Transference, Schema, and Assimilation:
The Relevance of Piaget to the
Psychoanalytic Theory of Transference
Paul L. Wachtel
Reprinted by permission from The Annual
of Psychoanalysis, 1981, 8, 59-76. Copyright© 1981 by International
Universities Press. http://www.iup.com
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Editor's Note: The article "Transference,
Schema, and Assimilation: The Relevance of Piaget to the Psychoanalytic
Theory of Transference", by Paul Wachtel, was published on The Annual
of psychoanalysis, 1981, 8, 59-76, and reprinted in "Action and Insight",
by Paul Wachtel, 1987, New York: Guilford Press. In the introductory
remarks to the latter, the Author states that "Both the reality basis
on which transference reactions are based (cf. Gill, 1982; Hoffman,
1983) and the patient's role in bringing about that very behavior
on the part of the therapist (and on the part of other significant
people in the patient's life) are considerations that have been central
to my evolving position over the years and are evident in considerable
degree in the chapters that follow." These themes are central in this
article, that recasts these questions in terms of the Piagetian notions
of assimilation and accommodation. The Author introduces the chapter:
"It develops a theoretical strategy I first attempted in Psychoanalysis
and Behavior Therapy, but it spells out the clinical and theoretical
implications in considerably more detail. The chapter begins by examining
how transference has traditionally been conceived by psychoanalysts,
highlighting the usual emphasis on transference as inappropriate to
the situation and the problems with such formulations. It then goes
on to show how the phenomena usually discussed in terms of transference
can be understood in terms of Piaget's conception of schemas; transference
reactions reflect schemas in which assimilation predominates over
accommodation. This view, as the chapter develops, points the theorist
or therapist to the necessity of seeing what role accommodation may
play in the process as well, since from a Piagetian perspective pure
assimilation without accommodation is an impossibility. Once the question
is framed this way, considerably greater appreciation of the therapist's
contribution to the patient's transference experience is afforded,
as well as a more complex picture of just how the predominance of
assimilation occurs and of how the therapist can play a more transformative
role in the patient's life. This perspective also helps to illuminate
ways in which the transference experience can be a disguised and highly
symbolic representation of what is actually transpiring between patient
and therapist without awareness."
The article is amazingly fresh after twenty
years. The Piagetian schema, whose usefulness to shed light on the
transference phenomena has been keenly shown by Wachtel, has a growing
appeal in the integrative field. The concepts of assimilative and
accommodative integration, derived from Piaget, allow for a new understanding
of the basic integrative processes.
I
The Freudian concept of transference originated in observations
of disturbed adults, obtained in the context of therapy, and was an
attempt to account for certain distortions in their perception of
reality. The Piagetian concept of schema derived from observations
of healthy children, obtained in the context of research, and was
an attempt to account for their increasingly accurate perception of
reality. Two more disparate origins would be hard to find. Yet, I
will argue, the Piagetian concept can provide a very useful and clarifying
perspective on the phenomena to which Freud directed our attention.
Freud's first reports of transference phenomena were
published in the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1895/1955).
There he referred to the patient establishing a "false connection"
(p. 302) between the doctor and a figure from the past. Transference
reactions were "a compulsion and an illusion, which melted
away with the conclusion of the analysis" (p. 304; italics added).
In his discussion of the Dora case, Freud (1905/1953)
elaborated somewhat on the concept and introduced an interesting complexity,
related to the major theme of the present chapter. Though transferences
were generally to be regarded as "facsimiles" which "replace some
earlier person by the person of the physician," some were found to
be "more ingeniously constructed" and "may even become conscious,
by cleverly taking advantage of some real peculiarity in the physician's
person or circumstances and attaching themselves to that" (p. 116).
In "The Dynamics of Transference" (1912/1958) Freud
states that "The peculiarities of the transference to the doctor,
thanks to which it exceeds, both in amount and nature, anything
that could be justified on sensible or rational grounds [italics
added], are made intelligible if we bear in mind that this transference
has precisely been set up not only by the conscious anticipatory ideas
but also by those that have been held back or are unconscious" (p.
100).
Three years later, in further considering the idea that
transference reactions should not be understood as real reactions
to what is going on, Freud (1915/1958) discusses as an "argument against
the genuineness of this love . . . the fact that it exhibits not a
single new feature arising from the present situation, but is entirely
composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including
infantile ones. We undertake to prove this by a detailed analysis
of the patient's behavior in love" (p. 167).
He then goes on to indicate, however, that in thus proceeding
"we have told the patient the truth, but not the whole truth" (p.
