The Power of Coincidence (31 page)
How do we tell the difference between getting caught up in something or simply witnessing it? We sit on the beach as the clouds roll by. When we sit and simply notice them
without moving ourselves
, we are witnesses. When we follow them with our eyes and crane our necks and perhaps see images in them, we are attaching to them, not simply witnessing them. A witness is one who sees without being influenced or determined by transference, projection, or displacement. He simply sees the bare fact with no editorial comment. His hands are in his lap, not stuck in the tar baby of ego or story.
To be stuck is to refuse to say yes to reality as it is and to move on from there
.
Getting You to Feel for Me
We can understand transference better if we look at one other unconscious defense mechanism,
projective identification
. A form of this happens when someone cannot stand certain of his own feelings because they seem too rude, too threatening, or too far out of character to know or show. So he does something that provokes his own unwanted or intolerable feeling in the other person, who in effect, feels it for him. We can see possible origins of empathy and intuition in this behavior.
Here is an example: I am angry at you but have always been afraid to show it, so I come late to meet you at the theater, arriving after the film has begun. You look and feel peeved and angry, so I get to see my anger but on your face! I am identifying my own feeling by having projected it through you. In doing this I may also be motivated by a transference need to recreate my parent’s way of acting toward me. I may want you to act or feel toward me as my mother or father did. Maybe this time I can handle it. Maybe you will see what happened to me and ultimately feel compassion.
Inducing reactions in the other person that will feed a transference belief might also appear at work. I see you, my boss, as my critical father, and I do things at work that will lead you to criticize me. Now I revive my relationship with my critical dad or former spouse, of whom you remind me. I believe more firmly that I am an appropriate target of criticism, since you tell me so.
Projection and projective identification can be positive or negative. Sports fans imagine athletes to be living out their own ideals of competence and mastery. This is a positive projection. On the negative side, fans can rejoice and join by vicarious feelings in the violence they witness during an out-of-control soccer game. They are seeing the players express the rage they themselves feel. What a skewed and confounded search for mirroring. All this misdirected identification shows us that what we fail to integrate can become represented later by something else and we are then even more misled. This is exactly what transference is about.
We do not engage in projective identification because we are deceitful but because certain feelings are unbearable and we are seeking a safe way to diffuse them. We are not simply unloading our unacceptable or disavowed feelings. There is a positive—that is, developmental—reason. We are seeking a
model
for showing feelings. Then we can learn to practice feeling our own feelings safely. Thus, after seeing the scowl on your face at the movie theater—and noticing that you remain my friend nonetheless—I can learn how to show anger appropriately.
The person at the receiving end can practice
tonglen
. In this Buddhist practice, we take in the pain that the other finds intolerable, pass it through our heart-mind—serenely receptive and transformative because of our mindfulness and loving-kindness practices—and give it back in the form of healing compassion. This practice is alchemical in that it takes what is so unacceptable and turns it into something valuable.
In a sense, every time we listen to a friend tell us his troubles and respond with mindful presence and loving-kindness, we are practicing tonglen. We can say also that good therapy is tonglen, since the therapist takes in the pain and negative emotions of the client and gives back healing responses. Therapy thereby affirms how each of our feelings or attitudes, no matter how negative, can evoke compassion and lead to transformation. We then joyfully realize how every negative experience has positive, growth-fostering potential, how every liability is a resource, how every shadow trait has a kernel of value, how every disturbance or mistake can deepen our spiritual consciousness. The more we discover this truth, the less we need to project, displace, or transfer. There is an energy of light frozen in our confusion, a luminosity we can release, if only we do not give up our mining.
One of Our Habits
Our feelings about our current relationship may be conscious: “I know I am angry at my partner.” But the origin and import of our feelings are often unconscious, as might be the attitudes and expectations beneath them: “I wanted him to speak up for me.” Unconsciously, this may be “I expect him to be there for me just as dad was.” Our fears or expectations usually grow from memories. Notice that transference can be based on positive memories, not only negative ones.
Transference is a habit in all people regardless of the quality of their parenting background. We will transfer whether our past was positive or negative in its impact on us. The fact that our psychic development is the result of a lifelong continuum of transference relationships may be a way of maintaining our own sense of personal continuity: “I am still with those I remember from my past, as long as I can transfer onto this new partner. He revives my story.”
Transference is a homing instinct in the psyche. We all feel an urge to return to the past. Why would we want to do this? We are seeking a way to replicate and enact the unfinished business of our childhood or of our primary adult relationships. This inclination of ours can help us when it works to reconstitute the past so that we can explore what our hidden issues are and how they can be laid to rest. This happens in psychotherapy or in any moment in which we revisit our past and work out what is left of it in the present. It takes conscious noticing, catching ourselves in the act of transference, slipping out of the grip of the past, and what may be a fire walk into the real present. Psychological freedom happens when we find the courage to enter the here-and-now reality of ourselves and others, shorn of the decorations and detritus of our history.
