Imagine the following situation.
You meet someone. She could be your therapist. You think of her as a potential intimate partner, or you become friends.
And then you say to yourself, she reminds me of my mother. Everything about her reminds me of my mother. Everything about her reminds me of my mother. The traits, her behaviors, the way she speaks, her values, her beliefs, her advice, everything. It's actually my mother.
And then you begin to expect her to treat you as if she were your mother, to behave in a way that would not contradict your memories about your mother.
You want her to, for example, love you and accept you unconditionally. You want her secretly to idealize you. You want her to give you good advice, succor and support. You want her to be available on short notice and without limitation. You want her to baby you sometimes.
And she refuses.
And she refuses because she is not your mother.
And then you become frustrated and angry at her. And you reject her. And there's conflict.
And yet you cannot separate from her you cannot break up with her you cannot say goodbye for some reason the conflict draws you in overwhelms you pervades every nook and cranny of your existence you become obsessed with it obsessively.
You try to coerce her and to force her to behave in a maternal way, to conform to the image of a mother that you have in your mind or to your real mother, biological, mother of origin, long deceased, still living, whatever the case may be, she must be your mother.
Sometimes you stand back and you say, what's happening to me? What's going on here? It's not okay.
But this self-awareness has no impact. Does not modify your behavior because you are trapped in this time travel loop as if you were catapulted back to your early childhood and you found yourself again with a mother.
And so this entire process that I've just described is known as transference.
And this is the topic of today's video.
We're going to discuss two approaches to transference.
The approach of psychoanalysis, which is a more limited way of analyzing transference, and the approach of self-psychology, which is the approach I uphold, and which is the only approach in my view, that applies to relationships with narcissists.
This is a difficult video. So pay attention and try to listen to the end. Take notes, take breaks, go on a vacation, but it's worth it.
Because transference is at the core of the narcissist relationship with you.
And transference is intimately connected to defense mechanisms and defensive behaviors, such as, for example, projection, displacement, and projective identification.
Transference is also the motivation behind many types of conduct and misconduct that puzzle us and befuddle us when we observe narcissism.
And yet are easily explainable if we were to take into account that there is a type of transference known as narcissistic transference.
This is the topic of today's video.
So, explore, go forth and multiply my viewers.
You finally attend therapy. And the therapist reminds you very much of your own mother.
So gradually you catch feelings. You find yourself behaving with your therapist as if she were your mother.
You become a student at a university and the professor reminds you of your father.
Gradually you begin to interact with the professor as if he were your father, conflicts and all.
You have a child with your spouse. Then you divorce your spouse because he has been abusive, a narcissist, shall we say.
You see your spouse in the child. You begin to mistreat the child.
The poor kid has done nothing but resemble his father.
But that's enough to trigger you and to cause you to punish the kid for his father's sins.
All these areto cause you to punish the kid for his father's sins.
All these are known as transferences and this is the topic of today's video.
Transference is when someone reminds you of someone and you treat them the same way. Someone reminds you of your father, of your mother, of an influential peer, of a teacher, even of a media star. And then you begin to treat them as if they were these people.
Transference is a kind of displacement activity. It's very delusional. It's disorienting. It has elements of fantasy, a surreal dream scape.
When you develop transference, when you begin to treat people, not as they, not as who they are, but as who they remind you of, then it's a process that could be pathological and could be helpful.
The topic of today's video is transference, and more precisely, a highly unique class category of transferences known as narcissistic transferences.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of psychology. Believe it or not, your professor in T-shirt. Okay, Shoshanim.
Transferences, as the examples I've given demonstrate, transferences occur in all human relationships and in all human interactions, not only in therapy, not only in psychoanalysis, in analysis, but everywhere, with everyone, all the time, in all human relationships.
And this is especially true in relationships with narcissists.
Remember, narcissists are children, and the narcissist's significant other, the narcissistic's intimate partner, the narcissist's best friend, the narcissist's calling. They are always maternal figures.
When you are having a romantic relationship or an intimate relationship with the narcissist, actually you serve as his mother, your stand-in for his biological mother of origin.
So this is a kind of transference.