168). The argument that transference love is not genuine because it
is a repetition is weak, Freud says, because "this is the essential
character of every state of being in love. There is no such state
which does not reproduce infantile prototypes" (p. 168). Of particular
relevance to the arguments to be advanced in the present discussion,
Freud notes that the difference between transference love and what
we call normal love is one of degree, and further adds, "it displays
its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable
and capable of modification; but that is all and not what is essential"
(p. 168; italics added). Thus Freud indicates here that the processes
responsible for the emotional and perceptual phenomena we label as
transference are essentially the same as those in all relationships
between two people, differing only in degree.
Yet only a year later, in his Introductory Lectures,
Freud (1916/1963) repeats the kinds of statements which were the basis
for the prevalent tendency (discussed below) to treat transference
reactions as something quite distinct from "realistic" reactions to
others. There, discussing transferences, Freud wrote that "we do not
believe that the situation in the treatment could justify the development
of such feelings. We suspect, on the contrary, that the whole readiness
for these feelings is derived from elsewhere, that they were already
prepared in the patient, and, upon the opportunity offered by the
analytic treatment, are transferred on to the person of the doctor"
(p. 442). He goes on to say, discussing negative transferences, that
there can be "no doubt that the hostile feelings towards the doctor
deserve to be called a 'transference,' since the situation in the
treatment quite clearly offers no adequate grounds for their origin"
(p. 443). And in discussing how to deal with transferences in treatment,
he says, "We overcome the transference by pointing out to the patient
that his feelings do not arise from the present situation and do not
apply to the person of the doctor, but that they are repeating something
that has happened to him earlier" (pp. 443-444).
Increasingly, this latter emphasis became the standard
and predominant psychoanalytic view. Transference reactions were regarded
as inappropriate and unrealistic. They were not to be viewed as responses
to the current reality of the analyst or the relationship he had established
with the patient, but had to do with something in the patient's past
which was being erroneously transferred to the present context. Despite
developments in ego psychology, which have alerted us to the complex
interaction between long-established psychic structures and current
environmental input, contemporary formulations and definitions continue
to treat transferences strictly as unfounded departures from reality.
Greenson (1967), for example, states unequivocally that "transference
reactions are always inappropriate" (p. 152). And Langs (1973a) says
that "to identify a fantasy about, or reaction to, the therapist as
primarily transference. . . we must be able to refute with certainty
any appropriate level of truth to the patient's unconscious
or conscious claim that she correctly perceives the therapist in the
manner spelled out through her associations" (p. 415; italics added).
At the same time, however, it has been increasingly
recognized that the actual behaviors and attributes of the analyst
do play some rote in evoking transference reactions. Informally, it
is frequently pointed out that transference distortions often have
a reality "hook" or "peg" on which they are hung; and, more formally,
Langs (1973b) has referred to "reality precipitates" of patients'
transference fantasies. Macalpine (1950) has pointed to the particular
features of the psychoanalytic situation which foster and call forth
regressive transference phenomena. Gill has even suggested--correctly,
I think--that unless the analyst acknowledges the role of his own
behavior in evoking the patient's reaction, the patient's ability
to accept and make use of the analyst's interpretation will be severely
limited.
But the continuing emphasis on viewing transference
as a distorted or inappropriate reaction, a displacement of something
from the past, has required the introduction of a number of other
concepts to account for the patient's ability to react to the realities
of the treatment situation-- to accept, for example, that the
analyst's silence is a technical part of the procedure rather than
a deprivation aimed specifically at the patient and designed to hurt
or punish him, or to recognize after a while that the analyst does
value him even if he does not give overt reassurances. Such concepts
as the "therapeutic alliance," the "working alliance," and the "real
relationship" are designed to address these aspects of what occurs
during the course of an analysis (Greenson, 1965, 1971; Greenson &
Wexler, 1969; Zetzel, 1956).
Since the same patient who is able to continue to cooperate
in the analysis because he recognizes the technical nature of the
analyst's silence may also fantasize that the silence is really a
sadistic act or a retribution for sins, it is usually suggested that
the transference and the working alliance may exist, as it were, side
by side, proceeding apace as two different features of the therapeutic
process. Such a way of conceptualizing does acknowledge the complexity
of the patient's manifold levels of reactivity to what is happening,
but it also creates serious dangers of reification, in which the transference,
the working alliance, and the real relationship are separate and discrete
"things." Schafer (1977), from a slightly different perspective, has
also addressed the at once realistic and unrealistic aspects of the
patient's reactions to the analyst. He suggests that Freud had not
quite reconciled two varying views of transference. "On the one hand,
transference love is sheerly repetitive, merely a new edition of the
old, artificial and regressive . . . and to be dealt with chiefly
by translating it back into its infantile terms. . . . On the other
hand, transference is a piece of real life that is adapted to the
analytic purpose, a transitional state of a provisional character
that is a means to a rational end and as genuine as normal love" (p.