Noticing our transferences may not be so difficult, since we choose people on whom to transfer that really do resemble our parents or other significant characters in our life story. We can gradually recognize—as will others regarding us—the similarities that made certain people such well-qualified candidates for transference.
Indeed, we can piece together our childhood history from the crypt of our unconscious. We do this by observing our needs and expectations in relationship and the partners we choose or keep choosing. We can also learn about our childhood from our patterns in relationships. For example, if our mother left us early in life, did we believe we made her leave, perhaps because we were not enough for her? Do we now make partners leave to repeat that scenario, mistakenly believing that repetition will be a completion? Do we hope they will come back as Mom did not? And if they do, will this mean that Mom’s disappearance has finally been canceled?
Transference is a redirection of unresolved energy toward a safer object. We seek such a refuge since perhaps we may have felt the energy of the past to be too dangerous for us to confront directly. Thus transference, used to track our personal issues, can serve as a kindly scout that leads us gently into a territory that may be scary. This spouse can be more safely confronted than a devouring mother. Our anger, so terrifying to express in our childhood, can now be safely released in our committed marriage.
The safer object can be a stranger who annoys us, a colleague who snubs us, someone we are becoming interested in, an old flame returned, a family member or friend. All that is required for transference to kick in is some momentary gesture, word, deed, or manner that unconsciously recalls a person from our past with whom things are still unsettled. This may explain immediate attraction or repulsion. When we just don’t like or definitely do like someone and we don’t know why, transference may be at work.
Transference not only distorts who others are, it distorts who we think we are. Thus, the whole book of our life is mistranslated in transference. Consciousness is the new revised version that matches reality more accurately than the earlier texts. A fealty to what is real here and now radically opens us and widens our understanding of ourselves and others. We see the new newly and know others clearly, perhaps for the first time. It takes us such a long time to see. But that is nothing to be ashamed of. It is how the psyche works. All our ways of seeing the world are screened and stunted by our past until the rare moment of opening happens. Then a new inner landscape opens and we find our place in it.
At the same time, it is not simply a choice between authentic reality and a misrepresentative transference. We are usually engaged in both at once, since our past and present relationships are truly similar. A transference may thus not be totally a distortion, since there were indeed so many ambiguities in our relationships with the people in our past and now so many similarities to those in the present. It is well-nigh impossible to be clear about who is who. We find it hard to be precise about who people really are and what they mean to us in themselves. We therefore may refer to transference as a distortion only in the objective sense. Subjectively, it is not so much a distortion as a near miss, an approximation, a rough estimate, a ballpark figure—like so many of the beliefs and opinions we imagine to be gospel.
In the traditional view, distortion happens when a perception does not correspond to reality. With regard to others, we then fail to see a person, instead seeing only our subjective version of her. Our work then is to match our perception to her reality. But this may require an arduous climb rather than an immediate grasp. We can instead learn to know someone by engaging with her at gradually unfolding levels. We can keep finding out more about who she is while never quite knowing her fully. Then all it takes on our part is ever more generous receptiveness to who she is and ever more patience with a timing that eludes our jurisdiction.
Our story/transferences add weight to the impact of events. For instance, if someone does not make time for us, we might simply notice it and work around it, while there may also be some impact on our feelings. If, however, this is reminiscent of how unavailable our mother was in childhood, we might feel the blow more heavily. We then become more angry than fits the present circumstance. Some of that anger is part of the grief about what we missed out on long ago. As we notice a connection to our past, we see how the recent event helped us locate a long-unnoticed issue. We might eventually see that finding that piece of unfinished business is more valuable than being made time for!
Once we work out our issue, the world and others become just who they are. Then we can appreciate those who make time for us and, at the same time, say yes to the given of life that not everyone will do so. We might notice how we have been manipulating others over the years to make time for us. We give that up too. In any case, the fact that we were still looking for what we missed in childhood is a better position to be in than to have given up hope altogether. In fact, if the continuing search is what finally woke us up to transference, it has great value.
We do not eliminate transference; we decant it. We do not kill it as David killed Goliath. We wrestle with it respectfully as did Jacob with the angel, until it yields its blessing. The blessing is the revelation of what we missed or lost and the grace to grieve it rather than transfer it. We feel a momentum to mourn all those who did not make time for us, to let go of their importance to us, to go on with life no longer determined or unduly influenced by what others choose to do. We then find satisfying sources of need-fulfillment in ourselves and in other humans who can be there for us most of the time and not there sometimes. And in a yes to that, we have all we need.