In this episode, William Gomes explores transference, the phenomenon through which past relationships and unconscious patterns structure present experience. Far from being merely a therapeutic artifact or distortion of reality, transference reveals the fundamental way in which the subject’s history organises their relationships, perceptions, and desires. By examining how transference operates both within and beyond the analytic setting, this episode demonstrates why understanding this concept is essential to grasping psychoanalytic practice and the ongoing influence of unconscious formations on everyday life.
Understanding Transference: The Return of the Past
The Discovery of Transference
Transference was one of Freud’s most significant discoveries, emerging from his early clinical work. He observed that patients developed intense feelings toward him: love, hatred, dependence, rivalry. Initially, Freud viewed these feelings as obstacles to treatment, resistances that interfered with the patient’s ability to remember and work through their past.
Yet Freud came to recognise that transference was not merely an obstacle but rather the central phenomenon of psychoanalytic treatment. The feelings that patients developed toward the analyst were not random or arbitrary. Rather, they repeated patterns from earlier relationships, particularly relationships with parental figures. The patient was transferring onto the analyst feelings, attitudes, and expectations that belonged to these earlier relationships.
This discovery transformed psychoanalytic technique. Rather than trying to eliminate transference, the analyst could use it. The transference brought the patient’s unconscious patterns into the present, made them visible and available for interpretation. The patient was not merely talking about their past; they were living it in the relationship with the analyst.
Transference thus became both the primary obstacle and the primary vehicle of psychoanalytic work. It created resistances, complicated the treatment, generated intense emotions that could derail the work. Yet it also provided direct access to unconscious formations, allowed the analyst to observe and interpret patterns as they occurred, created the conditions for genuine psychic transformation.
Transference Beyond the Analytic Setting
Whilst transference was discovered in the analytic setting, it is not limited to psychoanalysis. Rather, transference is a fundamental feature of human relationships. The subject brings to every new encounter patterns from past relationships, unconscious expectations and assumptions, fantasies about how others will respond.
This means that we never encounter others simply as they are. Rather, we perceive them through the lens of our past, organise our responses according to familiar patterns, unconsciously assign them roles from our history. The boss becomes the critical father, the partner becomes the abandoning mother, the friend becomes the rivalrous sibling.
These transferential patterns are not conscious or deliberate. The subject does not think, “I will treat this person as if they were my father.” Rather, the patterns operate unconsciously, structuring perception and response without awareness. The subject experiences their feelings and reactions as appropriate to the present situation, not recognising that they are responding to ghosts from the past.
Understanding transference as a general phenomenon helps explain certain puzzling features of social life. Why do conflicts escalate beyond what seems rational? Why do people repeatedly misunderstand each other despite clear communication? Why do relationships so often repeat familiar patterns? The answer lies in transference: we are all constantly relating not to the people actually present but to unconscious representations structured by our history.
Positive and Negative Transference
Freud distinguished between positive and negative transference. Positive transference involves feelings of affection, admiration, or love toward the analyst. Negative transference involves feelings of hostility, resentment, or hatred. Both forms are significant for analytic work.
Positive transference can facilitate treatment. The patient’s affection for the analyst motivates them to attend sessions, to engage in the work, to tolerate the difficulties of analysis. Yet positive transference can also become resistance. If the patient is satisfied merely with the analyst’s approval or affection, they may avoid deeper work, may maintain superficial cooperation whilst defending against genuine transformation.
Negative transference is often more difficult to work with. The patient’s hostility can threaten the treatment, can lead to premature termination, can create impasses where no interpretation seems possible. Yet negative transference is also essential. It reveals the patient’s aggressive impulses, their capacity for hatred and rivalry, aspects of their psyche that might otherwise remain hidden.
Moreover, both positive and negative transference can mask each other. Intense positive feelings might defend against underlying hostility. Apparent negativity might conceal deeper attachment or dependence. The analyst must attend to both what is manifest and what is concealed, understanding transference as a complex, layered formation rather than a simple emotional response.