Dual mothership, for example, is another type of transference.
Remember, dual mothership? It's when you serve as a narcissist's mother and he serves as your mother. And that way you become each other's mothers and each other's children.
This is a kind of very complex transference.
Narcissists provoke transferences in other people and relate to other people via transferences.
Even the whole of mirrors is a form of transference. The whole of mirrors is when you see yourself as an idealized perfect entity, idealized perfect person through the narcissist's eyes or through the narcissistic gaze, that's also a kind of transference.
Okay, I hope I have baffled you enough, and it's time to help to extricate you from the swamp.
Unfortunately in psychology, there are no shortcuts.
In order to discuss narcissistic transferences, I would need to teach you what is transference.
You need to endure 10 minutes of psychoanalysis before you get to the promised land of narcissistic transferences.
What is transference?
Transference is a projection, a displacement onto another person of unconscious feelings and wishes that originally directed at important individuals such as parents, usually in the person's childhood.
So, when you come across someone, both you and the other person engage in transference, you have unresolved issues with your mother. You've had a history of conflict with your father. Or you loved both of them and they loved you.
Whatever the case may be, there has been some kind of dynamic between you and your mother, between you and your father, to you and your teachers, between you and your peers, etc.
You bring these dynamics with you. In every future encounter with other people, these dynamics come into play.
You displace and you project these dynamics, these unconscious feelings, these unfulfilled wishes, these conflicts, these memories originally directed at other people, you project them onto the new person that you've just met.
And this is transference.
Now of course, when you engage in transference with someone you've just met, this brings to the surface repressed material. Memories, some of them pleasant, most of them unpleasant. This surfacing of unconscious material is usually very difficult. This re-experiencing is harrowing. And so even in the most innocuous encounters with other people, there's an element of involuntary memory, an element of recall, an element of access to the unconscious, and the eruption of traumatic memories, unpleasant memories, memories best forgotten, and parts of yourself that you reject, you're ashamed of, weaknesses perhaps.
And so encounters with other people are like triggers. They trigger parts of you that have been relegated under the carpet, that have been buried with a lot of effort. When, if you were to study what it is that you're feeling when you meet new people, you would learn many things about yourself. You would gain insight about your own difficulties, about unresolved issues, about things you can do and techniques you can adopt to become more balanced, to restore inner peace, and to function better.
Indeed, this is exactly what we're doing psychoanalysis.
In psychoanalytic therapies, the transference, the process of transference, is used as a tool. The analyst encourages transference in the patient, in order to help the patient gain awareness of these unconscious wishes and memories and so on. So, as I said, of these unconscious wishes and memories and so on. So, as I said, transference has a role in many types of encounters, therapeutic or not. And it's an unconscious repetition of earlier behaviors, earlier effects, memories, and projecting all these onto new people, new subjects. And this is something that is not under your control. This is not something you can control. This is not something you can control. That's not something you can turn off or switch off. This is automatic, an automatic process. In therapy, we analyze transference. We interpret the patient's early relationships and experiences as they are reflected and expressed in the present relationship with the analyst or the therapist. This is called transference analysis. It's even worse. Most therapists are human beings. I don't know if you have noticed. And so they too develop transference. When the therapist interacts with the patient or with the client, the patient or the client develops transference towards the therapist begins to see the therapist as a maternal figure or as a father figure or as a deceased friend or as a teacher from times past and so on and begins to treat the therapist as if the therapist were these figures in early life
but the same process happens with the therapist. The therapist begins to see the patient, as if the patient were some figure from the early life of the therapist.
This is known as counter transference. It is the therapist unconscious and sometimes conscious reactions to the patient and to the patient's transference. These are thoughts, memories, feelings, drives, urges, emotions, cognitions that are based on the therapist's own psychological needs and conflicts. And whether the therapist expresses them or not, the therapist becomes gradually aware of these reactions to the patient. This could become a serious problem.
