Transference and Terror–The Heart of Ernest Becker’s Analysis

By Daniel Liechty, Ph.D.

 

PSYCHOANALYTIC TRANSFERENCE

What makes people act the way they do? Ernest Becker approached this question both in terms of individual actions and in terms of group behavior. He saw that the two were closely related, leading him to a deeper understanding of transference (Becker 1973).

Transference in psychoanalytic literature generally refers to the very strong emotions of the client toward the counselor that emerge in the course of therapy (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973). These may be either strongly negative emotions or strongly positive emotions. It is assumed in psychoanalysis that strong negative emotions are based on unresolved childhood conflicts in which the client transfers the anger, hatred and ambivalence experienced during that period of life onto the therapist. The emergence of strong negative transference can then be used by the therapist to uncover these unresolved conflicts of the past and, by working through these feelings with the therapist, the client can be helped to resolve the conflicts in the unconscious. Clinicians are also well aware of the fact that clients will form very intense and clinging attachments to the therapist. The therapist is experienced by the client as an all-wise, all-knowing, and even all-powerful being and the client magnifies the personal qualities of the therapist beyond any sense of proportion (Giovacchini 1987).

While this kind of positive transference is less valuable for therapy and can place an enormous moral strain on the therapist, it happens with consistent regularity. This fact intrigued Freud, who theorized that humans carry within themselves a strong desire for passive and dependent protection, based in the childhood experience of dependence on parental caregivers. This desire is transferred to the therapist in the course of analysis, causing the patient to view the therapist in the same light of omnipotence with which the child experienced its adult caregivers.

Freud theorized that this desire was the basis for the trance state in hypnosis, as well as the reason why, especially in groups, people will so willingly submit to authoritarian leaders and leadership structures (Freud 1921). That the submission can be total was evidence for Freud that it was erotic in nature and rooted in infantile sexual desire directed toward the parental objects. This view was developed further by other contributors to the psychoanalytic corpus. Becker was very appreciative of Freud’s interpretation on this issue and considered it “the key to a universal underlying historical psychology” (Becker 1973, p.131).

Becker saw that this theory explained most clearly why people engage in acts of sadism in a group context that they would never even consider in another situation and for which they might later be shocked and ashamed. For if the leader comes to represent the omnipotent parent, the person wants nothing more than to submit and serve. Since it is the parents who, during the oedipal transition process, facilitate the development of the superego, a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, then an authoritarian leader acting in that role can override the restrictions of the superego and sanction any sort of behavior in its place. Becker considered this an important fact about human beings that was already tacitly suggested by Freud.

Reality reveals to us the fact that as individual people, we are finite, mortal, weak animals. Given the choice between accepting this reality or giving oneself over to illusions of greatness and importance that the leader imparts to followers, the mass of human beings will choose illusion over reality, lies over truth, fiction over fact and will strike out in holy rage against anyone or anything that threatens to shatter the illusion to which they have committed themselves (Becker 1975).

This is the nature of the bond between leader and follower, between individual and group behavior. It is a bond rooted in the regressive transference of individual submission to power, in the individual need to feel awe and protection from the symbolic icons of power by which the person can deny and avoid recognition of finitude. Furthermore, people do not simply find themselves passively engulfed by such feelings toward symbolic icons of power. People actively and all but consciously seek such symbolic icons of powers toward which they might submit themselves, even when, perhaps even especially when, this is done under the ideological cover of seeking independence, individuation, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and autonomy.

THE LEADER AND THE GROUP

The leader imparts to the group members a sense of transcendent expansion, sanction for sadistic or licentious behavior, and group cohesiveness based on the dynamic of regressive transference (Becker 1973). The leader offers the group opportunity to maintain the illusion of power in the face of ontological finitude. The leader does this by assuming the burden of guilt for the concrete actions of the group members as well as the existential guilt of “being” for the group. The price each person pays for this service is obedience to the authority of the leader. The very power of the leader is the source of his or her vulnerability as well. The relationship between the leader and the group is not simply unidirectional.

Looked at from the other side, the leader is created by the group. While there are natural leadership qualities that will make a certain individual seem to be a “born leader,” the specifics of these qualities vary widely from culture to culture. It is the group that recognizes and responds to these qualities of leadership exhibited and embodied in particular individuals.

