Transference Quotes

Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment. ~ M. Scott Peck

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker. ~ Arthur M. Jolly

I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don't give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don't know that, then maybe it's you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself. ~ Olga Nunez Miret

It's transference, Megan," he said. "It happens from time to time. It happens to me, too. I really should have introduced this topic last time. I'm sorry." I ~ Paula Hawkins

When God calls us to confession, it's not just about sharing details for the purpose of information transference. To better understand what God has called us to, it is important to know the difference between transparency and vulnerability. Transparency is sharing the intimate details of your life with another. Vulnerability is going beyond transparency to invite others into the details of your life and asking them to help you. ~ Aaron Stern

I even presume to sit at his desk while I write this book, hoping some magical transference will take place and I'll be gifted, if only for this moment, with his way with words. I feel like a boy trying to fit into his dad's running shoes. ~ Erin Lee Carr

The human voice was the first instrument and remains the most powerful and effective method of musical creation and emotional transference. ~ Deke Sharon

Charisma is the transference of enthusiasm. ~ Ralph Archbold

The single greatest reason why we are losing a generation is because the home is no longer the place of the transference of the faith. We live in a day of 'outsourcing'…Today, we have a generation of people that outsource their kids. ~ Tony Evans

The mutual, reciprocal transformation involved in unconscious countertransference/transference means mutual vulnerability. Vulnerability means, literally, "woundability," and Jung and Jungians move here into considerations of analysts as "wounded healers. ~ Anonymous

It was rare but not unheard of for an analysand tossed by tides of transference and desublimation to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or by contrast inflamed with the special hatred of counter-transference to leave herself there in some desperate condition as a cruel prank like a paper sack of dog turds set afire. ~ Michael Chabon

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world. ~ Sigmund Freud

Selling is essentially transference of feeling. ~ Zig Ziglar

But as time goes on we not only remember specific things in relation to the people we have loved; their lives get built into our lives and finally the transference is complete. We are what we are because of them. ~ May Sarton

An immature parent with unresolved issues and repressed shame can also transfer his or her shame to us. This interpersonal transference of shame is referred to as induced shame. ~ John Bradshaw

I suppose the doctor-patient relationship has that idea of transference. I think it's a special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy. That's why there are so many TV shows about doctors. ~ Michael Fassbender

If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre–preferably to Iceland. Good morning. ~ Aldous Huxley

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul. ~ Simone Weil

But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or worse. It's a process something like falling in love. You don't necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there's something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike or Kerouac, or DeLillo – for someone masculine, or at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swearwords- and, though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I'm talking about. I'm talking about understanding – or at least feeling like I understand- every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator. "This is me," I wanted to say when I read Tyler's rich, sad, lovely novel. "I'm not a character, I'm nothing like the author, I haven't had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if I ever I were to find a voice." And I did find a voice, eventually, and it was mine, not hers; but nevertheless, so powerful was the process of ident ~ Nick Hornby

Tacticians attempt to limit the options of opponents while increasing their own. Increasing one's options is the result of deeper understanding of the limits and enablers at hand. The boundaries of the battle or campaign limit the span of choices available only to the novice. To the master tactician, the more the boundaries appear to limit choice, the more options become available. The rules become enabling. To be sure, perceived limits and restraints are the source of surprise. When one side believes a thing cannot or will not be done, it is vulnerable to a master tactician who finds a way to do so. Knowledge of the opponent's perceptions of the boundaries of war increases the options available. When one can find no means to overcome the boundaries of battle, the conflict is lost. Military genius is conferred upon the tactician who can limit the opponent's options. Victory or defeat comes when one side perceives that the only option left is surrender, the renouncement of the capacity to choose for oneself and the transference of it to the other. This outcome occurs only because structure and context create the corners into which the opponent can be backed. ~ Everett C. Dolman

Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have been previously suppressed. Heinz Kohut (1977) has based his 'self psychology' on a similar perspective. He describes 'selfobject needs' that continue from infancy throughout life and comprise an individual's need for empathic responsiveness from parents, friends, lovers, spouses (and therapists). This responsiveness brings a sense of aliveness and meaning, security and self-esteem to a person's existence. Its lack leads to narcissistic disturbances of personality characterised by the desperate search for selfobjects - for example, idealisation of the therapist or the development of an erotic transference. When, as they inevitably will, these prove inadequate (as did the original environment), the person responds with 'narcissistic rage' and disappointment, which, in the absence of an adequate 'selfobject' cannot be dealt with in a productive way. ~ Jeremy Holmes

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.
Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking. ~ Rust Cohle, True Detective

The creation is a very internal process, and publishing the book is a very external process. It is nice to see the book out in the world and people having the same reaction as when I created it. The point of all art is the emotional transference, and when that happens, the book has succeeded. ~ Elliot Ackerman

The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur - that is, as soon as history begins - that theory explains nothing. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Isms' are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics. ~ Christopher Dines

Stafford's Hypothesis on The Transference of Existence:
Even if you self-isolated, stood still, and held your breath after traveling into the past, you would still be a pebble diverting the flow of time in some way. The very transference of existence via wormholes, not interaction with past actors or events, creates paradoxes.

Time Transference has three stages:

1. The distance traversed between the origin or starting point of the wormhole and the rip in the Chronosphere (space-time continuum).
2. The transference of biological material through the rip in the Chronosphere without damage to or mutation of the genetic code of the chrono-commuter.
3. Arrival at the endpoint of the time transference - the reconstruction of the chrono-commuter's genetic material and the sealing of the rip in the Chronosphere. ~ Stewart Stafford

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener. ~ Raymond Scott

PLACEMENT
The Physical Transference of Care and Saying Good-bye

"A toddler cannot participate in a discussion of the transition process or be expected o understand a verbal explanation. [They benefit] tremendously by experiencing the physical transference of care, and by witnessing the former caregiver's permission and support for [their new guardians] to assume their role. The toddler pays careful attention to the former caregiver's face and voice, listening and watching as [they talk] to [their new guardians] and invites the [guardians'] assumption of the caregiver's role. The attached toddler is very perceptive of [their] caregiver's emotions and will pick up on nonverbal cues from that person as to how [they] should respond to [their] new family. Children who do not have he chance to exchange good-byes or to receive permission to move on are more likely to have an extended period of grieving and to sustain additional damage to their basic sense of trust and security, to their self-esteem, and to their ability to initiate and sustain strong relationships as they grow up. The younger the child, the more important it is that there be direct contact between parents and past caregiveres. A toddler is going to feel conflicting loyalties if [they] are made to feel on some level that [they] must choose between [their] former caregiver and [their] new guardians ... ~ Mary Hopkins-Best

The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability. ~ Simone Weil

As Jung noted in his Psychology of the Transference, "Psychological induction inevitably causes the two parties to get involved in the transformation of the third and to be themselves transformed in the process" (1946, p. 199, italics added). This is in the theoretical and phenomenological zone of Odgen's "analytic third, ~ Anonymous

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them. ~ Emily Bronte

The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the 'transference' of an emotion from the past on to someone in the present -- who perhaps doesn't entirely deserve it.

Our minds are, oddly, not always good at knowing what era they are in. They jump a little too easily, like an erstwhile victim of burglary who keeps a gun by the bed and is startled awake by every rustle.

