By Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries & Katharina Balazs
Dirk was puzzled about what just happened. To the best of his knowledge, he had only asked Jerome, a recently hired senior executive, to deal more proactively with some of the company’s clients. But Jerome had suddenly become angry, defensive and stalked out of his office.
Jerome, for his part, was also confused. Why had he reacted like that?
After calming down, Jerome realized that Dirk reminded him of his overbearing father. His overreaction was almost exactly what he had done in fights with his father, too: getting angry and storming away.
This “erroneous” interpersonal connection was first described by Sigmund Freud in his famous Dora case under the name of “transference.” Trying to understand this unsuccessful therapeutic intervention with his patient, he came to realize that its reason lay in his failure to recognize the transfer of emotions held by Dora for a person from her past onto Freud himself.
If you have ever had an emotional reaction to someone which was clearly too intense for the situation, you have most likely experienced a transference reaction. As transference reactions are essentially a reliving of the past, the reaction they trigger is often inappropriate, and even bizarre, in the context of the present.
Reflect on patterns of behavior that have gotten you into trouble, and where you feel that your judgment has repeatedly been poor. To help you in analyzing what has happened, ask yourself the following questions: What kinds of people make me feel anxious, angry, sad or happy? What do I like or dislike about them? And who in my past do these people remind me off? How are they similar or different? Discovering the ghosts of past is the first step toward not letting them interfere with life in the present.
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is an executive coach, psychoanalyst, and management scholar. He is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at Insead in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Katharina Balazs is an executive coach and an associate professor at the European School of Management (ESCP) in Paris.