This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a taming of terror. Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it.
~Ernest Becker [1]
Why do people follow leaders? What explains the power that followers invest in a leader and their role? And why, at the same time, do we have such ambivalent feelings toward leaders and their authority?
Anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker believed that these questions can be answered in part by understanding the concept of transference, which he explores extensively in The Denial of Death, a vast and far-reaching work in which he seeks to explain human behavior, with a particular emphasis on social relationships and power dynamics. While the term was originally coined by Freud (Übertragung) to describe feelings of attachment and fascination by patients for their therapists, Becker makes clear that it extends well beyond the therapeutic realm and applies to all of our relationships with authority figures and others--and his views are highly consistent with my experience as a coach working with senior leaders.
Becker begins by noting that leaders' undeniable charisma is insufficient to explain their power over others:
All through history masses have followed leaders because of the magic aura they projected, because they seemed larger than life. On the surface this explanation seems enough because it is reasonable and true to fact: men worship and fear power and so give their loyalty to those who dispense it.
But this touches only the surface and is besides too practical. Men don't become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest; the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained. The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power...
Becker then reminds us that Freud saw the roots of transference in primal memories of childhood. As young children we emerge from infancy and experience the world as a chaotic and terrifying place. Parents and caregivers appear to us as awe-inspiring figures with the power to tame chaos and create order and safety, and while our relationship with authority may evolve considerably on our journey to adulthood, we often "transfer" our attachment to other powerful figures who promise to relieve our anxieties, and we retain a deep-seated yearning to submit to their leadership:
Freud saw that a patient in analysis developed a peculiarly intense attachment to the person of the analyst... In the transference we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety...
No one can argue away the manifestations of transference in everyday human affairs. It is not visible on the surface: adults walk around looking quite independent; they play the role of parent themselves and seem quite grown up--and so they are. They couldn't function if they still carried with them the childhood feelings of awe for their parents, the tendency to obey them automatically and uncritically. But, says [Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor] Ferenczi, although these things normally disappear, "the need to be subject to someone remains; only the part of the father is transferred to teachers, superiors, impressive personalities; the submissive loyalty to rulers that is so widespread is also a transference of this sort."
These individual impulses exert a profound effect on our behavior in groups, a topic that Freud discussed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [2], which had a substantial impact on Becker's thinking:
Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like "mental contagion" and "herd instinct," which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.
We see extreme examples of this behavior in mass movements such as political rallies, and Becker, who helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 when he was 20 years old, devoted much of his work to understanding and combating the violence that such movements engender. But the same underlying impulses can affect our behavior and our social relations in ordinary organizational life, with none of the hyperbolic emotion or potential for violence that we associate with large crowds. While employees don't consciously view their leader as a substitute parent, on some level they do look to the leader to tame chaos and create order and safety, and this process can readily foster a sense of dependence and submission.
Becker doesn't accept Freud's views uncritically--one of the main themes of The Denial of Death is that while Freud remains worthy of study, he also made some fundamental errors that must be acknowledged in order to make use of his insights:
One of the weaknesses of Freud's theory was that he was too fond of his own phylogenetic myth of the "primal horde," Freud's attempt to reconstruct the earliest beginnings of society, when proto-men--like baboons--lived under the tyrannical male. For Freud this craving of people for the strong personality, their awe and fear of him, remained the model for the basic functioning of all groups. It was [Austrian-American psychoanalyst Fritz] Redl, in his important essay, who showed that Freud's attempt to explain everything by the "strong personality" was not true to fact. Redl, who studied many different kinds of groups, found that domination by a strong personality occurred in some of them, but not all. But he did find that in all groups there was what he called a "central person" who held the group together due to certain of his qualities.
The work by Redl which Becker refers to dates from 1942, but much contemporary research is finally rebutting the persistent idea that early human societies were despotic tyrannies. [3] This is significant because relatively few contemporary business leaders are charismatic tyrants who rule through "awe and fear," and yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the process of transference as Becker describes it is no longer relevant in the relatively egalitarian organizational cultures of today. This is particularly true for the startup CEOs who comprise the majority of my coaching practice. By no means are they "tyrannical" figures, nor are they necessarily the "strong personality" who dominates the organization, but they are often the "central person" who holds the group together.
Becker cites another aspect of leadership that is particularly relevant to my work with founders:
Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the "initiatory act" when no one else had the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the "magic of the initiatory act."
This is an apt description of the role of founder, whose first and most important "initiatory act" was launching the venture itself, and who feels empowered (and even obligated) to continue stepping into this process at every subsequent stage of the company's development. In this context it's significant that investors often cite a desire to retain founders in leadership roles as long as possible because of their "magic"--while the word conveys a nebulous, indefinable quality, Becker and Redl suggest that it may simply be the courage to take action when others lack daring, thereby becoming the group's "central person."
