Transference.

 In the book Mann, David. Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical practice in psychotherapy. Nathan Field tells of what happened when he purposefully broke the transference spell.

It begins this way:

The truth was I liked her, I felt she had real potential, and I did not want to lose her.

All my training told me that her transformation, like that of Breuer’s ‘Anna O’, was merely a ‘transference cure’; that she was floating above everyday life in a hot air balloon and the crash, when it came, would be catastrophic. I decided it was my duty, as her analyst, to bring her safely back to earth. 

Much as I hated doing it, I now proceeded to interpret her feelings as simply transference. I told her that being ‘in love’ with me was really a form of resistance against insight. Within weeks the spell was broken. She became manifestly depressed, mortified at having fallen victim to the illusion that I had ever really cared about her. Our relationship rapidly began to deteriorate. Previously even my half-finished sentences were intuitively understood, now the most carefully worded interpretations became hopelessly misconstrued. Her old, persecuting superego re-established its dominance, she talked increasingly that therapy was mere self-indulgence, and saw no point in continuing. I struggled on with my interpretations, but in vain. 

The end came about in an unexpected way: I returned from the Easter break to be told that she was getting married. I was astonished: it had all happened in the two weeks I was away. My response was mixed: professional satisfaction that the therapy seemed to have worked after all, since her life was now entering a more settled phase; and personal sorrow that I had ‘lost her’ to another man. I was wrong on both counts. Within just a few weeks of her wedding I began to realise she was far from happy. The man she married was a friend of her family, by all accounts an able and generous-spirited person, who had been in love with her for years. But she now told me that, while she admired his achievements, she had never found him personally attractive. Next I heard that she had moved to a separate bedroom. The marriage was deteriorating fast, and I became filled with concern for her, indeed for both of them. 

When she let drop that she found her husband physically repulsive, because his chronic alcoholism had rotted his teeth, I blurted out: ‘Then why did you marry him?’ She countered: ‘Why did you go away?’ Her retort stunned me: I now realised that my decision to deflate the transference had been construed as a totally unacceptable withdrawal of love, and my holiday had killed off the last of her illusions. It was, for her, a repetition of what had happened with her father: throughout her childhood they had adored each other, but when she had reached a certain age, he had unaccountably withdrawn, perhaps through his own Oedipal anxieties, but she had seen it as an intolerable rejection. 

Her impulsive marriage was a kind of vengeful suicide, as if to say: ‘Look what you drove me to’. At the same time she revenged herself on her family by marrying a man they approved of, going through the fashionable wedding they had arranged for her, then sabotaging the whole arrangement. The sheer destructiveness of it left me feeling like an accessory to murder....