It is a cliche when clients fall in love with their therapists. But many movies seem to get the client/therapist roles all wrong. Movies often deal with transference lust rather than love. Most notably Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, who consummate their transference issues on the big screen during Prince of Tides, before going back to their respective partners and boring lives. The scriptwriters got around that particularly awkward, ethical situation because Nick Nolte was not officially Barbra Streisand’s client, he was the brother of her client, which, although sails perilously close the edge of the world as we know it, technically manages to navigate its way through the tidal-waves of legal and moral violations. Just.
The Sopranos also managed to neatly satisfy an audience’s vicarious voyeuristic transference tendencies when Tony Soprano had a sexual fantasy scene which involved violently sweeping all accoutrements off the therapist’s desk except for the therapist Jennifer Melfi herself, and going for it in an unbridled, finally requited, sexual transference.
In a nutshell, erotic transference is where the traumatized client wants to have healing sex with the nurturing therapist. Eroticized transference is where the delusional client thinks the caring therapist wants to have healing sex with their irresistible self. However, if your therapist is suffering from erotic or eroticized counter-transference (for everything there is an opposite) and wants to have an unethical, illegal quickie with you, leave their office as rapidly as possible, preferably leaving a small whirlwind of dust in your wake.
Sexual fantasies however (on both sides of the couch) are apparently normal. A peer-reviewed journal provides evidence based research that 95% of male therapists and 76% of female therapists have sexual feelings towards clients. In real life a dual relationship (and not just of the sexualized sort) has vast potential to harm the client and puts an almighty question mark over the therapist’s ethics and standards. While therapy sex makes for great TV viewing, it tends to reveal more about audience expectations than the therapy profession itself. However, never mistake Fantasyland for the excellent work done in a real-world therapist’s office.
There is a reason I have stayed with my therapist for fourteen years – she is a most ethical person with self-restraint and well-defined boundaries – and that niggles, irritates and gets on my nerves greatly at times. I would like to go to the movies with her, share a café cappuccino, go for a walk along the beach, take her out for dinner or move in together and live happily ever after. It’s what Sigmund Freud called transference love which is not about sexual feelings but rather the more ubiquitous sensual fantasies of merging, enmeshing and being engulfed in the mother/child symbiotic relationship. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a male or female therapist, whether your therapist is fat or thin, attractive or has a face like a smacked bum, or whether or not you (or they) are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual; these transference fantasies always come from the same deep primitive place – your parents and the way they related to you as a child.
Transference love is crucial to the therapeutic process. It allows the patient to explore all manner of parental feelings in a safe, trusting and respectful environment.
Here are eight ways to know you are in love with your therapist:
1. Shopping with your therapist is not retail therapy, but…..
You go shopping for clothes and visualize what your therapist would look like in them rather than yourself. I’ve had to actively remind myself on many an occasion that I have my own sense of style and taste that differs from hers. My therapist once wore a blood-red and sunset-orange frilly, ruffled skirt that looked like an out-of-control bushfire on a hot Australian summer day. It felt like it was alive and breathing fire. I didn’t like it but I wanted to go out and buy one anyway.
2. You have your therapist’s voice in your head.
You have your therapist’s voice in your head; a warm, honey-toned, well-modulated one that says, “You are very special! You can do this! I believe in you!” This mellifluous chant has, over the years, slowly replaced the harsh, angry, scathingly judgmental rant that used to scream, “I hate you and I wish you were never born.”
3. Sharing synchronicity and relationship through books.
Books are connection points for like-minded people. You read a book about mothers and daughters and immediately want to post it to your therapist so she can share your experience. And she would except for the time factor. She has her own set of books she hasn’t got time to read. I’ve just read “Waiting Room” a memoir by Gabrielle Carey, about her very private, distant, unknown and emotionally unavailable elderly mother who was diagnosed with a brain tumour. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to send it immediately to my therapist or my own mother. During therapy, I will sometimes give her a brief synopsis of the current book I am reading and explain my feelings on the subject for a deeper and more penetrating awareness and understanding of what the themes, motifs, symbols, plot and characters mean to me. Sometimes we do swap and read each other’s books. Once she gave me a book that I was already reading at the time.
4. When your therapist gives you a gift.
I have two roses, one pink, one yellow, dried and pressed in a wooden frame sitting on my bookshelf (see above photo). My therapist gave them to me when I had cancer. It is a potent symbol of her on-going care. It has more meaning to me than a thousand fresh roses from the world’s most expensive florist. This is because it came from her garden. She told me that one of them was her mother-in-law’s favourite. If our house ever catches fire, after the photo albums it will be the most treasured item I will grab.
5. You don’t have to agree with her all the time in order to connect.
Just because my therapist is a yoga freak, doesn’t mean I will ever like yoga (or Pilates). I went once, passed wind, snored my head off and was too embarrassed to ever set foot in the place again. Yoga is aerobics for the elderly and Pilates is yoga for people who have a fetish for plastic and bondage. However she has instilled in me that exercise of any and all sorts (and good eating) is important for both the brain and the body; by example rather than nagging and threats of love withdrawal.
6. A good therapist’s wisdom affects more than just the client.
If my therapist is my substitute mother, then she is a surrogate grandmother to my children. She passes on her worldly wisdom to me and I pass it onto my teenagers who tell me in no uncertain terms to, “Stop talking like a psychologist, Mum.”
