REVISITING TRANSFERENCE

REVISITING TRANSFERENCE

My mother who taught kindergarten was sitting with a friend in Dubrow’s cafeteria (Brooklyn) when a pupil with his family came in.  The five-year-old ran over.  “You eat?” he asked.  Perhaps he thought she just walked into the coat closet and hung herself up at the end of the school day.

That’s transference: attributing inflated or unrealistic attributes to someone, usually one in a position of perceived authority.

Workshop participants create inflated beliefs about the leaders.  Peter Rengel, hai facilitator, once called Diana and me the ‘mom and pop’ of the Ontario community.  Yes, we were seen that way.  But the truth is we were not the ‘mom and pop’, just folks like you, doing our job.

And now that we have left HAI leadership, has the transference toward us diminished?  I know from some of my interactions that some still see us as the ‘mom and pop’, albeit estranged. 

As a well-known entertainer for most of my life, I was the constant recipient of transference, and hated it.  My fans meeting me on the street treated me as if I really was that wild guy who loved to play crazy instruments.  To me those instruments were just the tools of my job.  I left them on the stage in the way anyone leaves their tools at work.  But people saw the instruments, the stage … and not me.

Transference and my relationship to it played a significant role in my being fired.  As a HAI producer I pretty much ignored transference, denied it until it punched me in the face when, as a participant at a workshop, I shared intimacy with another participant, who later claimed she had been taken advantage of because I abused my power as a producer.  HAI’S position was despite that I was a participant in that workshop, since I was a producer, I was responsible for the other’s transference. 

I learned my lesson from that incident and took on how people might transfer theri pictures on to me, but it was too late.  Not long after, minor incidents over the past ten years were apparently collected and reported, and in the present culture of Me Too, HAI felt it safer to fire me than support me. 

HAI pays obeisance to transference.  Its policies and some of the subtle ways HAI speaks into the workshop room support it; for example, at the end of the L1 when facilitators say how participants may have fallen in love with a team member, as if there is something special about us and not simply people like anyone else, who have taken some training to help make things run smoothly.

During each workshop, I would stand up at large group share, talk how powerful it was for me to see those sitting before me whom I had affected, who were here because I led their mini, or shared personal questions.  In one way, it helped solidify the value of their path and how HAI has impacted their growth, but it was also a way of aggrandizing myself to them.  I recognize now that associating my impact with their growth contributes to their transference.  They saw me as a little bit bigger than before.  I stopped doing that when I got that it didn’t serve me.

 Stan Dale insisted we see him as the ordinary person he was.  Once, at a workshop a participant kissed his feet.  He accepted that and immediately bowed to kiss his.  Transference was Stan’s enemy.  He recognized it as the fundamental power of cults, which herds folks into obedience and robs them of choice.

I believe there are many ways in which, without thinking, HAI pays obeisance to the transference god.  And I would like us to take notice.

Recently I attended an ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) training.  There, my attitudes toward transference were validated.  It was spoken into the room and identified as something we all do and are personally responsible for.  I was invited to have whatever pictures and beliefs I wished about the facilitators -- and -- they would not take them on.  My beliefs belong to me.  Furthermore, the relationships among the team, facilitators, and participants were brought onto the same level.  We were all in this together.     

My week-long training at ISTA was a very powerful experience for me, this issue of transference being only part.  I will have more to say about it in the near future.  I highly recommend ISTA to anyone on a path of growth, and am happy to talk about my experience if you wish to get in touch.

I felt with some sadness that if HAI had the same attitude toward transference, I would still be producing and leading Mini workshops.