Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
=Transference.= Another kind of displacement which seems hard to
believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent
human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at
some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to
rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward
other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the
people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a
new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves--not, "This
person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or,
"This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is
my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may
proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the
original person in childhood.
Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and
behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has
discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or
religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of
displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the
person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married
a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she
unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.
Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of
displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or
attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as _Lady
Macbeth_ felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from
her deeper stain. This is a frequent mechanism in the
psychoneuroses--not that neurotics are likely to have committed any
great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their
wishes or thoughts are wicked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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