7. Your therapist cares for you even when you don’t.
I remember a defining moment twelve months into therapy. I found out I had Type 2 Diabetes and was really frightened, angry and wanting to retreat into denial. My therapist leaned forward, looked me in the eye and said that she “cared about my kidneys.” Eight years later when I was diagnosed with a malignant kidney tumour, she gave me a bunch of roses, two of which, one pink, one yellow, I dried and pressed as a permanent visual reminder not only of her loving/kindness, but that I need to care for my two kidneys, one pink and one yellow (and the rest of me) as well.
8. You admire and respect your therapist so much you decide to become one yourself.
Some children want to grow up and be just like their mothers. I am no exception. Eighteen months ago I embarked on a psychology degree, love it dearly and am doing very well. Passing on her love of education in general and psychology in particular is, I consider, a legacy of her great therapy to me among many other things. Like caring for my family, my house, my garden, my health, my self-respect, my respect for others; thus instilling in me an overriding wish to help other people who have suffered from any form of mental illness.
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From Psych Central's :
PsychCentral (September 27, 2009)
You are certainly writing about all of the big stuff with me this week! I’m #6 and #8.
My being “in love” was always just more about my loving him. I don’t think so much erotic transference, but more of my perfect love type of thing. The feelings have never been about sex, but all about this pure and sweet, giving kind of love. I never needed or wanted anything back but his trust and acceptance. It’s non-demanding, non-envious and very pretty. That’s why I like this part of me so much. And that’s likely why I’m so sensitive about my feelings too.
I told him about it and he was gentle and accepting, as always. It has been a healing, though very painful at times, experience for me.
I love this article! Funny yet so true!
thanks for this article. It was funny and made a lot of sense. My therapist loves me. She would never breach the safety boundaries though. I really can’t imagine any therapist having erotic counter transference. It is interesting to know that it happens though.
I read the books that my therapist gives me. They are “smart” books about therapy sometimes hard to understand but very interesting. I have also lent a dvd about therapy (fiction) to my therapist. She must have loved it so much, she never gave it back. 
I love everything you write, Sonia. I’m especially grateful when you put words to experiences some therapists are not taught to handle.
I’m not saying they are told not to discuss — I’m saying they came from an environment which didn’t emphasize some important topics.
Your urge to merge paragraph is a thing of beauty. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for how easy that is to re-convey. When I used those words they came out stumbling, embarrassed, and not loudly enough to break through the therapist’s fears. And I have a good therapist. Really.
In my experience, even the best therapists often don’t have their heads or therapeutic skills wrapped the big three: love, death and money.
Just because these are the stuff of life itself doesn’t mean anyone helped them deal with these topics themselves.
These are a Woody Allen movie. These are a Greek play. There is nothing more important than the combination of these three. There is nothing therapists run from more, from what I see. Maybe it’s where I live. We don’t have any Phenomenological/Existential specialists that I’ve ever met.
Of these lacks, I find it easier to accept the fear of death, and discomfort about money. I’m really very frustrated at how hard it is to have a conversation about the love/crush/urge to merge thing.
The problem starts with what we call it. “Transference” is one of the stupidest words ever used. What a house of cards upon which to base the definition of a relationship.
A therapeutic relationship might be approximate. It might be absurdly close and distant at the same time. It is not, however, different than any other relationship when it comes to transference.
We employ no more transference with therapists than with anyone else in our lives. Our ability to carve out a reality from the endless input stream called our “senses” is not better or worse with therapists than with anyone else. Do I project my relationship with my parents onto my therapist? If yes, I probably project those needs and fears onto everyone else, as well.
Transference is really another word for “projection.” When used in this way, it’s can be a valid a description of the situation.
It is OK to define a judgment as projection. It is then appropriate to deconstruct the projection to align one’s thoughts closer to an agreement on objective reality.
“Transference” is just a word to distance the therapist from what’s frightening about the client. It’s a way to say, “You’re not having that experience; that experience is not real; that experience is an expression of infantile needs.” And the especially infuriating one Lorraine Braco’s character used on Sopranos: “You don’t really know me.”
You know what I know? I know a person who puts up with my shit, without getting offended, until I calm down enough to relate in a mature way. I know someone who didn’t react by making my turmoil worse because her needs weren’t met. I know that so few emotional needs in my life are met right now that I’m prone to over-respond to any whiff of help that smells like love.
I fall in love with anyone who kindly, gently helps me. Take that same experience outside the boundaries and I’d fall still fall in love. This is not me as an infant. This is not me not knowing therapist. I am an adult. The therapist is someone whom I know as good, helping and intelligent. In many, many ways I know the therapist better than I know my husband. And maybe most important, she definitely knows me better than he does.
These are today’s needs being met. My needs are real. My knowledge of scores of my therapist’s personal qualities is real.
This is one adult meeting several needs of another adult. This is me enjoying the company of another person. This is me feeling wanted.
In the “real world” outside of the boundaries, we have a word for such a profound enjoyment of another’s company. We don’t call that “transference.” We call it “love.”
I’ve always thought of it as love too. I used to be triggered by the word transference, but not anymore. It’s everywhere… in everything, in every relationship and often. I find it fascinating. Upon exploring my feelings for my therapist, I found a very clear picture of myself…my wants, needs, desires, motivations, what is meaningful to me…The feelings are, in essence, me and what I’m about. I think being in the safe environment of the therapy room did allow me to access these feelings more easily, but they are still very real. I adore him and always will.
I’m with you Beth. Either it’s all love or it’s all transference. Or it’s all a combination. Projection is not limited to therapy. Love is not limited to everything else.
I think your list works better when you and your T are both women, esp. the clothing part!
Also, does not sound like your transference/love is unrequited. She cares for you when you don’t even care for yourself? That’s nice!
Here’s unrequited transference: You don’t dare tell your T “I love you” because, just like if you say it to your parents, you know you won’t hear it back.
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