Sustained empathic inquiry...leads to uncovering the client’s unconscious organizing principles and then making them accessible to transformation.—Robert Stolorow

Transference helps us grow when it substitutes the role of casting director to that of prompter. We stop setting the stage and lining up the actors. Instead, we look at the stage we have set and the actors we have hired, and let it all prompt us to recall our lines: “I designed this drama in accord with my past. Now I can let it become my prompter, helping me speak my truth in the moment.”

As consciousness grows, transference comes to light and loses its power to determine our present life as once it did. Then, as Freud says: “Transference the obstacle becomes transference the ally.” We realize that in most of our relationships we have been seeing reflections and we choose to pass through the looking glass to the reality of who others really are and can be. This is how transference can become transformation.

The Crucible of Transference

Heinz Kohut uses the expression “the crucible of transference.” This phrase reflects the painful........

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