340). He notes that integrating the two perspectives is an important
theoretical problem, and suggests that one major obstacle to such
integration is the tendency to draw too sharply such distinctions
as "past and present, old and new, genuine and artificial, repetition
and creation, the subjective world and the objective world" (p. 360),
etc. As we shall shortly see, applying the perspective of Piaget's
theory to these questions helps to transcend these dichotomies and
to foster the integration of the different views of transference.
II
Piaget's concept of schemas, characterized by the two
basic functions of assimilation and accommodation, seems particularly
useful for understanding the diverse phenomena of transference and
other more or less closely related relationship phenomena. Piaget's
work in general highlights the active role of the developing individual
in shaping and defining his experiential world. Neither as children
nor as adults do we respond directly to stimuli per se. We are always
constructing reality every bit as much as we are perceiving it. This
emphasis on the importance of evolving structures which mediate the
individual's experience and behavior is quite compatible with the
psychoanalytic view. Both theories suggest that man is not stimulus-bound,
that he does not just reflexly respond to external stimuli, but rather
selectively organizes and makes sense of new input in terms of the
experiences and structures which define who he is.
The concept of transference was an attempt to come to
terms with an extreme version of this tendency to experience events
in terms of structures and expectations based on earlier experiences.
The observations which generated the concept seemed
to suggest such an unusually strong role for internal mediating structures
that the reality of who the analyst was or what he was doing was virtually
ignored by the patient. The tendency to perceive the present in terms
of the past became, in certain affectively laden areas of experience,
so acute that it seemed to override all evidence of the analyst's
actual neutral, investigative role. The difficulty with the concept
of transference as it is usually formulated is that it is so exclusively
focused on distortion, on the lack of perception of the real characteristics
of the analyst. It is for this reason that the observation that the
patient does also recognize the analyst as a real person in a professional
helping relationship to him must be represented by a completely different
concept than that of transference (e.g., therapeutic or working alliance,
or real relationship). It is difficult, therefore, to know quite where
or how to fit the observations that transference reactions do seem
to have a "reality peg." The difficulty, discussed above, in integrating
the varying perspectives on transference phenomena is a result of
this dichotomous theorizing.
From a Piagetian perspective, one can readily see a
continuity between those phenomena usually described as "transference"
and those designated by terms such as "therapeutic alliance" or "real
relationship" (or indeed, more generally, between transference phenomena
and the accurate gauging of other people's motives and characteristics
which facilitates effective adaptation). Transference reactions, in
Piaget's terms, may be seen simply as reflecting schemas which are
characterized by a strong predominance of assimilation over accommodation.
The experience with the analyst is assimilated to schemas shaped by
earlier experiences, and there is very little accommodation to the
actualities of the present situation which make it different from
the former experience.
In part, of course, such a way of talking about transference
phenomena is simply a translation from one language system to another.
But it is a translation that has some important implications, both
in terms of pointing inquiry in somewhat different directions and
of facilitating the integration of varying views of the phenomena
of interest. Perhaps most importantly, once one views these phenomena
in terms of schemas, one is confronted with the idea that schemas
can never be characterized only by assimilation. Assimilation may
at times predominate over accommodation, but there can be no such
thing as "pure" assimilation--or, for that matter, as "pure" accommodation
(Piaget, 1952, 1954).
However necessary it may be to describe assimilation and accommodation
separately and sequentially, they should be thought of as simultaneous
and indissociable as they operate in living cognition. Adaptation
is a unitary event, and assimilation and accommodation are merely
abstractions from this unitary reality. As in the case of food ingestion,
the cognitive incorporation of reality always implies both an assimilation
to structure and an accommodation of structure. To assimilate an event
it is necessary at the same time to accommodate to it and vice versa..
. . [T]he balance between the two invariants can and does vary, both
from stage to stage and within a given stage. Some cognitive acts
show a relative preponderance of the assimilative component; others
seem heavily weighted toward accommodation. However,"pure" assimilation
and "pure" accommodation nowhere obtain in mental life. (Flavell,
1963, pp. 48-49)
Transference, seen in this tight, can be understood
as the result of a state of affairs in which assimilation is strongly
predominant, but is nonetheless not inexorable. Some accommodation
to the actual details of what is being experienced, and to how they
differ from those of previous experiences assimilated to that schema,
must also occur. Since assimilation is strongly predominant, it does
not take a particularly dose fit to activate the transference schema.
So two very different analysts may, in separate analyses with the
same patient, be subjectively experienced in very similar fashion
by the patient. The schema is easy to activate, and it does not change
very readily despite the lack of fit. But since "pure" assimilation
cannot occur, it is not completely arbitrary. The range of activating
events is wide but nonetheless does have some bounds. The occurrence
of transference reactions can seem at times to be almost completely
the playing out of an internal dynamic, so striking and deviant can
it be from the reality of what is going on between patient and analyst;
but it is never completely unrelated to what is transpiring. This
is what Gill is calling our attention to in his emphasis on the importance
of acknowledging the analyst's role in eliciting such reactions, and
this is why a perceptive observer can often find a "reality peg" or
"hook" in even the most extreme transference reaction.