Initially in psychoanalysis, countertransference was considered to be very harmful to therapy. But later on, in psychodynamic psychotherapies, we began to understand that countertransference teaches us something. When the therapist develops reactivity towards the patient, when the therapist, for example, experiences certain emotions in the presence of the patients, when the therapist reacts in a certain way to specific exchanges with the patient, there's a lot to be learned not only about the therapist, but also about the patient. Modern analysts and modern therapists use countertransference as a source of insight into the patient's effect on other people. In other words, the therapy says, this is the way the patient is affecting me. It stands to reason that this is the way the patient is affecting everyone. Now, what does it say about the patient? So countertransference as well as transference are tools in therapy. We are in therapy. The therapist is supposed to become aware of, analyze and interpret counter transference and transference as productive processes within therapy.
And so this is a general introduction to transference.
There is negative transference. When the patient transfers onto the analyst or the therapist, feelings of anger or hostility that the patient originally felt towards parents or other significant individuals during childhood. That would be negative transference.
And of course you could have positive transference. It's when the patient transfers onto the analyst or therapist feelings of attachment, of love, idealization, or other positive emotions that the patient emotionally experienced towards parents or significant individuals during childhood.
So, transference doesn't necessarily need to be negative or positive, and transference is not limited to therapies or analyses or the therapeutic process.
As I mentioned earlier, transference occurs involuntarily, automatically, in every interaction with a new person.
When you meet someone new, you immediately engage in transference, and the new person you have met engages in countertransference.
Gradually, both of you settle into some kind of narrative where you fulfill the roles of earlier people who have featured earlier in your lives.
So if you have a very good friend, she can assume a maternal role. She becomes like a mother figure.
Or when you have a very good male friend, he could become a father figure. Or when you have a new teacher or a new professor in college, they can become father figure. Or they can resemble another teacher much earlier in life.
We superimpose, we project, we displace narratives which incorporate people throughout our lives. We superimpose these stories on future encounters.
The truth is that throughout life, we keep interpreting and misinterpreting behaviors of other people in view of these templates.
We impose these templates on other people. So if you were to meet someone and say, wow, she reminds me of my mother, that's amazing. And then you treat her as if she were your mother, then of course you are imposing on her a narrative and you're constraining your ability to interact with her.
You cannot explore her in your relationship in any meaningful way because you are type casting her.
The narrative, the childhood narrative takes over and you're blind now to any information that countervails and contradicts this childhood narrative.
In other words, transference and counter transference are counterfactual. They're not based on facts. And they are fantastic. They're a form of fantasy defense.
And they restrict your ability to interact with reality in an open-minded way, open to new information.
Because the narrative that you impose on reality, the storyline that you impose on new people that you meet, render the whole situation constricted.
You are not available to accept, digest, interpret and assimilate information that contradicts the narrative.
So transference and counter transference are processes that could be insightful, could be helpful, could help you to get to know yourself better, but they are very bad ways, they're very dysfunctional ways of interacting with other people. They reduce your self-efficacy, your ability to extract beneficial outcomes from the human environment, for people around you.
Because you don't see them as they are. You see them as imaginary figures borrowed from your earlier phases in life.
Now, Heinz Kohut, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst, came up with a construct of narcissistic transference. He established a whole new branch of psychology, a new school in psychology, known as self-psychology. And in self-psychology, transferences could be narcissistic.
What on earth is a narcissistic transference?
A narcissistic transference is a set of transferences that involve the narcissistic needs of the patient in relation to significant others. These needs are used, leveraged by the therapist in therapy in order to help the patient.
But let's go back to the core.
In psychoanalysis, transference is when you attribute or actually misattribute qualities, traits, experiences and memories of earlier figures in your life to someone you've just met.
So you've met someone and you say, well, that's my mother. You've met someone, you say, well, that's my father. That is wrong, counterfactual, fantastic, and self-defeating in many ways. That's in psychoanalysis.
In self-psychology, transference is about the needs you've had with other people, with earlier people in your life. The psychological needs in relation to significant others earlier in your life.
For example, what kind of needs did you have with your mother? What kind of needs did you have with your father, with influential peers, with teachers, and so on, role models?
These psychological needs were either gratified, satisfied, and met, catered to by your mother, father, etc., or they were not.
