Transference

How Transference Works

The emotional and motivational relevance of close others is what renders them as broadly influential as they are. They are linked to the self in memory so that one experiences the self differently depending on the particular relationship. Cognitively, the frequency with which these representations have previously been activated and used leads them to have a special readiness to be used again. In short, they are chronically accessible. At the same time, triggering cues in the form of qualities of a new person will heighten the transient activation of a specific representation, making it more likely to be used at that time. Indeed, anything in the external context that maps onto what is known about the significant other can cue the representation, even if seemingly incidental, such as a style of responding or a first name. This cuing occurs even if the resemblance is outside of awareness.

Historical Background

Historically, transference was conceptualized as a clinical concept largely occurring in psychotherapy and useful to therapeutic ends. Freud proposed the concept and conceived it as the patient re-experiencing with an analyst the infantile psycho-sexual conflicts felt with a parent. As reformulated by Harry Stack Sullivan, transference came to be called parataxic distortion. Notions of the self and significant other were at the forefront and bound together by the self-other relationship (termed personifications linked by dynamisms). Transference occurs, then, when material about the significant other is superimposed onto a new person and the learned interpersonal dynamics are experienced anew. The social-cognitive model of transference, formulated by Susan Andersen, is compatible with Sullivan's assumptions, though conceptualized in contemporary terms and in a way that can be examined scientifically. The scientific approach has allowed the first experimental demonstration of this century-old concept.

Procedures Used in Transference Research

In studies of transference, people typically learn about a new person by reading a series of statements about this person. In one condition, a minimal number of the features they learn are ones that they themselves had generated to describe their own significant other in an allegedly independent session several weeks earlier. For example, a feature listed to describe the significant other and then presented about the new person might be “drives a fast sports car” or “bites nails in public.” This is how transference is triggered. In a control condition, participants learn the same information about the new person, but this information does not resemble their own significant other. Instead, it resembles someone else's significant other. Thus, there is no significant-other representation triggered in the latter case.

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