This perspective also shows us why Gill's emphasis on
the finding of a reality peg in no way undermines the important clinical
core of the concept of transference; nor does it ignore Freud's insights
about how the continuing effect of the patient's childhood way of
experiencing reality is revealed in the transference. If anything,
it provides a basis for making the traditional psychoanalytic formulation
even more powerful by making it more precise: It points us to ask
in all instances of transference precisely what aspect of the analytic
situation or of the analyst's behavior or characteristics led to the
occurrence of this particular transference reaction at this particular
time. Since the predominance of assimilation is emphasized, no loss
of the role of intrapsychic factors or the patient's unique individuality
is entailed by this particular kind of effort to relate the patient's
behavior to events currently going on about him. The schema notion
implies responsiveness to environmental cues without positing stimulus-bound,
slavish reactivity to environmental events. Thus, one can avoid the
pitfall of the false and limiting dichotomy between understanding
in terms of intrapsychic factors or "psychical reality" and understanding
in terms of the "actual" situation, and appreciation of reality factors
can enhance rather than compete with a psychodynamic perspective.
An understanding of what particular features of the situation bring
forth the transference reaction can in this way be seen as a legitimate
part of what is pointed to by psychoanalytic understanding, rather
than as the undermining or watering down of that understanding. A
broader and firmer base is thus provided for the psychoanalytic view,
which also gains increased power and utility.
Further clarity is also provided by this perspective
regarding the question, both substantive and definitional, as to whether
transference reactions are manifested only in the analytic situation
or go on in the patient's daily life as well. From the present vantage
point, one can readily see that all perceptions and behaviors are
mediated by schemas which are the product of past experiences and
which attempt to assimilate new input to them--as well as to accommodate
to their novel features. Understanding just which aspects of the analytic
situation make assimilation more likely or help to highlight the way
in which it occurs in the patient's mental functioning (cf. Gill,
1954; Macalpine, 1950; Stone, 1961) has important clinical utility.
Such understanding can also shed light on the question
of how best to generalize from the data of the analytic session and
integrate the formulations such data suggest with those deriving from
other
sources.
III
Much of the confusion which arises from the traditional
way of talking about transference phenomena is a result of the cognitive
and perceptual theory which underlay Freud's theorizing. As Schimek
(1975) has recently clarified, Freud's view of cognition was at odds
with the essential thrust of the rest of his theorizing, which was
obviously strongly dynamic, motivational, and developmental in its
emphasis. In contrast, his ideas about cognition, Schimek shows, were
based on the simple associationism that one finds among many stimulus-response
learning theorists who have been particularly opposed to psychoanalysis.
This simple associational psychology has been sharply criticized by
Piaget (1952), by critics of behavior therapy sympathetic to psychoanalysis
(Breger & McGaugh, 19ò5), and recently even by a number
of prominent behavior therapists who have seen the necessity of taking
into account man's active role in defining what the effective stimulus
is and how it will be experienced (Bandura, 1974; Mahoney, 1974),
It would be unfortunate if psychoanalysis, to which such a view is
really most alien, were to retain it.
Precisely because psychoanalysis is in its other aspects
so strongly a dynamic, motivational psychology, this aspect of its
conceptual underpinning went unnoticed for a long time. The stagnant,
nonpersonalistic conception of perception and cognition was obscured
because dynamic and personal factors were so strongly brought into
the theory at the point after the percept or cognition was
formed. As Schimek points out clearly, Freud assumed a simple, camera-like
registration of reality and formation of memory traces which, again,
stored "accurate" images of reality that were somewhere retained in
their true and original form--but then he concentrated, in the more
important and original aspects of his work, on how these images and
representations were transformed or distorted under the pressure of
drives and defenses. It was there that the dynamic features of the
theory were evident. So powerful and original were Freud's ideas in
this regard that it was little noticed that the perceptual building
blocks for these dynamic processes were conceptualized by him in a
far less dynamic fashion than they were by many academic psychologists
in the developing area of cognitive psychology.
In conceptualizing transference phenomena, this camera-like
view of perception and memory traces led to the formulation that a
fully formed, pre-existing set of reactions is plucked from their
original context and displaced from an early figure to the analyst.
As Greenson (1967) puts it, "Transference is the experience of feelings,
drives, attitudes, fantasies and defenses toward a person in the present
which do not befit that person but are a repetition of reactions originating
in regard to significant persons of early childhood, unconsciously
displaced onto figures in the present" (p. 155).
