The Power of Coincidence (30 page)

Mindfulness is an unconditional awareness of the present without the clutter, conditioning, or contaminations of the past. We can deal with transference mindfully by bringing it into a present no longer conditioned by the past. In Buddhism, the here and now, when it is truly experienced, is ultimate reality. Our work on transference thus commandeers us to a high spiritual consciousness.

Transference smuggles the past onboard the present, and mindfulness escorts us safely to the port of the present, our illicit and burdensome cargo now cast overboard. Transference is an attachment to a fabrication, an illusion about others and ourselves. Mindfulness is its antidote because it is an accurate revision of others, of life events, and of ourselves as they are in this very moment.

Yet we have to concede that the present cannot help but hold some vestiges of the past. To be present mindfully does not mean living with no history—an impossible, useless, and dangerous task. We are mindful as we acknowledge our past as an inevitable and subtle stowaway in our lives. Then we are in the best position to update our ship’s manifest. This takes the psychological work of addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating past events that still gnaw at us. It may mean grieving childhood relationships or finishing some emotionally unfinished business with a recent partner. It will certainly entail an attitude of enquiry into ourselves and our story. These tasks—all of which will appear as practices in this book—can be the psychological escorts into spiritual consciousness. Then we can sit mindfully in the present, finally free of ego and the stories that stop or drive us.

No one escapes transference. It is as much a part of a relationship as are apples to apple pie. In this book we find out how and why transference happens to all of us, what we can learn about ourselves because of it, and how we can come through it as awakened adults. We will keep an eye on the past, wink at our penchant for fantasy, and, hopefully, become loyal to the present. We sometimes take comfort in wishful thinking, a faux version of hope that does us no good. True hope is based on visible potential for change, a reality. Wishful thinking is based on projection, a concept.

Tattoos are carefully and consciously chosen and then needled onto the body. Our assumptions about, expectations of, and projections upon relationships, not consciously chosen, are tattooed into the cells of our bodies. The more a new situation resembles the past, the more bodily stress do we feel and the harder it is for us to release it. Yet, we can trust that our psychological work and our spiritual practice will yield physical results. We will feel our bodies relaxing, our breathing calming, and our tattoos fading. Transference, like all painful events, turns out to be an opportunity for healing after all.

In the chapters that follow, we will be surprising ourselves by finding out how many of our choices in life and relationship are tied to our own past—how much of what we call home is an archeological site. Our goal is to break the hold our ancient history has over us. Our challenge is to keep what is useful from it but to confront the ways it may be limiting our ability to reimagine ourselves and our relationships. Then we bravely join the poet Rilke in “the boundless resolve, no longer limitable in any direction, to achieve our purest inner possibility.” What a thrilling prospect: to dare a bold escape from our karmic prison into the Eden of Only This, to dare a valiant leap over our past’s detaining wall into the paradise of Only Now.

Chapter 1

What Is Transference?

L
earning to read, I stammered out, “See Dick! See Jane!” Did I ever imagine in first grade that it would take me another fifty years before I would be able to do just that? It has been hard work for me really to see the rosy faces of the Dicks and Janes I meet up with in life. It has required a steadfast allegiance to an unedited reality of who others are instead of falling into my habitual compulsion to project my own needs and beliefs onto them. It has taken conscious awareness of this person’s presence here and now, free of my continual unconscious transferences from other persons, especially ones long since vanished into the past. I found help in the psychological work and spiritual practices I describe in this book. Now my vision of Dick and Jane has improved somewhat, or at least enough to notice when their faces are becoming blurred.

The word
transference
comes from two Latin words:
trans
, which means “across, over, or through,” and
ferre
, which means “to carry.” Psychologically, to “transfer” is to carry over the past into the present. We unconsciously place a parent’s face or that of a former partner or any significant person onto someone else. We thereby re-create our childhood story or a chapter from a recent relationship. Transference is thus a perpetuation of old scenarios, an attempt at resurrecting the past.

The past tense of the verb
ferre
is
latus
. Thus the same Latin word is the root of both
transference
and
translation
. This seems appropriate since in transference we are continually translating the story lines of our own past into our present transactions. We are so often translating our childhood griefs or expectations, met or unmet, into newly arriving experiences with others. But it is ultimately the same book in another language. In any case, there are also those special moments with others in which transference is not at work, as we shall see.

The word
important
comes from the Latin
portare
, which is a synonym for
ferre
. Both words mean “carry.”
Importance
is a metaphor for how we import or carry meaning into our experiences. Someone becomes “important” because he evokes a significance, makes an impression, has an impact on us. Originally, people became important to us because they had an influence on our development. For instance, our parents or brothers and sisters were important to our growth into adulthood. Our first spouse or partner was important to our growth in intimacy and adult love. In transference, new people become important because they mimic the originals.