Transference and Repetition
As discussed in Episode 21, repetition is fundamental to psychic life. Transference is a particular form of repetition: the repetition of relationship patterns in the present. The patient does not remember their past relationships; rather, they repeat them, enact them in the relationship with the analyst.
This repetition occurs because unconscious formations are structured through signifying chains that organise experience according to familiar patterns. When the patient encounters the analyst, unconscious signifiers are activated, linking the present relationship to past relationships through chains of association. The analyst becomes assimilated to familiar figures, perceived through the lens of past experience.
Yet this repetition is also an opportunity. Because the patient repeats in the transference, the analyst can observe these patterns directly. The repetition is not merely historical; it is occurring now, in the present relationship. This makes it available for interpretation, for intervention, for potential transformation.
Understanding transference as repetition also helps explain its persistence. The patient does not simply develop transferential feelings once and then move beyond them. Rather, transference continues throughout treatment, shifting forms, moving between positive and negative, becoming more or less intense. The repetition insists because it is structured through unconscious formations that cannot be simply eliminated or corrected.
The Structure of Transference
The Subject Supposed to Know
Lacan introduces the concept of the “subject supposed to know” to explain the fundamental structure of transference. The patient attributes to the analyst a knowledge that the analyst does not actually possess. The patient supposes that the analyst knows the truth of their unconscious, understands the meaning of their symptoms, possesses answers to their questions.
This supposition is essential for transference to operate. It is what allows the patient to free associate, to speak without censorship, to reveal thoughts and feelings they would otherwise keep hidden. The patient speaks to someone they believe knows, someone who will understand, someone who can provide interpretation and meaning.
Yet this supposition is also a fantasy. The analyst does not actually know the truth of the patient’s unconscious. The unconscious is not a hidden text waiting to be decoded by an expert reader. Rather, the unconscious emerges through the patient’s own speech, reveals itself through slips, associations, and patterns that the patient produces.
The analyst’s position is thus paradoxical. They must maintain the patient’s supposition of knowledge, must allow the transference to develop, must occupy the position of the one who knows. Yet they must also refuse to provide the knowledge that is supposed, must deflect the patient’s demands for answers, must help the patient recognise that the truth lies not in the analyst’s knowledge but in their own unconscious formations.
The Analyst as Objet Petit a
As discussed in Episode 9, the objet petit a is the object-cause of desire, the object that sets desire in motion whilst remaining forever unattainable. In the transference, the analyst comes to occupy the position of objet petit a. The patient’s desire is organised around the analyst, yet the analyst remains enigmatic, opaque, fundamentally unknowable.
This positioning is crucial for the work of analysis. If the analyst were simply a real person with knowable characteristics and responses, transference could not fully develop. The patient would relate to the analyst as they relate to anyone else, according to conscious perceptions and rational assessments.
Yet the analytic setting establishes conditions that allow the analyst to function as objet petit a. The analyst sits outside the patient’s sight, speaks rarely, reveals little about themselves. This creates a void, an absence, around which the patient’s fantasies can organise. The analyst becomes a screen onto which the patient projects their unconscious formations.
This is not manipulation or artifice. Rather, it respects the structure of desire and the unconscious. Desire requires an object that remains partially unknown, that promises satisfaction whilst withholding it. By occupying this position, the analyst allows the patient’s desire to manifest, to reveal its unconscious structures, to become available for analysis.
Transference Love
One of the most challenging aspects of transference is when the patient falls in love with the analyst. This transferential love can be intense, overwhelming, apparently genuine. The patient experiences it as real love, as authentic feeling directed toward the analyst as a person.
Yet Lacan emphasises that transference love is structured by the same dynamics as any love. All love involves some degree of transference, some projection of unconscious fantasies onto the beloved, some attribution of imaginary qualities to the other. What distinguishes transference love in analysis is not its artificiality but rather the conditions that make its structure visible.