Such a formulation leaves little room for any accommodation
to the reality of the analyst and the interaction. Something static
and pre-existing is simply "displaced," moved from one object to another.
The postulation of a somewhat malleable and responsive structure,
built up on the basis of prior experience, but shaped as well by new
experiences that do not quite fit it, would permit a reconciliation
and synthesis of observations of "distortion" in the transference,
and observations of accurate perceptions and of realistic, cooperative
engagement in the analytic process. But a "displacement" formulation,
which implicitly requires a fully formed representation to be displaced,
ends up leading to the proliferation of separate and discrete postulated
quasi-entities--the transference, the therapeutic alliance, the real
relationship, etc.
Rather than dichotomizing between perceptions that are
accurate and those that are "distorted," the schema notion helps us
to see that all perception is a selective construction, in some respects
a creative act. It is not arbitrary, but it never lacks the personal
element. Even the supposedly "objective" observations that underlie
scientific theory building are richly suffused with the idiosyncratic
and personal, as modern philosophers of science--Polanyi (e.g., 1958,
1966) in particular--have strongly emphasized. In the perception of
other persons, and especially in the perception of their intentions
and affective states and qualities, the variability from observer
to observer is so great that it is extraordinary that a sharp distinction
between "accurate" and "distorted" perceptions could have been retained
for so long. To be sure, each patient's experience of the analyst
is highly individual and shaped by personal needs and fantasies. But
consider the enormous variation in perception of the analyst by those
other than his patients--the differences in how he is experienced
by his spouse, his children, his teachers, his students, his friends,
his rivals. Which is the "undistorted" standard from which the transference
distortion varies?
Discussing the phenomena traditionally designated as
transference in terms of schemas, assimilation, and accommodation
does not present us with such conundrums. It avoids the sharp dichotomizing
implicit in most discussions of transference, yet retains the clinical
core. To recognize a unity in the modes of apprehending reality that
encompasses both the transference perceptions of the analysand and
the observations of the physicist or chemist is not to ignore the
differences between the two, or to blunt the problematic features
of the former. Indeed, it enables us to incorporate the role of the
analyst's real properties and behavior not as something which somehow
limits, reduces, or "excuses" the patient's highly personal interpretation,
but as a way of amplifying it and gaining a finer sense of its determinants.
IV
Ideally, one might expect to see a fairly even balance
between assimilation and accommodation, with neither predominating
to any great extent. In that case the individual would be able to
be responsive to variations in environmental stimulation, while maintaining
a certain consistency and managing to make sense out of new events
on the basis of previous experience. The phenomena discussed in psychoanalytic
writings under the rubric of transference suggest an imbalance in
this ideal relationship, an excessive degree of assimilation that
impedes efforts to adaptively gauge and deal with the events of the
present. In attempting to account for how this imbalance comes about,
two main lines of explanation seem to have developed.
The traditional psychoanalytic explanation stresses
the role of repression and other defenses in creating a structural
differentiation which, in effect, prevents accommodation. Accommodation
per se is, of course, not referred to in most psychoanalytic accounts.
Rather, what is stressed is that defenses relegate certain contents
and processes to the id, preventing them from becoming part of the
ego. Since it is the ego which is the part of the personality which
is in touch with the perceptual world and which has well-developed
properties of organization and coherence (Freud, 1923/1961), the result
of repressing something is to prevent it from being modified by new
perceptual input--i.e., to prevent accommodation. This is why the
contents of the id are described as "timeless" and why, for change
to occur, they must be integrated into the ego, where they are brought
into contact with perceptual input and with the demands for logic
and consistency. Freud's famous phrase "Where id was let ego be" reflects
the view that only when id contents are integrated into the ego can
they be modified to conform to current reality demands. If one employs
(and extends) the conceptual scheme of Piaget in this context, it
can be seen that one effect of defensive processes is to interfere
with the accommodation of certain schemas to new input. When manifested
as transference phenomena, these schemas are revealed in their original
structure as they are applied inappropriately to stimulus objects
which would be more appropriately assimilated by schemas which have
undergone a developmental evolution.
When viewed in the light of the Piagetian notions of
schema, assimilation, and accommodation, some questions are raised
about this traditional account of how transference reactions persist
in unchanging form. Such an account seems to contradict Piaget's view
that accommodation and assimilation must both be present. Now, of
course, one need not postulate that transference schemas show no accommodation
whatever. Even changes in the particular cues which serve to elicit
the transference reaction reflect some degree of accommodation; and
the postulation of at least a certain degree of evolution and change
in transferential schemas (even apart from whatever change can be
brought about by analysis) is not really inconsistent with the traditional
psychoanalytic view. Moreover, transference schemas are ones in which
affective and defensive processes--which Piaget did not address--are
centrally implicated. It is certainly possible that in this realm
Piaget's observations regarding the dual role of accommodation and
assimilation might have to be modified. The question of precisely
how defenses can impede accommodation would seem from this perspective
a particularly important one.
