Richard G. Erskine
In Eric Berne’s writings there are two different explanations of psychological functioning: the ego, composed of separate states, with intrapsychic dynamics among the states; and ego state terminology applied to descriptive behavioral roles. Subsequently, throughout the transactional analysis literature, two views of transference and transactions exist that, when applied clinically, are at variance with each other.
One purpose of this article is to draw a distinction between Berne’s two theories of ego states and to describe how each theoretical perspective creates a significantly different concept of transactions and transference. The practice of transactional analysis in psychotherapy is markedly different with each of these two theories.
A second purpose is to demonstrate that consistent use of Berne’s developmental, relational, and intrapsychic theory of ego states in understanding the internal dynamics of transactions can lead to a sensitive and effective response to transactions and transference and to a comprehensive and integrative psychotherapy.
Transference within Psychoanalysis
Freud’s (1905/1955) identification and specification of the transference dimension of the psychotherapeutic relationship is his most fundamental discovery (Langs, 1981). For the past 90 years psychotherapists have struggled with the problem of understanding patients’ communications and clarifying the difference between transactions that are solely in response to the current situation and those that are an expression of archaic relationship conflicts.
In the case of Anna O., Breuer and Freud (1895/1955) discovered the phenomenon of transference when they tried to uncover childhood traumas that were the roots of hysterical symptoms. They first considered transference as resistance to the uncovering of repressed childhood traumas. However, by 1905 Freud described the importance of working with the transference and considered transference and resistance (defenses) as the two main elements of psychoanalysis.
Freud (1905/1955) described transference using the metaphor of new editions or facsimiles of old emotional experiences. In transference patients replace the emotional experience with an earlier person with a similar experience with the psychotherapist. Within psychoanalysis this description of transference remains the basis for treatment. It was echoed by Greenson (1967), who described transference as the emotional experience of a person that does not befit that person and which actually applies to another. A person in the present is inappropriately reacted to as though he or she were a person in the past.
Freud’s hypothesis about the origin of transference was based on the assumption that each individual, through the combined operation of innate disposition and influences brought to bear during early years, acquired a somewhat fixed method or set of methods of living which were evident in all relationships. The patient in analytic treatment was seen as repeating these attitudes and reactions. Freud understood transference as the displacement of behavior and feelings onto the therapist, feelings that were originally experienced and directed toward significant figures from childhood (Freud, 1912/1958, 1915/1958). This early psychoanalytic concept of transference is the one most compatible with Berne’s (1961) original writings on ego states and their application to a theory of transactions and transference.
In the 1910s and 1920s Freud shifted his focus away from a theory of relationship conflicts of early childhood, as represented in his original ideas (1905/1955), to a theory that emphasized innate biological drives. Anna Freud (1965), working within this drive theory model of psychoanalysis, described the defensive, projective aspects of transference as the externalization of instinctual drives. She wrote that many of the transference situations encountered in her work were because the person of the analyst is used to represent one or another aspect of the patient’s personality. In this view, transference and projection are drive theory concepts that describe the defense against awareness of a specific biological drive.
For example, a patient may project a drive of aggression onto the therapist, thus subjectively attributing it to the therapist while experiencing the self as the object of aggression from the therapist. The patient then experiences the disowned and split off drives as being in the other person (Berg, 1977; Novik & Kelly, 1970). This drive theory concept of transference is not compatible with either Berne’s (1961) intrapsychic or descriptive theories of transactional analysis.
Berne’s (1961) descriptions of transference phenomena are more closely linked to those of psychoanalytic object relations theorists such as Bollas (1979), Fairbairn (1952), Guntrip (1971), Khan (1974), and Winnicott (1965). Spotnitz (1969) described the object relations theorists’ view of transference as “the patient’s attempt to reveal the basic maturational needs for objects that were not met in the course of his development” (p. 139).
Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) described in detail the bifurcation of current psychoanalytic theory between a relationship perspective and an instinctual drive perspective and the correspondingly differing views of transference. Anna Ornstein (1989) described transference as “current” resistance: “Transferences contain many elements of the past, but they are not only made of archaic reactions, they also contain a current reaction” to the therapist. When the transference is used to investigate the intersubjective field between patient and therapist, the behavior and unconscious intrapsychic processes of the therapist become an important source of information for use in understanding the patient. From this perspective, what looks like transference is at times a current reaction to the behavior and affect of the therapist (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987). Such insight into the meaning of the transference requires an empathic acceptance by therapists of their own childhood experiences and emotions (Brandchaft, 1989).