The patient loves the analyst because the analyst occupies the position of the subject supposed to know, because the analyst functions as objet petit a, because the analytic setting creates conditions where unconscious fantasies can fully develop. The love reveals the patient’s fundamental fantasy, their particular way of organising desire, their unconscious expectations about relationships.
The analyst must neither gratify nor simply reject transferential love. Gratification would collapse the transference into reality, would transform the analytic relationship into an actual relationship, would foreclose the possibility of analysing the love’s unconscious structure. Yet simple rejection would be cruel and would fail to recognise the truth that transferential love reveals about the patient’s desire.
Instead, the analyst interprets the love, helps the patient recognise its transferential nature, explores what the love reveals about unconscious formations. This is delicate work, requiring both firmness and sensitivity, both maintaining abstinence and acknowledging the genuineness of the patient’s feelings.
Resistance Through Transference
Transference is both the vehicle of analysis and a major source of resistance. The patient uses transference to avoid rather than engage with unconscious material. Intense positive feelings can defend against negative feelings or painful insights. Preoccupation with the analyst can distract from work on other relationships or life situations.
The patient might develop what Freud called “transference neurosis,” where the neurosis that previously manifested in symptoms or life difficulties becomes focused entirely on the relationship with the analyst. Whilst this brings the neurosis into the analytic relationship where it can be observed, it can also create impasses where the patient’s entire psychic energy is absorbed by transferential concerns.
Understanding resistance through transference requires recognising that the patient both wants and does not want to change. Consciously, they seek relief from suffering, understanding of their difficulties, transformation of painful patterns. Yet unconsciously, they resist change because their symptoms and patterns provide jouissance, because transformation would involve loss, because knowing the unconscious truth is threatening.
The analyst works with resistance not by trying to overcome it but by interpreting it, by helping the patient recognise how they use transference to avoid certain material, by exploring what the resistance defends against.
Transference in Clinical Practice
Establishing the Transference
The beginning of analysis involves establishing conditions for transference to develop. The analyst’s abstinence, their refusal to answer personal questions or to provide reassurance and advice, creates a void that the patient must fill with their own fantasies and projections.
Free association, the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, also facilitates transference. When the patient is asked to say whatever comes to mind without censorship, they reveal unconscious patterns, make associations that bypass conscious control, produce material that reflects their transferential relationship to the analyst.
The analytic setting itself structures transference. The patient lies on the couch whilst the analyst sits out of sight. This physical arrangement mirrors early childhood experiences of speaking to parents without seeing them, of being cared for by someone whose face is not visible. It activates unconscious memories and patterns, creates conditions where the past can return.
Yet transference does not simply happen automatically. The analyst must maintain a particular position, must resist gratifying the patient’s demands, must interpret rather than respond. This requires discipline and training, requires the analyst to manage their own countertransference, requires maintaining the analytic frame even when under pressure.
Interpreting the Transference
Interpretation of transference is different from other forms of psychoanalytic interpretation. When the analyst interprets a dream or a slip of the tongue, they are commenting on material the patient has produced. Yet when the analyst interprets transference, they are commenting on the patient’s relationship to the analyst themselves.
This creates unique difficulties. The patient might experience transference interpretation as rejection, as criticism, as the analyst refusing to acknowledge genuine feelings. The patient might feel exposed, embarrassed, or angry that their unconscious patterns are being pointed out.
Yet transference interpretation is essential. It is what allows the patient to recognise that their feelings and perceptions are structured by their past, that they are relating to the analyst through unconscious patterns, that the relationship is organised by transference rather than simply reflecting the analyst’s actual characteristics.
Effective transference interpretation requires timing and tact. Premature interpretation can feel intrusive or dismissive. Yet delayed interpretation allows transferential patterns to become entrenched, makes them harder to dislodge. The analyst must judge when the patient is ready to hear that their feelings are transferential, when such interpretation will be productive rather than destructive.