A different way of accounting for the apparent lack
of accommodation in transferential schemas relies less on structural
differentiation and a conception of the id as a zone of nonaccommodation.
Instead, one might assume that transference schemas, like any others,
will show accommodation in response to clear, disconfirming feedback.
In that case, a lack of change would imply that the actual feedback
is either unclear or not really disconfirming. To understand how this
might happen, it is useful to examine some contrasts between our interactions
with the physical world and those with other persons.
The schemas which come to represent the physical world
to the child, and which form the basis for much of our commerce with
the world, do change a great deal as feedback requires accommodation
of extant schemas. (At the same time, of course, this input is also
assimilated to those evolving schemas.) Whether one is observing an
infant learning to grasp an object, a child learning about conservation
of various quantities, or an adult learning to drive or ski, one sees
a process, varying in speed and efficiency, in which feedback shapes
and changes the existing schema. Why then do the schemas associated
with transference seem to change so little, despite their apparently
poor match to the input with which they are coordinated?
One thing becomes clear if one pursues this line of
thought: For the schemas that represent the physical world, disconfirmation
is relatively clear and dramatic. The skier or driver who organizes
input incorrectly falls or goes off the road; the infant fails to
grasp the object he seeks; etc. In the realm of interpersonal and
affective events, it is much harder to know one has been in error.
Such events are highly ambiguous, and consensus is much harder to
obtain. Almost everyone would agree when you have gone off the road.
That is not the case as to whether you have incorrectly
construed anger in another (or failed to construe anger). The ambiguity
of affectively laden events and the consequent difficulty in determining
when feedback requires accommodation make accommodation far less efficient
in this realm and the persistence of old schemas in early form more
likely.
It must further be noted that the nature of the affective
and interpersonal stimuli which we encounter (and which we must assimilate
and accommodate to) is substantially a function of our own actions.
This is, of course, true to some extent in the physical realm as well.
Driving presents us with different stimuli--and a different adaptive
task--if we turn the wheel to the left or to the right. But with physical
stimuli the process is not nearly as complex, and the potential input
is more predictable and varies over a narrower range. Moreover, it
is much easier to know when a change in input is due to our own actions
and when it is an independent event--the difference, say, between
the variation in direction of a hit tennis ball as a function of one's
stroke or as a function of a sudden strong gust of wind.
With affective and interpersonal events, however, the
sorting-out process is particularly difficult. It is very easy to
be convinced one has experienced what someone "is like" without realizing
how much the experienced property (even if accurately gauged in this
or other particulars) is a function of one's own actions when with
him. Each of us tends to consistently elicit particular aspects of
others' personalities, and must of necessity experience the sum of
these elicitations as "the way people are." For relatively healthy
personalities, the range of elicitations is fairly wide, and variable
enough to be roughly representative and in agreement with the experience
of others. But it is important to recognize that none of us really
lives in an "average expectable environment." We all experience some
particular idiosyncratic skewing of the possible kinds of encounters
with others. And this skewing is not just accidental, but is a function
of who we are. One of the ways in which consistency in personality
is maintained is by the selective choice of situations and interactants
and the elicitation of a particular side of those we do interact with.
Given who we are, we select and create a particular kind of interpersonal
world; and given that world, we experience the need to go on as we
have--and thus elicit that same kind of personal world again.
The persistence of transferential schemas, then, with
little change over the years despite what one might expect to be considerable
pressure for accommodation, can be seen as due both to the ambiguity
of interpersonal-affective feedback (making it easy not to notice
that disconfirmation or lack of fit has occurred) and to the tendency
for events to in fact confirm the seemingly inaccurate perception.
If the world were, in effect, to "hold still" for the developing child
rather than to change with his conceptions of it, he would
change to accommodate to it. In learning about the physical world,
this is in fact what happens, and it happens enough in the interpersonal
world for most of us not to be grossly out of touch. But to a substantial
degree, the world of affective and interpersonal events does not hold
still. It accommodates to our initial conceptions and expectations
(as they are translated into actions toward others) and short-circuits
our accommodative activities in this realm. Our suspicions, and the
actions they motivate, lead others to in fact be hostile; our expectations
of seductive behavior lead to eroticized interactions with others;
our submissive behavior, based on past experiences as well as defensive
needs, induces others to expect more compliance from us than they
do from others.
By the time the patient comes to see an analyst, he
has probably had hundreds of such quasi-confirmatory experiences.
I call them quasi-confirmatory because the patient's perceptions are
in one sense anachronistic, even if they may turn out to be confirmed.