In other words, your needs may have been met or they may have been frustrated, but they're still there. They're always there.
Narcissistic transference actually has to do with these needs.
According to Kohut, the process of transference is not only or merely or mainly about misattribution.
In other words, when you engage in transference with someone, you are not only saying, wow, she reminds me of my mother, but you're saying she reminds me of my mother and now she has to take care of my needs. Because that's what my mother should have done, or that's my mother has done, had done.
So, transference is not limited to identification, misidentification. That person is actually my mother, that person is actually my father.
Narcissistic transference is active. It's a form of projective identification.
In other words, there's a second step, a second stage in narcissistic transference.
Oh, she reminds me of my mother. Now she has to act as my mother. Now she has to become my mother. Now she has to cater to my needs as my mother should have done or had done. Or he reminds me of my father, now he is my father, now I will treat him as my father and he will treat me as my father. He would act as a father would and should.
So in narcissistic transferences, there is an initial stage of misidentification and misattribution and then the expectation and the demand that people who have been thus misidentified act in accordance to the roles assigned to them through the transference.
Is this clear? Let me reiterate it one last time.
You meet someone new, a therapist, a professor, a friend, someone casual, whatever the case may be.
According to psychoanalysis, you say, oh, she reminds me of my mother, end of story.
Your emotions, your memories, your wishes that you used to have with your mother are now transferred to this new person.
And that's where it ends.
According to Kohut and his concept of narcissistic transference, it's not where it ends, it's where it begins.
Once you have misidentified the person as your mother, you expect that person to behave as your mother, to act as your mother, to provide for you as a motherhood, to take care of your needs as any mother should, you force the other person to become your mother in a process known as projective identification.
And this is of course vastly different from the classical concept of transference.
Transference in classic psychoanalysis is the transposition of needs to a person who can fulfill them without the expectation of these needs being fulfilled.
Now, narcissistic transferences, there are three types, three categories of narcissistic transferences. Very interesting because they involve something known as self-object.
Actually, initially they were known as self-object transferences. But I will not go into it in this video. I will dedicate a separate video to the idea of self-object.
Let's discuss the three types of narcissistic transference.
Start with the idealizing transference.
Idealizing transference is a narcissistic transference that when it is activated or triggered, the patient experiences the other person as a powerful and benevolent parental figure.
So you meet someone. Again, it could be a therapist, it could be a professor, it could be a friend, it could be a casual acquaintance, it could be the guy in the grocery store.
You meet someone and instantly you're triggered. There's a switch, switch goes on in your mind. There's a flood of unconscious material that you have forgotten, repressed, buried, And you say to yourself, wow, that's amazing. This guy is my father. This woman is my mother.
So that's the initial phase. That's a basic transference.
And then you idealize them. You say they are good people, they are benevolent, they are caring, they're protective, they're super intelligent, they're amazing, they're perfect.
You idealize these figures because they remind you of mother or father or a teacher or a peer that you used to admire.
The initial reaction in idealizing narcissistic transfer is, as the name implies, idealization.
And so you would idealize these people at that point you would feel suddenly good you would feel good this is known as oceanic feeling or narcissistic elation you feel protected you feel safe, you feel understood, you feel accepted, feel that you belong.
And all this could happen in seconds. Everything I'm just saying could happen to you in seconds.
And this is what people I think mean when they use the phrase love at first sight.
And so at that point, the other person is idealized, becomes a secure base and you become once more a child. You regress.
There's a process of infantilization.
The other party, having been idealized, fulfills the role of a parental figure, almost godlike parental figure, with idealization involves the assumption of perfection.
Idealization is what kids do with their parents. They regard the parents as godlike figures.
And so the other person becomes a godlike figure.
And because you belong to the other person, because of this connection, instant connection with the other person, you also feel godlike. You feel that you share the power and capabilities of the other person. You feel that you are not only protected by the other person, but you have become a part of that other person.
In other ways, there's a process known as symbiosis, enmeshment, merger, and fusion, much the same way that young kids idealize their parents and feel protected by them.
So this is the first type of narcissistic transference, known as idealizing narcissistic transference.
The second type is known as mirror transference.