But the advantages of power and influence conferred upon a leader through the transference process come at a cost:
The important thing for us [in Redl's work] is that the groups "use" the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges. [British psychoanalyst] W.R. Bion, in an important recent paper, extended this line of thought even further from Freud, arguing that the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his "individual distinctiveness" by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.
The burdens of the leadership role and the loss of individual identity experienced by leaders are major themes in my practice. [4] Leaders enjoy certain freedoms, to be sure, and they also must relinquish certain freedoms in order to occupy the role effectively. Followers may admire and even adulate the leader, but they will resist empathizing with them, as that would render the leader human and diminish their power. [5] Leaders must strive to evoke empathy while also recognizing that it will come only with effort, and they must find ways to preserve their identity as an individual outside the role.
Highlighting the cost of leadership also allows us to more fully acknowledge the reciprocal nature of the relationship between leaders and followers. In contemporary organizational life followers are not held captive by the leader--the relationship is one of mutual choice, and followers ultimately decide who will lead them by remaining in their jobs (or not). But both parties need the other:
The qualities of the leader, then, and the problems of people fit together in a natural symbiosis. I have lingered on a few refinements of group psychology to show that the powers of the leader stem from what he can do for people, beyond the magic that he himself possesses. People project their problems onto him, which gives him his role and stature. Leaders need followers as much as they are needed by them: the leader projects onto his followers his own inability to stand alone, his own fear of isolation. We must say that if there were no natural leaders possessing the magic of charisma, men would have to invent them, just as leaders must create followers if there are none available. If we accent this natural symbiotic side of the problem of transference, we come into the broadest understanding of it, which forms the main part of the discussion I now want to dwell on...
Here Becker reaches the heart of his argument:
This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a taming of terror. Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can't really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focuses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe... The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to control, order and combat them.
Again, I'm not suggesting that employees view their leader as a substitute parent, but the all-consuming, immersive experience of transference that we undergo as children affects us in profound and lasting ways, and one of the results is our subconscious desire for a leadership figure who can "control, order and combat" the chaotic, terrifying world around us. Followers choose their leaders and endow them with such power for this very reason.
But our dependency and submission to the leader's power also provokes a counter-response:
This totality of the transference object also helps explain its ambivalence. In some complex ways the child has to fight against the power of the parents in their awesome miraculousness. They are just as overwhelming as the background of nature from which they emerge. The child learns to naturalize them by techniques of accommodation and manipulation. At the same time, however, he has to focus on them the whole problem of terror and power, making them the center of it in order to cut down and naturalize the world around them. Now we see why the transference object poses so many problems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person's strength. But then he experiences "transference terror"; the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object. How implacably ironic is human life. The transference object becomes the focus of the problem of one's freedom because one is compulsively dependent on it...
This explains the complex and emotionally fraught nature of so many leader-follower relationships. Both parties need each other, so much so that they create each other. As noted above, in the process the leader gains power, but at the cost of their individual identity in the eyes of their followers. Leaders make this bargain willingly, and yet it is a painful and lonely experience, and they cannot help but blame their followers for their lack of empathy. Followers endow the leader with authority in order to quell the anxiety evoked by a chaotic world, and yet in so doing they create a powerful figure who in turn becomes a source of further anxiety. Followers are then torn between their fear of leaderless chaos and their ambivalence regarding the leader's power. By definition, those who remain are opting to live with the latter, and yet this choice does not resolve the ambivalence. Just the opposite--it binds the followers to a figure who is simultaneously a source of comfort and fear, which causes immense dissonance. Thus "the fascination of the person who holds or symbolizes power," which I see in my practice every day--we cannot help but be fascinated by such figures and obsessed by the problem of our paradoxical relationship with them.
It would be specious to offer a "solution" to such profound challenges, but here are some of the ways I work with clients to address them:
- Leader-follower relationships are inevitably sources of powerful emotions, and we resolve such feelings by talking about them and writing about them.
- Leaders must be mindful of the tension between their desire to be an authentic individual and their obligation to perform in the role.
- Followers must be mindful of their reluctance to "empathize up" and their denial of the leader's humanity.
Finally, while I've framed this discussion around leader-follower relationships in organizations, it's worth noting that these dynamics exist in every domain of life, as Becker makes clear:
No wonder Freud could say that transference was a "universal phenomenon of the human mind" that "dominates the whole of each person's relation to his human environment."
Thanks to Anamaria Nino-Murcia for the inspiration.
Footnotes
[1] These lines and all other cited passages are from The Denial of Death, Chapter Seven: The Spell Cast by Persons--The Nexus of Unfreedom (Ernest Becker, 1973)
[2] Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Sigmund Freud, 1921)
[3] For example: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (Dacher Keltner interviewed by David DiSalvo, Scientific American, 2009)
[4] Leadership as Performing Art
[5] The Difficulty of Empathizing Up
Photo by François Philipp.