For what happens is that the person encounters another who is initially
quite ready to relate to him differently than the patient expects,
but who over time responds to the patient's pattern of interaction
with an all-too-familiar complementary pattern. What to the patient
feels like an accurate perception may be inaccurate as that
but fairly reliable as an implicit prediction: This is how
the other will act toward him after some time in his interactive field
(cf. Wachtel, 1977).
V
The experience with the analyst is, one hopes, a major
and dramatic disconfirmation that can permit accommodation to occur.
The analyst facilitates accommodation in at least two ways. First,
by interpreting unconscious fantasies (and by establishing the analytic
situation, in which such fantasies are likely to become more intense
and vivid), he helps the patient to be more aware of both the schemas
that guide his transactions with others and the kinds of events that
constitute confirmation or disconfirmation of his expectations. Thus
he helps reduce the ambiguity which makes for easy assimilation and
impedes accommodation. Second, he avoids falling into the complementary
behavior pattern which the patient's style of relating has so frequently
brought out in others. As I have described in more detail elsewhere
(Wachtel, 1977b), every neurosis requires "accomplices" to maintain
itself, and a good deal of the analyst's effectiveness may be seen
as residing in his ability not to become one more accomplice. Both
his neutral, analyzing stance and his skill in spotting and interpreting
the patient's subtle and unconscious maneuvers enable him to accomplish
this task.
It is not necessary, however--nor do I think it is possible--for
the analyst to completely avoid falling into complementary
behavior patterns. Wolf (1966) has described particularly well how
such unwitting participation in the neurotic pattern can occur. For
therapeutic purposes, it is sufficient that (1) the analyst for
the most part avoid becoming an accomplice to the neurotic process
(in other words, that he do a better job at this than most of the
people the patient encounters, even if he is not perfect); and (2)
he be able to acknowledge when and how he has acted in a way consistent
with the patient's transference expectations and to help the patient
understand how such patterns come to be repetitive features of his
life. Thus, I would agree with Langs (1973a) that when the therapist's
behavior "has been correctly and unconsciously perceived by the patient,
his interventions will begin, as a rule, with an acknowledgment of
the veracity of the perception and refer to the way it served as a
stimulus for the patient's responsive fantasies and conflicts." I
would further agree that "once the therapist has acknowledged his
contribution to the situation . . . the patient's responsibility for
his reactions must be recognized and subsequently analyzed" (p. 430).
As a result of the considerations put forth in this paper, however,
I would strongly disagree with Langs's contention that this is appropriate
only when the therapist's or analyst's behavior has been "erroneous"
or that all such occurrences are in fact errors in any useful sense
of that term.
VI
Transferences can at times seem quite fantastic. All
analysts have seen patients express feelings and ideas about them
that seem grossly off the mark and appear to have much more to do
with their experiences and fantasies with regard to other--usually
earlier figures. In order to understand this common sort of observation
from the present point of view, several points must be considered.
To begin with, one can recognize that transference reactions are indeed
very often grossly inappropriate without drawing a theoretically problematic
dichotomy between transferences and realistic perceptions. If one
starts from the assumption that all perceptions and actions are mediated
by schemas characterized by both assimilation and accommodation, then
it would appear that we label as transference that portion
of the continuum in which assimilation is predominant. Even in this
range, however, assimilation is not inexorable, and a particular schema
will be called into play only if there is something in the analytic
situation that bears some resemblance to the stimuli which have nourished
the schema in the past. Since, however, the dimension of similarity
can be a highly personal one, there need not be much of an "objective"
similarity. Hence the transference reaction may seem completely arbitrary
and brought about by "internal" factors. Examination of what in the
analytic interaction elicited it at this point, however, is likely
to be richly rewarded, for it affords an understanding not only of
the kinds of fantasies the patient is capable of, but also of the
conditions for their arousal and the particular difficulties to which
they may be related.
In considering just how unrealistic transferences really
are, it is important to recognize that the transference reactions
of most interest and concern to the analyst are those involving substantial
anxiety and conflict. In such circumstances the patient is highly
motivated not to see clearly what he is experiencing. Rather than
communicating directly what his experience is with the analyst, he
is likely to express it indirectly and symbolically. For defensive
reasons, his statement about some aspect of his experience of the
analyst may be so oblique it is unrecognizable. It simply sounds like
an outlandish and incorrect perception that must really be about someone
else. If the analyst is not prepared to translate the symbolism not
only into childhood references but also into references to what is
currently transpiring, he can easily be persuaded that the patient's
reaction is simply a "displacement" from somewhere else and has little
or nothing to do with actual occurrences in the analysis.
