Posted by pegasus on February 21, 2006, at 19:43:18
I've been rereading "A General Theory of Love", and I came across an explanation of transference that I found very interesting. Before I quote it, though, I need to give some background.
The book talks (among other things) about how experience and genetics create neural pathways in our brains. Some become especially strong and therefore more easily followed. So, that's why habits form, and why one thought associates to another -- the corresponding neurons actually become physically connected along these pathways. These strong neural pathways are called "Attractors". They make up the way our brains work. The section I'll quote discusses the limbic brain, where emotion originates.
So, here's what the book says about transference:
"The limbic brain contains its emotional Attractors, encoded early in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that view the emotional world and conduct relationships. If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthy emotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides to the world of workable relationships. If a diseased love presents itself to a child, his Attractors will encode it and force his adult relationships into that Procrustean bed . . . A person's emotional experience of the world may not budge, even if the world around him changes dramatically. He may remain trapped, as many are, within a virtuality constructed decades ago -- and, as Mark Twain observed, a person cannot depend on the eyes when imagination is out of focus.
"Limbic Attractors spawn a vexing and fascinating aspect of emotional life -- "transference," Freud's term for the universal human tendency to respond emotionally to certain others as if they were figures from one's past. Freud thought transference living proof that a banished memory can escape confinement and hover before a loved one's features, overshadowing a present angel with a past devil or vice versa.
Science has a way of supplanting myths with no less fantastic truths: tranference exists because the brain remembers with neurons. . . . because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong course is not easy to slow. As a life lengthens, momentum gathers. . . . No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought."
What do you think?
I really recommend this book in general to anyone interested in how the mind works. Although, sometimes I wonder whether the authors are presenting the building blocks of their theory as facts when they are perhaps still debated among those doing research in this field.
Peg
poster:pegasus
thread:611853
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060211/msgs/611853.html