The Transference and Countertransference

Or: It Takes Two to Tango.

What the books on psychoanalysis are slowly teaching me, above all, is something that I had aready recognised implicitly, but was never, until now, able to put into words, to formulate as a realistic principle.

The idea that being in a relationship often involves engaging with a certain about of something called Transference, along with something called Countertransference puts into words something that had previously avoided articulation. Perhaps others have tried to communicate it, but it has always sounded abusive: "Victim and Dominator are the same" is an abusive notion that avoids getting to the point rather than hitting the nail on the head. However, to view someone's reaction within context as always being indicative that there is something they're reacting to, hits the nail on the head every time. And psychoanalysis, with its notions of the Transference and Countertransference is also suggesting as much -- although it involves conceptualising the mind as a multi-dimensional sphere which brings elements of past experiences into the presence.

I remember when I made something in art school. This was a very distressing period of my life, when I had been freed from the tepid fishtank of life that was Australian high school existence, and let forth into the big, bad world, to fend for myself. Only this was not the culture or the world (emotionally, mentally and ideologically speaking) I had grown up in, and little of it made any sense. The aspect of this new world that had stuck me most (in a way that had left me almost unable to speak) had been its garishness. There were so many aspects of it that were extremely ugly, I had felt, especially the buildings, which were very violent against the eyes, compared to the pale and dignified architecture of colonial structures. There were images that almost seemed to defy the intellect -- to deny it.

So I made a terrible and garish structure out of glass. It was poorly put together, for I lacked craftswomanish skills. Perhaps it was merely a cry of distress?

So I presented this in a review meeting, as all I had been able to make until now. "What is it?"

"It is life," I answered. Life as it had become. Life as I was now experiencing it. Sharp, with jagged edges. Ugly.

"You must think that life is very tacky," said one woman, intending, by her statement, to hurt.

I didn't feel hurt by it, although in relating this story to an artist friend, she suggested that had it been said to her, she would have. Been personally devastated by the rejection, that is.

To me, I was telling the truth about something. If my artistic piece had been able to speak, it would have said, "I find life here to be devastating. It is beyond words. It is so very tacky."

If this story tells me anything, it is that we should be careful when assuming that someone is merely telling you about themselves. They may, rather, be telling you about their reaction to you.

Of course, that is something that someone who is depicted as "evil" is in no position to do -- to speak to you as an equal, with a particular viewpoint.