Transference is a concept espoused by the great Sigmund Freud about the tendency to react to other people as though they were our parents. Now, when we are fetuses, our lives literary depend on our mothers. Then we show up to this cruel world and our parents provide us with care and put a hedge around us that gives us as sense of affiliation and safety. We literary look up to our parents for provision, approval and affection.
Our mothers’ ample bosom is the fountain of life. Our parents are larger than life. They are gods. They are our heroes. They are infallible. Our identity is merged with them. Our world revolves around our parents. They are magicians.
However, as we grow older, we notice that our parents are fallible and start identifying other gods and heroes in our environment. Teachers, preachers, uncles and aunties. And now internet celebrities and politicians. Even as we identify new parents outside the homestead, our feelings, desire for approval and protection from daddy and mummy still persists even in adulthood.
We transfer the feelings we had towards our parents as children to celebrities and politicians. We look at them as larger than life just as a little child sees their parents. We become dependent on them for emotional provision, protection and direction. In transference, as Ernest Becker puts it in Denial of Death, “we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relive his helplessness and fears, who see things as he wishes them to be for his own safety, who acts automatically and uncritically, just as he did when he was in the pre-oedipal period”.
We have a proclivity to surrender to a higher power. Just like hypnosis, where people fall into stupors by the suggestion of a hypnotist. We act like automatons when it comes to our favorite celebrities and politicians. We are fascinated by them and clutch at every word they say.
We long to be brain washed. Politicians, psychopathic preachers and celebrities only give us what we desire. They find fertile ground. Deep down in our soul, we are children, ready to belief the fairy tales from our powerful parents. We cannot face the realities of a terrible world on our own, without mummy and daddy, hence we need someone to give us an illusion that it will be ok.
We need a superior power to help banish our fears and anxieties. To shield us from our realities. Who better to give us the illusion than the celebrity, the politician and the motivational speaker who tells us the untruth we want to hear? Just like a good bedtime story the words of politicians and celebrities lull us to sleep. A slumber from our painful realities.
We are all little boys and girls. We long for affiliation. We are hungry for heroes. Hungry for super parents. And the internet provides us with plenty.
The other day, my daughter threatened that she will report me to her teacher for punishing her.
Life is life
Fabio