Transference and Information Processing

The importance of transference has been emphasized by psychodynamically oriented clinicians since Freud. This article examines transference phenomena from an information processing perspective, delineates several different aspects of transference experience, and shows how experimental research documents processes involved in transference. It distinguishes between transference as person schemas/object representations, attachment, schema-triggered affect, interpersonal expectancies, scripts, and defenses, and argues for the importance of making such distinctions. It attempts, further, to demonstrate the clinical utility of examining and working with transference phenomena in the alteration of dysfunctional schemas and maladaptive mechanisms of affect-regulation. The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. -Hamlet For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentiu or in effisie, -Freud (1912, p. 108) I was recently referred for projective testing of a woman who was hospitalized for depression and possible borderline personality disorder. The first session proceeded rather uneventfully; she had a jaded, cynical style about her and tended to give up on tasks when she had the slightest reason to believe that she might not complete them successfully. When I returned for the second session, it was clear that she would not give me any more information unless I backed away from the more rigid testing format and simply talked with her for a while. After doing so for a half an hour, we returned to the testing, at which point she proceeded to keep me for two hours in order to complete a test that normally takes about 30 minutes. At the end of the session, having manipulated me into staying (in various only dimly masked ways), she denounced me as a liar for having kept her beyond the hour-and-a-half that I had, the previous day, forecast for the second session. Requests for should be addressed to Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Michigan, 580 Union Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. I would like to express my appreciation to Nancy Cantor and Dennis Klos for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.