Transference (psychology)

“ Thus, when we say that an unconscious idea strives for transference into the foreconscious in order later to penetrate consciousness, we do not mean that a second idea is to be formed situated in a new locality like an interlineation near which the original continues to remain; also, when we speak of penetration into consciousness, we wish carefully to avoid any idea of change of locality. ”

“ The unconscious wish-feelings evidently strive to assert themselves during the day also, and the fact of transference and the psychoses teach us that they endeavor to penetrate to consciousness and dominate motility by the road leading through the system of the foreconscious. ”

“ This conception of the transference is, you will have noted, most intimately connected with the acceptance of the idea of biological "duties" By this term you must understand those tendencies or motives in human beings giving rise to civilisation, as inevitably as in the bird they give rise to the exquisitely woven nest, and in the stag to the production of antlers. ”

“ Another kind of displacement which seems hard to believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the people who surrounded us when we were children ”

“ The Analysis of the Transference We have already seen that the transference brings about difficulties, because the personality of the physician is assimilated with the image of the patient’s parents. The first part of the analysis, the investigation of the patient’s complexes, is rather easy, chiefly because a man is relieved by ridding himself of his secrets, difficulties and pains. ”

“ Whereupon we may proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the original person in childhood.
Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other. ”

“ The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But this we can say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals the natural degree is very low. ”

“ The student will observe also, that however carefully the facts are selected bearing on this one point of thought transference, it is [113] impossible, so intimately related are the branches of psychic science, to have them entirely free from the possibility of other explanations. Granting that thought may be transferred from one mortal to another, admits that a spirit may transfer its thoughts to a mortal also, and hence a spirit seeing a friend in distress may act as a messenger. ”

“ The person from whom the thought is transferred is the active agent, and the one who receives it is the passive one. Often this phenomenon takes place spontaneously, as when one is in trouble, or at the point of dying, a knowledge of it may sometimes be transferred to an intimate friend who is in sympathy. In the hypnotic state, thought transference can sometimes be induced artificially; and [225] the point here to be considered is the transference to the child of healthy normal sensations to replace the abnormal ones which may have taken possession of consciousness and caused trouble. ”

“ I need not enter into particulars, but I will just say that the conditions under which apparent transference of thought occurs from one or more persons, steadfastly thinking, to another in the same room blindfold and wholly disconnected from the others, seem to me absolutely satisfactory, and such as to preclude the possibility of conscious collusion on the one hand or unconscious muscular indication on the other. ”

“ This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's successions as forces stamping their image on the mind, [552] still, between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. ”

“ The transmission hypothesis sins further by reason of its transcending the legitimate grounds of psychology. It assumes an independent world of consciousness which cannot be brought within the range of experience. Now even if it be granted that such a world does exist, it still falls outside the subject-matter of psychology. For psychology as we pointed out deals with facts of consciousness, with experiences and their relations. ”

“ In the experiments conducted in the same room or house, and in most of the spontaneous cases at close quarters, the idea transferred corresponds to a mental image consciously present to the mind of the agent. But the cases, whether experimental or spontaneous, of such detailed transference at a distance of more than a mile or two are very few—too few to justify any valid generalisation. For in most cases of thought-transference at a distance the idea transferred is one not consciously present to the agent's mind at all—the idea of his own personality. ”

“ The condition of the feeling of transition, and hence of the feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness of at least two possible objects of attention; and the formal consciousness of self might be schematized as a straight line connecting two points, in which one point represents the foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness. ”

“ The new fact which we recognize unwillingly is termed transference. We mean a transference of emotions to the person of the physician, because we do not believe that the situation of the cure justifies the genesis of such feelings. We rather surmise that this readiness toward emotion originated elsewhere, that it was prepared within the patient, and that the opportunity given by analytic treatment caused it to be transferred to the person of the physician. Transference may occur as a stormy demand for love or in a more moderate form ”

“ Both the transmitter and the material transmitted are physical in their nature, but how can an idea or feeling such as our idea of eternity, or of infinity, or aesthetic, or moral sense be transmitted through a tube? How then can we apply the concept of transmission-function to consciousness and the physical world where the two are totally different in nature? ”

“ But there are other vibrations in the Universe, which cannot be photographed,—the vibrations of the human brain, which, like those emanating from the ‘brain of heaven,’ are full of light and fire, and convey distinct impressions or patterns of thought. People speak of ‘thought-transference’ from one subject to another as if it were a remarkable coincidence,—whereas you cannot put a stop to the transference of thought,—it is in the very air, like the germs of disease or health,—and nothing can do away with it. ”