Mirror transference is a narcissistic transference in which the grandiose self of the patient is reactivated.
Now, just to give you a background, in self-psychology, all human beings are supposed to have a dormant, dormant, deactivated, grandiose self.
The grandiose self is active in the ages of two, three years old and allows the child to take on the world, to explore it, and to trust his or her capacity to manage in a new environment.
You need to be very grandiose as a two-year-old to believe that you can let go of mommy and explore the world on your own.
And this is the grandiose self.
What happens in the mirror narcissistic transference is this grandiose self, which is very infantile, it's very primordial, very primitive, is reactivated.
It's an early phase of life.
Remember, at that phase, the mother established the sense of perfection of the child by admiring the child.
And if the mother were a bad mother, metaphorically speaking, an absent mother, unavailable mother, depressive mother, selfish mother, parentifying and instrumentalizing mother, abusive mother, traumatizing mother, if it were a bad mother, this kind of bad mother would undermine the child's grandiosity and sense of perfection by devaluing the child's exhibitionistic behavior.
Let me repeat this and recap this. Today's material is not easy.
According to Kohut, in an early phase of life, the child develops grandiosity, a grandiose self.
The child needs this grandiosity in order to gather the courage to let go of mother and explore the world.
Now the mother can have two types of reactions depending on the type of the mother.
A good mother would encourage this behavior. She would admire ostentatiously, visibly and verbally, the exhibitionistic, grandiose behavior of the infant.
So when the child, age 2, or age 18 months, lets go of mother and ventures out into the world, mother would be there to admire this behavior, to encourage the child, and to idealize the child, so that the child can absorb, internalize this idealization and continue in the quest to find out more about reality.
That's a good mother.
A bad mother would do exactly the opposite. Abad mother would devalue the child's exhibitionistic, exploratory, adventurous behaviors. A bad mother would put the child down, criticize the child, even punish the child, or threaten the child.
So these are the two possibilities.
In the mirror transfer, which is a narcissistic transfer, the person recreates this childhood dynamics. The person reactivates the grandiose self, and then the grandiose self re-experiences what has happened early on in life.
And this reactivation process helps you to get to know yourself better and develop maybe a more stable sense of self-esteem.
But this is the second type of narcissistic transfers.
Let us summarize these first two before we discuss the third one.
When you come across a new person, someone new, you've just met, or when you're in a relationship with an intimate partner or with a good friend or with a colleague or whatever, there is automatically, involuntarily, a process of transference.
You immediately compare this new person to people you have met earlier in life starting with your mother.
And then sometimes the transference becomes narcissistic transference.
So the first option is you say, this person reminds me of, I don't know, mother, father or whatever, so I feel good about this person, I feel protected. I feel safe. This person is a secure base. I love this person because this person is actually my mother or my father.
That's the first possibility.
The second possibility is that you would develop a mirror transfer, depending on your experiences with your mother.
If your experiences with your mother were good experiences, if she encouraged you to separate from her and become an individual, you would have an identical, a replay of this dynamic with a new person you've just met.
And this would be mediated through your grandiose, primitive, infantile, grandiose self, which would be reactivated for a while and allow the transference to occur.
If, on the other hand, you have had bad experiences with your mother she wouldn't let you separate she wouldn't let you become an individual she would bridge your boundaries she would be abusive and traumatic and so on so forth you would superimpose this earlier experience on your ongoing relationship with this person.
You would actually force them to play the same role of an abuser.
And this is what is known as projective identification.
We're beginning to see that the precondition or the initial phase of projective identification is mirror narcissistic transference.
And this is where self-psychology and psychoanalysis come together very neatly because Freud was the one who came up with the idea of repetition compulsion.
Repetition compulsion is when we keep repeating the same self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors, even though we know better, and we keep doing this because we are trapped in early childhood narratives that we impose on other people in our life.
And when we impose these narratives on other people, sometimes we force them to behave in a way that conforms to the narrative. We coerce them to play the script.
And so that's where psychoanalysis and self-psychology become one and the same.
And finally, the most complex form of narcissistic transference is twin-ship transference.