Relatus
, from which we have the word
relationship
, uses the word
latus
and extends the meaning to “carried back,” a feature of transference. The word
intimacy
derives from the Latin
intimus
, or “innermost,” the deep-within that we call the unconscious, another feature of transference. Thus, even linguistically, transference seems to be built into the concept of a relationship!

We can now attempt a definition. Transference is an unconscious displacement of feelings, attitudes, expectations, perceptions, reactions, beliefs, and judgments that were appropriate to former figures in our lives, mostly parents, onto people in the present.

Freud wrote, “Transference is a universal phenomenon of the human mind that dominates our relationship to our environment.” He was echoing Shakespeare, who noticed that the world is a stage and all of us “merely players.” People who become important to us play supporting roles in our daily drama. Perhaps their importance lies precisely in their ability to do that. How ironic that personal importance may not be tied to an authentic you-and-I experience but to a staged performance.

Freud further described transference experiences as “a special class of mental structures . . . new editions or facsimiles which . . . replace earlier persons.” In transference we become caught in an anachronism, since we are replicating our emotional experience of childhood with someone to whom we are relating in the present.
Indeed, the word
present
becomes more symbolic than real once we realize that the past is so much a part of it
.

The frequency of transference makes us wonder if only the original characters in our life were truly significant and that others become significant later
because
they impersonate them. “You are special to me” may mean “You can play the part and if you cannot, I can train you for the role.” The phrase “I married my mother” is the equivalent of “I found someone who fit my transference needs left over from life with mother.”

The puzzle in therapy is not how did I get this way, but what does my angel want with me?

—James Hillman

How We Defend

To understand our topic more clearly, it is useful to distinguish three terms in psychology:
transference, displacement
, and
projection
. They are unconscious mechanisms our ego uses to defend itself against stress. They can be healthy when they are used occasionally to help us over a fear or to stabilize and maintain ourselves. They become dysfunctional when we become possessed by them or when we use them to avoid looking at the truth about ourselves or reality. Here are the distinctions:

Carl Jung wrote, “Projection makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.” I
project
onto another person characteristics, positive or negative, that I am unconscious of in myself; I shift onto others the traits, feelings, and motivations that belong to me. For example, I see you as controlling when all the while I don’t notice how controlling I am. I may also project my beliefs about someone or about what someone feels. Projection mistakes an internal experience for an external one, a “you out there” for an “I in here.”
In projection, I spend every day alone
.

I
displace
onto person B the feelings appropriate to person A. For example, I am angry at someone at work, but I take it out on my partner. Displacement mistakes one person for another, often an innocent bystander for a protagonist.
In displacement, I spend every day with the wrong person
.

In
transference
I displace onto others the feelings and expectations that rightly belong to my parents, family, former partners, or any significant others. Transference misplaces the past in the present.
In transference, every day is a family reunion
.

Transference is thus a type of displacement in which archaic family/parental transactions are reexperienced with other adults. Those others are usually confused by our behavior toward them because they do not see that we are inveigling them into a time warp. If they were to see our transference at work, they might pause, open themselves to compassion for us, and gently reassign our feelings back to us rather than letting them impinge upon them. Then our transference would become an assisting force in our personal growth, because we would notice from present reactions to us by others what is missing from our past.

In projection we believe that the other is thinking or feeling what we are thinking or feeling. The extreme form of projection is
identification
. For instance, you tell me you are lonely now that your relationship has ended. I understand how that feels both from my own past experience and from observing your pain. I imagine you feel/think just as I did when I was lonely. In that moment, I am feeling empathy, but I am also engaging in projection and identification, so I am not fully with you but rather with my own blend of you and me.

Perhaps empathy, and compassion as well, cannot fully happen without projection and identification? Freud referred to the use of defenses for achieving positive goals as a “regression in favor of the [healthy] ego.” In this instance, we see mental constructs being used in ways that further the spiritual virtue of showing compassion.

Transference, projection, identification, and displacement keep interrupting the you-and-I moment, presenting their urgent bill from the backlogged accounts of our life story. Consciousness is the antidote to such a mistake, because it cuts through fantasies to arrive at the pure reality, no matter how disturbing or seductive. It takes courage and integrity to enter the unguarded present moment simply as a witness. One cannot be at the mercy of repulsiveness or attractiveness, of similarity or difference, of our story or of that of someone else.