Image by Surfaces on Unsplash
The woman sitting on the chair in the small office kitchen stood up quickly when she saw me. I’d been walking down the hall to meet her. She looked like she was trying to sort through a series of facial expressions, scanning my face for clues about which one she should select.
I smiled and walked her back into my office. When I pointed at the couch, settling into the large chair across from her, she perched just at its edges. She tilted her body away from me, looking out of the window as she answered my questions. Though she was hesitant at first, there was a moment when she finally turned to face me, blurting out the story of why she came, how she’d never been in therapy before, and how totally embarrassing it was to be here, talking to me, this stranger, about all this intense stuff. She wasn’t even sure she needed therapy, or what it was for—”I mean, aren’t you just a paid friend?” She caught herself as she spoke, afraid she might have offended me. In her next breath she confessed she didn't have any friends anymore, anyway. “I think everyone is just sick of me talking about my problems all the time.” She sighed, looking back at the pigeons on the telephone line outside.
I have a pretty detailed answer to the question of what makes a therapist different from a good friend, and much of it hinges on my understanding of the concept of transference. I told this client that therapy works in part because it evokes a transference relationship between the therapist and the client. The client “transfers” onto the therapist a set of assumptions about how relationships work. These assumptions are often rooted in dynamics and experiences we’ve had with our primary caregivers, in our first families. The therapist watches for the transference, and over time, she can start to name it as it shows up.
In the above vignette, in that split second when I’m walking down the hall and the new client tries to adjust her expression to generate a certain reaction from me, and I respond by smiling and leading her to my office, her transference, and my counter-transference, have already started to appear.
When we’re sitting with a friend, we might talk about the fight we had with our partner last night. We might receive love, reassurance, advice, commiseration, or even a snack in return. In therapy, we can talk about the same content, but wrap that conversation in a second one, about how we fight, what we learned about the line between “fighting” and abuse, and whether we are even allowed to fight and at the same time feel love.
That second conversation, the one about who we “are” in our relationships and why we might be re-enacting dynamics we desperately want to change, as if we are sleepwalking, or on autopilot—that one hinges on how we identify and talk about transference.
When we start to identify our patterns in relationships, we’ll see that we are treating our boss the way we treated our mother, because that’s our deepest pattern of how to deal with authority. Or we’ll notice that we’re making assumptions about how we’ll be received in groups that have little to do with the present moment. When we can name the transference, see the patterns, we can change our core assumptions about relationships, possibly changing our interpersonal dynamics.
Transference is a concept that is born from psychoanalysis, created by Sigmund Freud. Freud noticed that if he said nothing and listened to the patient talk, the patient would reveal her ideas and assumptions about relationships. The less she knew about Freud, the more she could transfer her patterns onto him. Thus was born the idea that in therapy, the therapist should be a “blank screen”—she shouldn’t reveal much about herself, in order to facilitate the client’s transference.
If my therapist is a blank screen, I can treat her like a parent, a boss, a sports coach, a lawyer, a partner, a friend, an enemy. But if she’s a particular person in my head, with her own history, opinions, desires and beliefs, I’ll be less able to respond to her with all my relational patterns. She will be Louise, my therapist, and not anyone else. I will still have transference, but it will be limited to my assumptions about her.
The question becomes: what happens to transference if the therapist is known? What happens if the therapist discloses something in a session that makes her less of a blank screen?
What does it mean to do therapy in the age of social media? What has happened to transference, given the fact that clients often find a therapist by looking at her web page, reading her tweets, listening to the music she posted on YouTube when her band performed last week? What happens when a client searches for a therapist who shares her political views, or her sexuality, or her racial identity?
Does that make her feel safer, and thus help her attune and attach? Or does it limit her transference, and shut down her capacity to make visible to herself the ways she treats people who she perceives to be different from her?
I’ve had lots of conversations about transference with my clients. They’re savvy about power and control. They want to know what the rules are, and whether the therapist can exploit those rules to hurt or control them. Almost uniformly, they say they want to know who their therapist is, as a person, before they book a first session.
They tell me the blank screen reinforces the power dynamic between the therapist and the client. They feel they’re expected to disclose, to lead with vulnerability, while the therapist sits there, protected by her privacy and her knowledge, perhaps judging, mocking, and evaluating the client, thinking her behavior pathological, or boring, or coy, or something else altogether.
I hear Freud in my head as I write this. He’s chucking. “So much the better!,” he says to me. “You have appeared as the judge, and now the client can explore her loathing and suspicion of authority! Perhaps next week she will imagine you find her fascinating, and you can look at that!”
Freud came up with the theory of transference, and then he tested it in his sessions. He would ask questions and then proffer his interpretations. If the client rejected his interpretation, Freud often got excited: he’d see the rejection as evidence that he was actually on the right track. The “rejection,” he believed, was the client’s resistance to the truth of his interpretation. Her efforts to refute him were evidence that she was trying to push emotional content she found distressing out of her awareness.
Freud’s premise was that the client doesn’t want to know aspects of herself—dreams, wishes, desires, jealousies, self-hatreds—because this self-knowing is unpleasant, and shatters her efforts to see herself as “good.” When Freud met the client’s resistance with renewed vigor, continuing to insist that she consider the possible truth of his interpretations, he did so in the name of freedom.
