I have a pretty detailed answer to the question of what makes a therapist different from a good friend, and much of it hinges on my understanding of the concept of transference. I told this client that therapy works in part because it evokes a transference relationship between the therapist and the client.
The client “transfers” onto the therapist a set of assumptions about how relationships work. These assumptions are often rooted in dynamics and experiences we’ve had with our primary caregivers, in our first families. The therapist watches for the transference, and over time, she can start to name it as it shows up.
When we’re sitting with a friend, we might talk about the fight we had with our partner last night. We might receive love, reassurance, advice, commiseration, or even a snack in return. In therapy, we can talk about the same content, but wrap that conversation in a second one, about how we fight, what we learned about the line between “fighting” and abuse, and whether we are even allowed to fight and at the same time feel love.
That second conversation, the one about who we “are” in our relationships and why we might be re-enacting dynamics we desperately want to change, as if we are sleepwalking, or on autopilot—that one hinges on how we identify and talk about transference.
The question becomes: what happens to transference if the therapist is known? What happens if the therapist discloses something in a session that makes her less of a blank screen?
What does it mean to do therapy in the age of social media? What has happened to transference, given the fact that clients often find a therapist by looking at her web page, reading her tweets, listening to the music she posted on YouTube when her band performed last week? What happens when a client searches for a therapist who shares her political views, or her sexuality, or her racial identity?
Does that make her feel safer, and thus help her attune and attach? Or does it limit her transference, and shut down her capacity to make visible to herself the ways she treats people who she perceives to be different from her?
In Freud’s understanding, the struggle between therapist and client is not an effort on the part of the therapist to dominate and control the client. Instead, it’s a re-enactment: it moves the conflict that is inside the client, but repressed, into her full conscious awareness and externalized. The therapist becomes a stand-in for the part of the self that the client doesn’t like. Then the client can attack it, by attacking the therapist. Over time, the client might accept the interpretation and by extension, accept the parts of herself she used to find too disgusting, or anxiety producing, to face.
When we keep our focus “tight”—when we just look at the interpersonal dynamic in transference, the power that the therapist has over the client appears essential to the work of therapy. It is less that Freud wanted to be an a*****e and overpower his clients, and more that he knew what he was up against, in terms of wrestling with the mind’s complex defenses.
Though Freud did discuss the power of the social order, what he didn’t talk about was oppression, and the ways oppression can saturate the therapeutic dynamic. In his case studies, he didn’t acknowledge the ways patriarchy was impacting his relationships with his clients. He didn’t ask how patriarchy reinforced his “standing” as a person, how it reinforced his power and his confidence in his interpretations of his clients’ mental conflicts.
He didn’t ask how patriarchy constructed women as emotional, unreliable, less intellectual than men, and thus less capable of pushing back against his interpretations of their lives. He took their disagreement as resistance, as a natural response on the part of the psyche to having its secrets revealed. He didn’tconsider how hard it must have been for women to muster resistance at all, in the context of a highly patriarchal culture, made manifest in the incisive mind and formidable body of Freud.
When a therapist discloses information about herself, makes herself more known, she makes it more evident that she is speaking not only as a trained professional—speaking in that historical legacy of the expert who looks, notes, provides feedback and interpretations—but also as a person, with her own history and perspective.
Perhaps more importantly, she is opening the door to conversations about how she is situated by virtue of her race, class origins, education, sexuality, and other factors. (For more on the situated body, check out this post.) She’s acknowledging she’s more than her individual and familial histories. She occupies multiple identities. She may inhabit multiple locations in the social order, giving her power in some arenas and subjecting her to oppression in others, all of which contribute to and provide a context for her counter-transference, her lived experience in the world.
By making conversations about structural power a usual and expected part of the therapy session, the client and the therapist can examine the feedback loops that occur between interpersonal dynamics and structural dynamics. They can talk about individual change, but they can also talk about the limits of individual power. They can address the ways structures of oppression create mental distress, and must be fought with the same fierceness with which Freud approached his work on transference.
The dominant culture often acts a lot like an individual psyche: it resists seeing the pain and the suffering that are its legacy; it refuses change; it re-enacts trauma; it fights with everything it has against acknowledging information and wisdom that challenges how it has always behaved. Therapists, and those who participate in therapy, can use the skills we learn in the therapeutic space to unleash the energy and power we need to overcome violence and domination at the level of the culture at large. And we can start that process in our sessions, by making visible, by saying aloud, the things that are so painful to feel, so terrifying to resist.