Working Through Transference
Working through transference is a lengthy process. The patient does not simply recognise once that their feelings are transferential and then move beyond them. Rather, the same patterns repeat, return in different forms, require repeated interpretation and exploration.
This repetition is necessary. The unconscious formations that structure transference are deeply rooted, overdetermined, connected to multiple aspects of the patient’s history and psychic structure. Single interpretations, however accurate, do not dissolve these formations. Rather, they must be worked through repeatedly, approached from different angles, understood in their full complexity.
Working through also involves the patient experiencing the transference fully. It is not enough to intellectually understand that one is transferring parental patterns onto the analyst. The patient must feel these patterns, must experience the intensity of transferential love or hatred, must live through the repetition in order to genuinely transform it.
This is why psychoanalysis takes time. The work cannot be rushed. The transference must develop, must be interpreted, must be worked through. Attempts to accelerate this process risk superficial insight without genuine transformation, intellectual understanding without emotional working through.
The Resolution of Transference
Classical psychoanalytic theory posited that successful analysis involved the resolution or dissolution of the transference. The patient would come to recognise that their feelings toward the analyst were transferential, would work through the unconscious patterns that structured these feelings, and would eventually relate to the analyst more realistically.
Yet Lacan questions whether transference can ever be fully resolved. If transference is a fundamental feature of human relationships, if all relationships involve some degree of unconscious projection and fantasy, then complete resolution would mean the end of all relationship, the dissolution of the social bond itself.
Moreover, the transference to the analyst is replaced not by non-transferential relating but by different transferential configurations. The patient might move from transference based on parental figures to transference based on other relationships, might shift from positive to negative transference, might develop new fantasies about the analyst.
What can change is the patient’s relationship to transference. Rather than being unconsciously captured by transferential patterns, the patient can recognise them, can understand how they structure relationships, can take some distance from their compulsive operation. The transference continues, yet the patient’s awareness of it transforms its effects.
Countertransference
The Analyst’s Unconscious Response
Countertransference refers to the analyst’s unconscious responses to the patient. Just as the patient transfers onto the analyst patterns from their past, the analyst transfers onto the patient, responds according to their own unconscious formations, experiences feelings that reflect their own history rather than merely the patient’s material.
Initially, countertransference was viewed as problematic, as evidence of the analyst’s incomplete analysis or unresolved conflicts. The ideal analyst would have no countertransference, would respond purely based on the patient’s material rather than their own unconscious.
Yet contemporary psychoanalysis recognises that countertransference is inevitable and can be analytically useful. The analyst’s emotional responses provide information about what the patient is unconsciously communicating, about dynamics that might not be explicit in the patient’s speech, about transferential pressures that the patient is exerting.
Understanding countertransference requires the analyst to engage in ongoing self-analysis, to distinguish between responses that reflect the patient’s unconscious communications and responses that reflect the analyst’s own unresolved conflicts. This is delicate work, requiring honesty and self-awareness, requiring the analyst to take responsibility for their own participation in the analytic relationship.
The Analyst’s Desire
Lacan emphasises the importance of the analyst’s desire. This is not desire for the patient or desire for particular outcomes. Rather, it is a particular relationship to desire and knowledge that allows the analyst to occupy the analytic position.
The analyst’s desire is the desire to cause desire in the other, to occupy the position of objet petit a, to be what sets the patient’s desire in motion. Yet this must be done without claiming to know, without providing the answers that the patient demands, without gratifying the patient’s wishes.
This requires the analyst to manage their own desire to help, to cure, to provide solutions. These desires, whilst well-intentioned, interfere with the analytic work. The analyst who wants too much to help will gratify the patient’s demands rather than interpreting them, will provide reassurance rather than maintaining abstinence, will foreclose the patient’s encounter with their own unconscious.
The analyst’s desire is thus paradoxical: to desire without demanding, to occupy the position of the one who knows whilst refusing to provide knowledge, to cause desire whilst withholding satisfaction. This requires training, supervision, and ongoing analysis of the analyst’s own unconscious.
