Transference

So the story is of Aziz al-Hassan Ghori, who worked in the colonial state apparatus as a superintendent of schools.

But he was also one of the disciples of Maulana Thaanmi, a Sufi practitioner, the chief biographer of Maulana Thaanmi who wrote the book Ashraf as-Sawwani that was analyzed in Chapter 1 on Transference and Remembrance.

That chapter is about the Tazkirah genre.

But here I tell his own story of falling in love and basically in 1908 he is attending law school in the city of Allahabad and he hears that the Sufi master Ashraf Ali Tanmi is visiting Allahabad and he says, is very eager to meet Maulana Tanvi before the sermon takes place.

Your feelings are real, but what m- may not be true is the conclusion you've stacked on top of them.

So which direction is yours? Do you miss harm that's there or find harm that isn't? What did your family do or what do they still do now? Do they ignore mistreatment that's right in front of them, or do they manufacture it where it isn't? Um, is there a relationship right now where you keep treating the same hurt as a one-off? Uh, which of the three are you most prone to? Transference, black and white thinking, or emotional reasoning? Um, and have you ever been in a relationship with someone who constantly reads everything you did as harm? What was that like to be on the other side of that? Who would like to share?

I think I have, have some experience of, of both of these in that, you know, I was...

I married s- someone who I met when I was 19 and stayed with him for 18 years bec- uh, because I didn't know that Uh, you know, life didn't have to be like that, and I, I, I didn't know that it was possible not to just be yelled at all the time.

Um, Lisa suggested that we try and host a conversation about depth psychology and AI, and I just wanted to share that, um, it was about 20 years ago actually that a, a client of mine Googled me, um, which produced quite an interesting effect on our, on our psychotherapy session.

Um, and it made me really thoughtful, and I ended up writing a clinical paper about it called TMI and the Transference, LOL, which is a title that I'm still very proud of, but nobody knew what any of that meant [laughs] 20 years ago.

[laughs]

Um, and it was after working through that with this person, uh, and writing this paper that I realized that we are gaining insights inside the consulting room, um, that we're not necessarily picking up as clearly outside the consulting room, and it kind of became an obsession of mine, and I think a lot of people in this virtual room, to work harder to bring the implicit into the explicit.

And that book I just pulled out, I just wanted to make sure I got it totally correct.

Uh, Transference.

Are you familiar with the term transference? Explain it for the audience.

All right.

But today we're talking about transference.

And I think it's probably helpful to just give a definition of what that is, because We did that with the last one and it was helpful for me just kind of getting in that space.

Okay, what are we talking about? Transference then is the process by which, and I'm just going to read this definition because I think it makes sense.

The process by which a counselee unconsciously, it's not happening intentionally, transfers feelings, expectations, beliefs, and relational patterns from other relationships, other contexts that they've been on to you, the counsellor.

And I know...

somehow my brain links it to parenting styles because parenting styles impact childhood attachments, right? Down parenting styles as an episode.

need to check that i don't know i feel like we should have surely if not we need to because if you think about authoritarian authoritative permissive and neglectful parenting styles and then you think about the attachment kind of type fast forward 20 30 years in the workplace that parenting Like, I think that hasn't, there's an overlap somewhere there too in relation to the transference and counter transference that can happen at work.

So if I bring in past relational experiences where I, uh, bring in a maternal kind of understanding or a maternal, um, transference where I think that you should meet all of my needs and you know be there for me unconditionally no matter what I do you're going to be there that's what I'm bringing in as a supervisor how do you react to that transference in your counter transference depending on potentially your parenting how you were parented and your attachment style and then some people bring in paternal Transference sibling, you know, how they acted and resolved conflict with their siblings comes into the workplace and their expectations of that.

That's kind of big.

It's huge because it