It's when the patient experiences the other person as similar or very similar in characteristics to themselves.
And so there's an experience of being understood, being valued, being mirrored, being reflected.
Let me repeat this.
The previous two narcissistic transferences, the idealizing transference and the mirror transference, had to do with memories of earlier figures in earlier life.
So when you came across someone new in your life, you identified them or misidentified them with earlier figures in your life. You said, wow, she's like my mother.
The twin ship transference is completely different.
In the twin ship transference, when you come across someone new in your life, you say, wow, he is exactly like me. Oh wow, she is my twin, my long lost other half, my soulmate.
That is twin-ship narcissistic transference, when you believe that the other person shares the same characteristics, same traits, same predilections, same cognitions, same emotions, same behaviors like you. Is a mirror, is a copy of you. A clone, you're cloned, you're two of a kind.
And so this creates an experience of enmeshment, merger, fusion, you're one organism with two heads, but you at the same time you also feel profoundly understood and grasped, valued, accepted. It's like a cult. It's a club of two and or a religion and you are the two worshippers.
So there's an affinity here, which is amazing.
This is known as alter ego transference, and it is the only kind of transference that does not trigger memories of figures and people in earlier life. It's the only kind of transference that has to do with you.
Now of course, narcissists engage a lot in all three forms of narcissistic transferences.
You have probably identified yourself in these transferences.
When the narcissist idealized you as a mother figure, that would be the idealizing narcissistic transference.
When the narcissist forced you to behave in ways which are reminiscent of a parental figure. That would be the mirror narcissistic transfers.
And when the narcissist kept telling you, we are the same. You're amazing. You're like my copy. I'm like your copy. We are twins. We are soulmates. We are twin flames.
That's, of course, the twin ship narcissistic transference.
It is important to remember.
Transferences are not about reality. Transferences distort reality. Transferences are cognitive distortions. Transferences impair reality testing.
Because transferences is a misidentification of another person. Mischaracterization, misattribution.
When you engage in transference, you don't really see the other person, you don't understand the other person, you don't pay attention to the other person. The other person doesn't exist, it's just an excuse, a trigger.
Transference is an internal process, not an external one. Transference is when you reclassify people and put them in drawers or boxes. The mother box, the father box.
She's like my mother. So no need to invest any effort in getting to know her. I already know her. She's like my mother. So no need to invest any effort in getting to know her. I already know her. She's like my mother. I know everything about my mother. So I know everything about her. He's like my father. No need to work hard on the relationship. A father would love me, never mind what I do.
So transferences influence cognitions, emotions, and behaviors very badly.
Transferences cause dysfunctions, they reduce self-efficacy, and even emotions, as I mentioned, are affected.
If you misidentify someone as your mother, you're likely to feel about them, you're likely to emote, you're likely to relate to them emotionally as if they were your mother, which is a huge mistake.
So transferences constrict your repertory, constrict your ability to adapt, to be flexible, to absorb new information, to process it, and to act accordingly.
That's why in therapy, we use transference and counter transference in order to generate insight, in order to allow you to get to know yourself better.
But then we teach you how to not engage in transference and we teach ourselveshow to not engage in counter transferences.
Actually in psychoanalytic schools and psychodynamic psychotherapies, the therapist is supposed to be in therapy when he is working with a patient.
So when a psychoanalyst or a psychotherapist is giving psychotherapy to a patient, there is a risk of countertransference.
And so the therapist attends therapy in order to get rid of the countertransference.
So there is a qualified psychoanalyst or qualified therapist. He is known as usually, or she is known as a supervisor, and they help the therapist to get rid of the counter transference. Supervisor analysis or supervisory analysis.
The counter transference is considered to be helpful, but not a good thing and the therapy should get rid of it.
The transference is considered to be helpful to the patient, but not a good thing.
One of the main goals of therapy is to get rid of transference.
And it is not because transference and countertransference are pathologies, but it's because they reduce your ability to function in life in a way which would make you happy, content, and would allow you to accomplish your goals, to extract beneficial outcomes from your environment, human and non-human, and to proceed with your life plan without interruptions.