consider the following three examples.

Susan latched onto certain aspects of Catholicism that replicated her childhood situation. She took to heart the message she heard from the priests and nuns that we must search ourselves for our sins and confess them. She could regularly discover her misdeeds, such as defying, in small ways, her parents, acting selfishly, and harboring sexual thoughts. After unburdening herself in confession, she would feel temporary relief but then would commit “sins” again and would repeat the whole process. The net result is that she felt confirmed in her view of herself as evil but with the added burden that she felt eternal damnation was her ultimate fate.

An orthodox Jew, as a child, was held by both of his parents to exacting standards. His obsessive mother would have angry outbursts at him if he made the smallest mistakes, such as leaving his dirty socks on the floor or failing to clean off the bathmat after taking a shower. His father was a perfectionist who expected him to be the best in his studies; for example, his father expressed severe disappointment once when he brought home a report card with one “B” and the rest “A”s. As an adult, he has emphasized the aspect of Orthodox Judaism that declares that a person is worthy to the extent that he is observant. He is preoccupied with adhering strictly to the many biblical injunctions. Since it is virtually impossible to be perfectly observant, he lives with a sense that God considers him to be not-good-enough and that he is someone who is forever inadequate to meet up to the highest standards.

A fundamentalist Christian grew up in a family which was organized around his parents’ “us-them” approach. Their view was that the family was good, believing, and smart, while the outside world was filled with immoral infidels. The children felt constantly threatened by the possibility that they would be grouped with the despised outsiders. As an adult, the patient belonged to a conservative church that took much the same approach. The church members were considered to be saved, but constant vigilance had to be taken toward the people who did not belong to their denomination; those people were hopelessly tainted with promiscuity, cheating, feminism, divorce, and homosexuality. Yet he knew that he frequently felt temptations along the lines of how the sinful people acted, for example, he might think of a subtle way of shading the truth in a business transaction, or he might be attracted to a woman other than his wife. Hence he felt constantly on the verge of being categorized with the people who were evil. His denomination’s emphasis on original sin and hell further aggravated the state of anxiety that regularly enveloped him.

Yet the equivalent of a need-fulfilling transference can also characterize a person’s religious experience. In this situation the individual has a nourishing relationship with an image of God, with clergy, and with fellow believers such that he or she feels accepted, cherished, and part of a loving communion.

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