Managing Countertransferential Feelings
The analyst will inevitably experience strong feelings toward certain patients: attraction, irritation, boredom, anxiety. These feelings are countertransferential, reflecting both the patient’s unconscious communications and the analyst’s own responses.
The question is not whether to have these feelings but what to do with them. Acting on countertransferential feelings, whether through gratification or rejection, collapses the analytic relationship, transforms it into a personal relationship governed by mutual unconscious acting out.
Yet simply suppressing countertransferential feelings is also problematic. Unacknowledged countertransference will influence the analyst’s interpretations, will bias their listening, will create blind spots where they cannot hear certain material.
The analyst must instead observe their countertransferential feelings, must reflect on what they reveal, must use them as information whilst not acting on them. This might involve discussing countertransference in supervision, might require additional analysis of particularly strong or persistent countertransferential patterns, might necessitate referring the patient to another analyst if countertransference becomes unmanageable.
The Analyst’s Training Analysis
The requirement that analysts undergo their own analysis is partly to address countertransference. The analyst who has not worked through their own unconscious patterns will unconsciously enact them with patients, will respond according to their own unresolved conflicts, will be unable to maintain the analytic position.
Yet training analysis has limits. The analyst will never achieve complete self-knowledge, will never eliminate all unconscious patterns. Countertransference will continue throughout the analyst’s career, will arise with different patients, will take different forms.
This is why ongoing supervision and personal analysis are essential. The analyst must continue to work on their own unconscious, must remain open to discovering new aspects of their psychic structure, must take responsibility for how their own formations influence their clinical work.
Transference in Everyday Life
Transference in Intimate Relationships
Intimate relationships are particularly saturated with transference. Partners transfer onto each other patterns from parental relationships, expectations based on early attachment experiences, unconscious fantasies about love and intimacy.
This explains certain puzzling features of intimate relationships. Why do conflicts often seem disproportionate to their apparent causes? Because the partner has become assimilated to a parental figure, has triggered unconscious patterns from childhood. Why do people repeatedly choose similar partners despite conscious intentions to do otherwise? Because they are unconsciously seeking familiar transferential dynamics.
Understanding relationships through transference does not mean dismissing genuine love or connection. Rather, it means recognising that love is always partly transferential, always involves unconscious projections, always reflects the subject’s psychic structure as much as the beloved’s actual characteristics.
This understanding can help couples navigate conflicts. When partners recognise that they are responding transferentially, that they are perceiving each other through the lens of their past, they can begin to distinguish between the actual person and the unconscious representation. This does not eliminate transference but can transform the relationship to it.
Transference at Work
Workplace relationships are also structured by transference. Authority figures become parental surrogates, colleagues become siblings, organisational hierarchies replicate family structures. These transferential patterns organise workplace conflicts, shape career decisions, influence job satisfaction.
An employee might experience their boss as controlling and critical, might feel perpetually misunderstood and undervalued. Yet investigation might reveal that this perception reflects transferential patterns, that the boss’s actual behaviour is less extreme than the employee experiences it, that the employee is responding to unconscious expectations shaped by early relationships with authority.
Similarly, managers might transfer onto employees, might unconsciously assign them roles based on family dynamics, might respond to workplace situations through patterns from their own history. A manager might become overprotective of certain employees, might unfairly criticise others, might unconsciously recreate family dramas within the organisation.
Understanding workplace transference does not excuse poor behaviour or genuine abuse. Yet it helps explain why workplace conflicts are often so emotionally charged, why rational interventions sometimes fail, why organisational dynamics can feel so compulsive and resistant to change.
Social and Political Transference
Transference operates not only in personal relationships but also in social and political life. Leaders become parental figures, nations become families, political movements become sites for transferring unconscious wishes for salvation, protection, or revolution.
This helps explain the intensity of political attachment and identification. People do not support political leaders or movements merely based on rational assessment of policies. Rather, they transfer onto these figures unconscious wishes, fantasies, and expectations. The leader promises to fulfil what was lacking in childhood, to provide what parents failed to provide, to establish the ideal family or nation.