Thus, if the patient has the fantasy that the male analyst
is a woman in disguise or has no penis, or that he is much older than
he really is, or is a notorious and immoral seducer, the analyst,
feeling secure that the fantasy as stated is not true, may not recognize
how it symbolically reflects the patient's reaction to some particular
action or pattern of actions by the analyst. Depending on the
specific meaning of "woman" to the patient in that context, for example,
his fantasy that the analyst is a woman might mean he viewed something
about the analyst as weak, or soft, or emotional, or nurturing, or
smart or whatever.
It is, of course, important for the analyst to determine
the meaning of "woman" to the patient in order to understand
fully the transference reaction. But, having done so, it is also important
to know just what he did that seemed weak, nurturing, or whatever
to the patient; and this not primarily for the purpose of discovering
his "error" and attempting to weed it out in the future by more self
analysis (though either of these aims is certainly at times appropriate),
but rather for the purpose of understanding just what kind of input
the patient's schemas assimilate in just what way (for not just any
behavior on the analyst's part would get registered as "weak" or as
"woman"). Such understanding enables the analyst to apprehend much
more precisely how and when the patient's psychic processes create
problems for him, and importantly, the range of situations in which
problems and misperceptions are not likely to occur. All too
often, lack of specificity and failure to understand intrapsychic
organizing processes in their situational context interfere with an
appreciation of the patient's strengths, of where and how intact
functioning is manifested (see Wachtel, 1973b, 1980).
In addition, understanding what behavior of the analyst
elicited the patient's transference reaction can enable analyst and
patient to explore whether other people in the patient's life have
tended to behave as the analyst did, and what meaning the patient
has given to their behavior. The analytic work can then examine both
the kinds of behavior the patient elicits from others and the impact
of such behavior as filtered by the patient's complexly motivated
perceptual processes, as well as the way in which this in turn leads
to behavior on the patient's part which is likely to again elicit
similar behavior from others--thus starting the cycle all over again.
One then gets a picture of transference reactions as not just the
residue of some early experience which is being displaced or replayed,
but as part of a continuous process that has characterized the patient's
life for years yet has only become fully explicated in the experience
with the analyst. Such a perspective, I would contend, provides both
a more complete understanding of transference reactions and improved
possibilities for facilitating therapeutic change (see Wachtel, 1977b).
VII
The considerations presented here do not pose a challenge
to the basic observations of psychoanalysis regarding transference
phenomena. I regard as soundly based on clinical observation such
central psychoanalytic tenets as that patients regularly show rather
substantial distortions in their perceptions of the analyst; that
such distortions are personally meaningful and related to the person's
history; and that they are in important ways the product of unconscious
conflicts and fantasies.
The present perspective does suggest, however, certain
modifications in how we think about our observations, and points
toward the inclusion of a wider range of observations than
has been typical in psychoanalytic practice. It also suggests that
the path between early experiences and later transference reactions
may be more continuous than has been typically portrayed; that interactions
with many figures throughout the person's life tend to occur in such
a way as to confirm and perpetuate the modes of perception and reaction
that eventually appear as transferences in the patient's analysis;
that transference reactions, even when seemingly unrelated to the
reality of the analyst or the analysis, are often symbolic expressions
of conflicted perceptions of what has actually transpired, or at least
of the personal meanings which actual events and characteristics have
had for the patient; that accommodation occurs to such a slight degree
in some interpersonal and affective schemas both because of the ambiguity
in this realm, which makes it harder to know when disconfirmations
have occurred, and because of the reactivity of events in this realm
to our own actions: What we expect to occur is likely to happen even
if it would not have been likely to occur if it were non expected
(and if we did not act accordingly).
The potential value of conceptualizing transference
phenomena as reflecting schemas in which assimilation predominates
over accommodation has not been exhausted by the considerations put
forth here. It is to be hoped that future efforts will carry this
work forward.
SUMMARY
Transference phenomena have traditionally been viewed
as reactions which are inappropriate and based on the distorting effect
of the patient's past. At the same time, they convey an important
reality about the patient's life (or at least his subjective life)
and--it has been increasingly recognized--an important reality about
the therapeutic interaction as well. Integrating these varying perspectives
on transference has created some (not always clearly understood) theoretical
difficulties. The present discussion has suggested that Piaget's notion
of schema, with its stress on the simultaneous processes of assimilation
and accommodation, can help to clarify these theoretical issues. By
regarding transferences as schemas in which assimilation predominates
over accommodation to an inordinate degree, one can incorporate both
the traditional clinical knowledge about the distorting effects of
transference and an emerging recognition of the importance of what
actually transpires between patient and analyst. Such a way of looking
at transference both points to and is aided by an understanding of
the differences between the ways in which we learn about the physical
world and the world of people and emotions. It also leads to a number
of other important new questions for psychoanalytic inquiry and new
perspectives on psychoanalytic practice.
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Amazon.com
November, 1979