“ Once admit the principle that a feeling may be tinged by the reproductive consciousness of an habitual transition, even when the transition is not made, and it seems entirely natural to admit that, if the transition be habitually in the order abcdef, and if a, c, and f be felt separately at all, a will be felt with an essential earliness, f with an essential lateness, and that c will fall between. ”

“ There is a distinction between thought-transference and thought-reading. It is no mere fanciful distinction either. Thought-transference occurs when the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of one mind are projected by intense action and received by the sensitive and impressionable mind of another—awake or asleep is immaterial—so long as it occurs without pre-arrangement and contact.
Telepathy is a more vivid form of sudden and unexpected thought-transference, in which the intense thoughts and wishes of one person, more or less in sympathy, are suddenly transferred to the consciousness of another. ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ Thought transference, which is now unquestionably an established fact, notwithstanding much chicanery that is still to be found in connection with it, is undoubtedly to be explained through the fact that thoughts are forces. A [Pg 66] positive mind through practice, at first with very simple beginnings, gives form to a thought that another mind open and receptive to it—and sufficiently attuned to the other mind—is able to receive. ”

“ The transmission hypothesis is all the more unacceptable as the terms in which it is expressed are contradictory, and the analogy on which it is based is essentially illegitimate. Consciousness is supposed to be different in nature from the physical world and existing independently, the psychophysical threshold alone regulating the volume of the stream of consciousness to be poured over into the material world. ”

“ Finally, it may be urged, that the invocation of an extra-mundane world helps matters little, as it does not show the modus operandi of the interdependence of mental and physical phenomena, inasmuch as the rising or falling of a physical threshold does not in the least explain or show how a stream of consciousness is made possible to vary in volume and intensity. Without explaining the proposition that mental processes vary as physical processes, the transmission hypothesis only assumes an additional world of disembodied consciousness and thus gratuitously multiplies entities. ”

“ But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses, [Pg 247] if of simple objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' according as they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects, we call them 'percepts' when vivid, 'concepts' or 'thoughts' when faint. ”

“ Whether such a faculty exists or not, it is certain that the phenomena which suggest it occur under the same conditions and inextricably mingled with others which can, with some plausibility, be explained as due to thought-transference from the conscious or unconscious memory of persons actually present. ”

“ The psychological law of association of objects thought of through their previous contiguity in thought or experience would thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical fact that nerve-currents propagate themselves easiest through those tracts of conduction which have been already most in use. ”

“ Transmigration, in some form, has certainly been, if not hereafter to be, the lot of man. I do not believe the Platonic conception of this great truth to be the correct one, nor that man will ever undergo the doom again; yet. that the soul has reached its present through many an inferior state, is a self-evident fact to me. ”

“ For there is always the possibility—amounting, I feel warranted in saying, to certainty—that what they really indicate is not communication with the dead, but thought transference between living minds.
In fact the telepathic connection between the mind of the medium and the mind of the sitter is often most obvious. ”

“ Transmission supposes something which may be transmitted; if, then, the act of consciousness is transmitted, it must be something permanent in itself, in the midst of the succession of the substances; and this is a very strange conclusion to which the German philosopher is brought by his theory of transmission. All psychologists had said that the substance of the soul is permanent, and its phenomena transitory; now, on the contrary, we find that the transitory is the substance, and that which is permanent is the phenomenon, or the act of consciousness which is transmitted. ”

“ Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and its environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a succession; and by so doing evolves a distinct consciousness—a consciousness that becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the correspondence more complete. ”

“ If it be objected that every hypothesis is extra-experiential, it may be pointed out that a hypothesis must be framed in terms that can be drawn within the circle of experience, it must use a vera causa, an agent that is observable in nature. But, as we have already shown, the transmission hypothesis lacks this essential requirement. Its agent, disembodied consciousness, is not a vera causa, nor can it ever be drawn into the circle of experience. ”

“ Now turn to our experiments in thought-transference. Here again the agent is a living man; but he is no longer operating by ordinary means,—by spoken words or visible gestures. He is operating on the percipient's subconscious self by means of a telepathic impulse, which he desires, indeed, to project from himself, and which the percipient may desire to receive, but of whose modus operandi the ordinary waking selves of agent and percipient alike are entirely unaware. ”

“ It has been established on the clearest evidence that thought-transference and reception between two nearly harmonised or sympathetic human beings, or embodied human spirits, are possible, and this without intermediate sense or physical agencies. If, then, between mind and mind on earth, distance or space being no obstacle, matter no hindrance, why not between mind disincarnate—if we can conceive of mind apart from the human brain and organism—and mind incarnate? ”

“ During the first half of this century the inneity of instinct was placed in the order of cognition, while recent psychology places it in the order of movements, or, to be more accurate, in a fixed relation between certain states of consciousness and certain movements. ”