Understanding political transference helps explain phenomena that seem irrational from a purely cognitive perspective: the persistence of support for leaders who demonstrably harm their supporters’ interests, the intensity of political hatred that exceeds policy disagreements, the tendency for political movements to replicate authoritarian family structures.
Yet this understanding also suggests limits to purely rational political discourse. Appeals to facts or logic often fail because they do not address the transferential dynamics that organise political attachment. Effective political change requires addressing unconscious formations, recognising the transferential dimensions of political life.
The Ethics of Transference
Exploiting Versus Analysing Transference
The analyst occupies a position of power in the transferential relationship. The patient attributes to the analyst knowledge, authority, and significance. This creates potential for exploitation, for the analyst to use their position to gratify their own needs, to demand admiration or obedience, to engage in sexual or financial misconduct.
Such exploitation is an ethical violation that betrays the analytic relationship and harms the patient. It collapses the transference into reality, transforms what should be symbolic into actual gratification, forecloses the possibility of genuine analytic work.
Ethical practice requires the analyst to maintain abstinence, to refuse to gratify either the patient’s or their own transferential wishes. This abstinence is not coldness or rejection but rather respect for the analytic process, recognition that genuine transformation requires maintaining the symbolic space where transference can be interpreted rather than enacted.
Professional organisations establish codes of ethics that prohibit analyst-patient sexual relationships, financial exploitation, or other violations of the analytic frame. Yet beyond formal prohibitions, ethical practice requires ongoing vigilance, requires the analyst to monitor their own countertransference, requires humility about the limits of one’s self-knowledge.
Transference Outside the Analytic Frame
Understanding transference raises ethical questions about all relationships. If transference is ubiquitous, if we are all constantly projecting unconscious patterns onto others, how should we navigate relationships ethically?
One response is to recognise our own transferential patterns, to acknowledge when we are responding to unconscious projections rather than to the actual person. This requires self-awareness, willingness to question our perceptions, openness to discovering that our intense feelings or strong reactions might reflect our history more than present reality.
Yet this recognition has limits. We cannot eliminate transference from relationships. Attempting to relate purely “realistically,” without any unconscious projection, would mean the end of all meaningful connection. Relationships require some degree of fantasy, some unconscious investment, some projection of meaning onto the other.
The ethical task is not to eliminate transference but to take responsibility for it, to recognise its operations, to avoid conflating our unconscious projections with objective truth about the other.
The Analyst’s Responsibility
The analyst bears particular responsibility for managing transference ethically. This includes maintaining appropriate boundaries, refusing to exploit the patient’s vulnerability, interpreting rather than gratifying transferential wishes.
Yet it also includes recognising when analysis is not helping, when transference has become unworkable, when the patient might be better served by a different analyst or a different form of treatment. The analyst must be willing to refer patients, to acknowledge limitations, to prioritise the patient’s welfare over their own narcissistic investment in being able to treat everyone.
This requires ongoing training, supervision, and personal analysis. The analyst must continually work on their own unconscious, must remain open to discovering new aspects of their countertransference, must take responsibility for how their own formations influence their clinical work.
Related Episodes in The William Gomes Podcast Series
Episode 1: Why Lacan Still Matters Today Episode 9: Objet Petit a and the Quiet Engine of Desire Episode 10: Fantasy and Desire in Emotional Life Episode 18: The Subject of the Unconscious: Understanding the Divided Self Episode 19: The Chain of Signifiers: How Language Shapes the Psyche Episode 21: Symptoms and Repetition: Why We Repeat Patterns and What They Reveal Episode 23: [Next episode in series]
Listen to the Full Episode: Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and at williamgomespodcast.com
This article is part of The William Gomes Podcast’s ongoing exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis and neurodevelopmental psychology. For more information, visit williamgomespodcast.com or connect with William Gomes on LinkedIn.