Another way of viewing the leader/group relationship is to see the group members as actively and all but consciously in search of people who, by the specific outlines of their particular cultural hero system, embody and exhibit those qualities of leadership required by the group members for the successful functioning of their regressive transference. When the group finds such a person (perhaps after some sequence of trial and error) the members are more than willing to surrender their will to that of the leader. In this surrender, very strong and specific demands are placed on the leader to fulfill the expected role that the group requires for regressive transference. Contrary to the mythological constructs of the hero systems of numerous cultures, even the most exalted and powerful of human leaders are human beings and not gods. The group holds as firm a grip on the leader as the leader holds on the group. They hold the leader hostage to the expectations of the group, and the group will not hesitate to move against a leader who ceases to exhibit this ability to lead.

Building on the insights of Freud and others concerning transference and group behavior, Becker (1973) suggested that this transference dynamic is present in all human behavior. Transference is not simply neurotic behavior but normal behavior. Or better said, normal behavior is neurotic behavior. Human behavior can best be interpreted as a continuum of strengths and weaknesses, with no hard-and-fast lines of demarcation between what is normal and what is neurotic. If we view neurosis as a continuum, however, we have to become aware of those features of ourselves that we would rather pretend do not exist. Seen in this light, there is no convincing philosophical or therapeutic justification for the division between “healers” and “sick,” between “we” and “them,” which the medical model of psychiatry implies. This theme, which is being echoed in the current literature (Goldstein 1990b), began to dominate Becker’s mature work.

What Becker saw is that human destructiveness is not simply a matter of acquisitive appetites out of control, material conflicts of interest, or clumsy ignorance of sophisticated conflict resolution methods. Human destructiveness is rooted in the ontological fact of human finitude on the one hand and on the other hand the very real human need for illusions, lies, and fictions concerning this fact of ontology. Experience, education, material equality and conflict mediation will lessen the frequency with which humans resort to overt institutions of violence such as organized warfare. This is to be encouraged at every point. Yet Becker began to understand that at its deepest levels, human resort to violence is rooted in an existential urge to deny and avoid ontological finitude. That is a different problem altogether from the subject matter of professional peace studies.

TRANSFERENCE AND NORMALITY

Freud theorized that the human desire to submit to authority is rooted in sexual motivation. Becker recast this in an existential/ontological direction. Becker sought to ground his views in the general human condition rather than in specific erotic drives. This allowed his theories to mutually influence the emerging interdisciplinary consensus concerning the fictional nature of human meaning systems and the plasticity of human character. According to Becker, transference is motivated by a real terror of both life and death. As he wrote,

People seek merger with the parental omnipotence not out of desire but out of cowardice … The fact that transference could lead to complete subjection proves not its “erotic character” but something quite different: its ‘truthful” character, we might say…. it is the Immortality motive and not the sexual one that must bear the larger burden of our explanation of human passion. [Becker 1973, p. 142)

In his mature theory of human motivation, Becker pointed toward two ontological drives–the fear of death and the fear of life. He found a definite cowardliness, dread, and fear of both life and death on the one hand and on the other hand a definite attraction toward heroism, goodness, beauty, and perfection.

The attraction toward heroism Becker located in the human conscience. This desire to do what is right and to feel good is an extension of what Becker earlier had summarized in the concept of self-esteem. Each person has an aesthetic urge toward perfection and wholeness that is an integral component of self-esteem. Each person’s sense of perfection is shaped by culture and upbringing. Within one culture, normally socialized people tend to share basic notions, with variations occurring due to individual experiences.

While other species (if we may speak anthropomorphically) also seem to desire to feel good by living expansively in the environment according to their nature and instincts, human beings cannot easily do this. Having exchanged instinctual meaning for symbolic meaning in the course of evolution, human beings no longer have a clear and unambiguous nature by which to live in the world. Animals need not contemplate just what truth, goodness, and beauty mean for them. For human beings this is a primary activity, sometimes even prior to basic bodily care. The reason for this is that while humans do want to merge with oceanic nature, at the same time there is an equally strong urge to stand out from nature as something unique in the universe. To deny, neglect, or ignore either pole in human beings can only be done by concerted repression of that which is basic to human character.