He wanted to free the client from the snares of her own self-loathing by encouraging her to allow and accept the aspects of her “self” that the dominant culture would tell her were bad, sinful, evil, or otherwise unacceptable. For it was often the client’s efforts to be “good” that were causing the most harm. If the client could accept the disavowed, emotionally-charged content, Freud hoped, then she wouldn’t have to spend so much energy walling herself off from her feelings, staying numb, or suffering from physical and psychological symptoms.
In Freud’s understanding, the struggle between therapist and client is not an effort on the part of the therapist to dominate and control the client. Instead, it’s a re-enactment: it moves the conflict that is inside the client, but repressed, into her full conscious awareness and externalized. The therapist becomes a stand-in for the part of the self that the client doesn’t like. Then the client can attack it, by attacking the therapist. Over time, the client might accept the interpretation and by extension, accept the parts of herself she used to find too disgusting, or anxiety producing, to face.
When we keep our focus “tight”—when we just look at the interpersonal dynamic in transference, the power that the therapist has over the client appears essential to the work of therapy. It is less that Freud wanted to be an asshole and overpower his clients, and more that he knew what he was up against, in terms of wrestling with the mind’s complex defenses.
Today most therapy doesn’t emulate pure psychoanalysis. It’s much more relational. Therapists ask their clients’ permission before they offer an interpretation; the interpretation is often made collaboratively; it’s a rare therapist who offers a completely blank screen to the client. But the history of psychoanalysis is still in the room, still shapes much of what counts as therapy. The power and the complexity of the dynamic is part of what differentiates therapy from tea with a friend.
Freud didn’t limit his analysis to interpersonal dynamics, however. He also wrote about culture, and the ways culture punishes its unruly subjects. The social order needs compliant citizens in order to function. Members of society give up freedom in exchange for safety. If they do not follow its laws, they are policed and punished. For Freud, the tension between the needs of the social order for compliance and the desire on the part of individuals to be free is a deep root of psychological distress. There is no way to resolve the paradox between the need to be safe and the need to be free. But some people internalize cultural norms in a way that is overly self-punishing. Freud was very aware of the punitive nature of his culture, and worked hard to help his clients push against its limits, even as he affirmed they could not resist without tension, anxiety, and distress.
Though Freud did discuss the power of the social order, what he didn’t talk about was oppression, and the ways oppression can saturate the therapeutic dynamic. In his case studies, he didn’t acknowledge the ways patriarchy was impacting his relationships with his clients. He didn’t ask how patriarchy reinforced his “standing” as a person, how it reinforced his power and his confidence in his interpretations of his clients’ mental conflicts.
He didn’t ask how patriarchy constructed women as emotional, unreliable, less intellectual than men, and thus less capable of pushing back against his interpretations of their lives. He took their disagreement as resistance, as a natural response on the part of the psyche to having its secrets revealed. He didn’t consider how hard it must have been for women to muster resistance at all, in the context of a highly patriarchal culture, made manifest in the incisive mind and formidable body of Freud.
When a therapist discloses information about herself, makes herself more known, she makes it more evident that she is speaking not only as a trained professional—speaking in that historical legacy of the expert who looks, notes, provides feedback and interpretations—but also as a person, with her own history and perspective.
Perhaps more importantly, she is opening the door to conversations about how she is situated by virtue of her race, class origins, education, sexuality, and other factors. (For more on the situated body, check out this post.) She’s acknowledging she’s more than her individual and familial histories. She occupies multiple identities. She may inhabit multiple locations in the social order, giving her power in some arenas and subjecting her to oppression in others, all of which contribute to and provide a context for her counter-transference, her lived experience in the world.
The client and the therapist may share similar situated identities. Or they may have similar personalities and interests as individuals, but very different locations in terms of structural power. To focus on transference, without attending to structural power, can skew the dynamic between therapist and client. At its worst, it can create a dynamic that unwittingly re-traumatizes the client, just at the moment when the therapist believes she is doing the most good.
To be clear: the kind of self-disclosure I’m talking about here isn’t about the therapist making a bid to have the client meet her needs, comment on her life, or otherwise engage what she knows about her therapist. It’s about the therapist using self-disclosure to open up conversations about power at the level of the system, which may be impacting the client and the therapist in radically different ways. It’s about bringing in an additional layer of analysis, occurring concurrently with the transference.
By making conversations about structural power a usual and expected part of the therapy session, the client and the therapist can examine the feedback loops that occur between interpersonal dynamics and structural dynamics. They can talk about individual change, but they can also talk about the limits of individual power. They can address the ways structures of oppression create mental distress, and must be fought with the same fierceness with which Freud approached his work on transference.
The dominant culture often acts a lot like an individual psyche: it resists seeing the pain and the suffering that are its legacy; it refuses change; it re-enacts trauma; it fights with everything it has against acknowledging information and wisdom that challenges how it has always behaved. Therapists, and those who participate in therapy, can use the skills we learn in the therapeutic space to unleash the energy and power we need to overcome violence and domination at the level of the culture at large. And we can start that process in our sessions, by making visible, by saying aloud, the things that are so painful to feel, so terrifying to resist.
Aren’t You Just a Paid Friend?