What's worse for the loved ones standing in the vicinity is the people in the throes of a transference have no easy way of knowing, let alone calmly explaining, what they are up to; they simply feel that their response is entirely appropriate to the occasion. Their partners, on the other hand, may reach a rather different and rather flattering conclusion: that they are distinctly odd -- and maybe even a little mad. ~ Alain De Botton

Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it? ~ Frances Mayes

In psychoanalytical theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood ... it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love. I'm just in transference. ~ Jodi Picoult

Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongation of those feelings into the consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious ~ Sigmund Freud

I read a lot of those Single Girl in New York books, like "Fear of Flying," where you could sort of put yourself, through transference, into the Jewish Girl in New York situation. ~ Charles Busch

If I can make you feel the same way that I feel about my
product or service we'll have a meaningful conversation about it
and how it can help. The trouble is that most sales people don't feel
anything. Nothing at all ~ Chris Murray

The contempt which men feel for the prostitute, and the fact that they have always regarded themselves as far superior to her, even when they made use of her, suggests an attempt to rationalize the situation; it might be explained as an unconscious transference to the woman of the shame they feel for themselves in these relations. ~ Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport. ~ Sherman Alexie

As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our room, drinking tea, flying on speed. She'd bang into the room in a fury. Or, she'd bang into the room, laughing like a maniac. Or, she'd bang into the room and sit under the desk eating Nutter-Butters. She was a sugar freak. She'd pour packets of sugar down her throat, or long Pixie-Stix. She was in constant motion. At first I wondered if she too had some food issues, subsisting mostly on sugar and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, but my concern (as she pointed out) was "total transference, seriously, Max. Maybe you're just hungry." Some Saturdays, we'd go to town together, buy bags and bags of candies, Tootsie Rolls (we both liked vanilla best; she always smelled delicious and wore straight vanilla extract as perfume, which made me hungry), and gummy worms and face- twisting sour things and butterscotch. We'd lie on our backs on the beds, listening to The Who and Queen, bellowing, "I AM THE CHAMPION, YES I AM THE CHAMPION" through mouths full of sticky stuff, or we'd swing from the pipes over the bed and fall shrieking to the floor. ~ Marya Hornbacher

No more fatal or deadly symptom can be seen in a church than this transference of its strength from spiritual to material forces, from the Holy Ghost to the world. The power of God in the Church is the measure of its strength and is the estimate which God puts on it, and not the estimate the world puts on it. ~ E. M. Bounds

A lot of my work involves instilling objects with the power of touch - a transference of soul, spirit, energy through actions. ~ Dan Colen

Ever since I could remember, I'd been engaging in literary transference/transplantation/translation from one culture to another. Growing up on English literature, I taught myself to see my daily reality reflected in my reading material, while plumbing its universal truths in search of particulars... In reading English literature with a Pakistani lense, it seemed to me that all cultures were concerned with the same eternal questions and that people were more similar to one another than they were different. As Alys Binat says in Unmarriagble, "Reading widely can lead to an appreciation of the universalities across cultures."

But as Valentine Darsee says, "We've been forced to seek ourselves in the literature of others for too long. ~ Soniah Kamal

The overarching principle of a therapeutic relationship is that therapists should be ever mindful of a variant of the Hippocratic oath and, to the degree possible, strive to "do no more harm" (Courtois, 2010). Complex trauma clients have already experienced considerable harm, much of it at the hands of other human beings. As a result of the ubiquitous processes of transference, attachment styles, and IWM [Internal working models], these clients often view the therapist's behavior and their relationship through the lens of their trauma-related negative interpersonal expectancies and unhealed emotional wounds and injuries. Therapists should not be surprised to be "guilty until proven innocent", not because clients with complex trauma histories are "unfair" or "unreasonable" but precisely the opposite - because the most realistic self-protective stance for them (given the fact that betrayal and harm have been more the rule than the exception) is to "distrust first and verify" (or to be hypervigilant) rather than to start with an expectation of safety and trustworthiness. ~ Christine A. Courtois

The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation. ~ Sigmund Freud

In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation. ~ Ernest Becker

If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance. ~ Sigmund Freud

Over the last few years I've felt as if I'm a walk-in, as if some kind of soul transference has taken place, as if a different soul – well, me I suppose - had just walked into my body and picked up my memories ~ Karl Wiggins

What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences. ~ Sigmund Freud

With girls house bristles with suspicion and frigidity; how much is paranoia transference? The damnable thing is that they can sense insecurity and meaness like animals smell blood. ~ Sylvia Plath