Is it possible to reconcile these two poles of being human? That is finally the problem of psychotherapy and the point at which therapy and spirituality meet. Putting the dilemma in this light allows us yet another handle on what Becker meant by transference. Transference, in a nutshell, is the dynamic of drawing personal symbolic power from external sources. Transference is the psychological mechanism by which an individual feels grounded in the object world and at the same time feels powerful, important, and unique-standing, as it were, above nature. Because of the need to feel powerful, important and unique, normally socialized people choose a combination of transference objects that symbolize strength, power or beauty to the majority of people living in their particular culture. In American culture in the late twentieth century, for example, transference objects like the flag, money, cars, famous people, and so on are easily understood and shared by the majority of people. Transference objects such as specialized collections, technical gadgets, a romantic or intellectual interest, a club, association, or social movement are shared by fewer people, yet well understood by the majority. They are considered safely normal, if perhaps idiosyncratic, so long as one is not fanatical about one peculiar transference object (that is, so long as one has a combination of transference objects that are shared by many other people). In Becker’s presentation, transference links even a perversion like fetishism to the same inner motives that we find in everyday normal living. As he wrote,

Transference is a form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems. We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, and we fix them to a spot in the environment. We can create any locus at all for projecting our cares onto the world, even the locus of our own arms and legs. [Becker 1973, p. 144]

Because humans are symbolic creatures and can arbitrarily invest any concept or object with talismanic power, there is nothing that limits our choice of transference objects to that which the majority prefers or approves. Perhaps for me a crucifix, or a crystal, or a rabbit foot worn next to my body gives me a sense of power, groundedness, potency. That’s just a little quirk, and folks smile when I tell them about it. But perhaps this crucifix, crystal or rabbit’s foot, and nothing, else yields such feelings of power, so that I become totally fixed on this one transference object and become frantic or simply refuse to go out if I can’t find it. That now becomes more like an obsession, makes people uncomfortable to hear about it, and I am often urged to ‘get help’ with this fixation. Now let us imagine the object is a woman’s shoe, or piece of underclothing–we are now in the territory of the clinical perversions, although objectively it is the same psychological processes in play in each of these examples.

In Becker’s view, people use transference as a way of dealing with the real terror of feeling powerless, ungrounded, weak and isolated–the very feelings that, because of the development of an individualized ego and personality in human beings, must be shouldered by the human species alone. These are feelings, in other words, that are unavoidable and endemic to–we might even say paradigmatic of–the human condition of self awareness, consciousness of self, the ability stand outside oneself and to think of oneself in the third person. But even more than this, the process of transference, of seeking sources of power outside of oneself for the purpose of building up one’s psychological defenses, is not only all-pervasive and unavoidable to human psychology, but a person unable to engage in the process of transference would be a good working definition of at least one major type of psychoses.

The first transference object in the lives of most people is probably their parents or caregivers. But as the ability to symbolize continue to develop, the child soon learns that almost any object will suffice if necessary, such as a teddy bear or blanket–Winnicott’s ‘transitional objects’ is just another way of talking about a child’s developing ability to employ symbols in the transference process. We symbolically invest a particular transference object with power to protect and reassure us of our place of value and safety in the universe.

The ambivalence felt toward both positive and negative transference objects is rooted in this investment of power we give them. As Becker wrote,

In some complex ways the child has to fight against the power of the parents in their awesome miraculousness … Now we see why the transference object poses so many problems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person’s strength. But then he experiences “transference terror,” the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object. [Becker 1973, p. 146)

In Becker’s view, transference dynamics pervade all of human life and are inseparable from the ontological fact of our human condition. Transference dynamics lay at the root of much human misery, oppression and bamboozlement. Yet for an animal who has raised its head with the new gift of self-consciousness and, surveying the universe, finds itself alone, threatened on every side and awaiting the finality of death, life without some form of transference would be unbearable. Without transference of any kind, we would simply be psychotically stunned every time we lifted our minds from total absorption in all but the most mundane of occupations.

Positive transference is the root of our urge toward, attraction to and desire to identify with the heroic, toward truth, beauty and goodness. But this is not the whole story. Becker (1973) wrote. “What makes transcendence heroics demeaning is that the process is unconscious and reflexive, not fully in one’s control” (p. 156). The tragedy of transference dynamics is that our transference objects are mediated to us without our conscious control or reflective input. If we were able to exercise some thoughtful control and judgment in choosing our transference objects, the negative side effects would be greatly reduced.

References

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.

___ (1975). Escape from evil. New York: Free Press.

Giovacchini, P. (1987). A narrative textbook of psychoanalysis. Northvale. NJ: Jason Aronson.

Laplanche. J., and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The language of psycho-analysis. New York: W. W. Norton.