Mirrors
Updated: Mar 15
And here I am, teaching yet another class, before the attentive and dreamy gaze of young university students. Among them all, a small group of friends catches my attention.
Flashes from the past. My mind travels ten or fifteen years back: my thin body, the ribs that the sun accentuates, drops of water running down my skin, my long and messy hair. I am playing in the river with my friends from that time, from that day that still lives within me.
We played along the riverbank. We laughed, shouted, loved — everything with intensity. I feel as though the soles of my shoes are gently lifting from the classroom floor; my soul submerged in memories.
My two friends and I swam aimlessly until we reached a rock: a tiny space where the three of us fit perfectly, lying down, contemplating the sunset. A deep peace revealed itself in the complicity of our smiles. I have their gazes engraved in me, every gesture, every movement of their bodies.
We did not know that our lives would take different paths; that we would stop seeing one another.
I do not know what is happening to me: a flood of memories in my mind. I did not expect it, least of all while giving a lecture.
Nor did I expect that she would be there, attending my talks: that woman who now feels so close to me and who in those years was a stranger to me. We met through Tomás. They looked so in love that it seemed they would remain together for life.
Tomás, who during our university years was my best friend. We cared for each other, admired each other, learned from one another. But we never saw each other again. She remained, extending her hand so that I could help her rise from her seat. In those brief exchanges, Tomás, my eternal companion, would come back to my mind.
There were hardly any photographs of the two of us. The few that existed — fortunately — showed us embracing each other. The most meaningful ones I kept in memory. The projects that seemed endless, the sleepless nights, the hopes and the disappointments. The beautiful and terrible poverty of university life: the long walks under the sun searching for places to photocopy the books we longed for; going from library to library, from dream to dream, from love to love, from pain to pain.
Our souls shared a time and a space that can never be repeated.
My mind travels at the speed of light, crossing years in the blink of an eye.
While I tell my students: —There is a lesson I will never forget, thanks to my professor David, who spoke about the process of… I am still there: on that rock, at that sunset, with my two friends. Around us, the others were running, diving into the water, swinging from the vines.
And as for whether I ever saw one of my friends from that little island again: one afternoon, after a long day of work, I was walking along a cobblestone path in the suburbs of Los Angeles, beside a beautiful river. The sunset was so radiant that the end of the path could not be seen. That same radiance distorted the silhouette of the woman I saw in the distance, walking toward me.
Curiosity turned into nerves: the nerves of the first day of class, the nerves of a first kiss. I recognized that presence. I wanted to turn back, to flee. Then I wanted to surrender to it. I could not.
That gaze, that smile, it was her. It was me.
It was the fire of the sunset. It was the water of the river. It was us.
Suddenly I woke up. The clock marked the early hours of the morning.
It had all been a dream. I dreamed that I was you, old friend. And the truth is that we never saw each other again because I could not bear the reality of waking up and being just another office worker while you do what you love, as you did back then.
I could not bear a present in which even the woman I loved during my university years now admires you, attends your lectures, and perhaps feels something more for you — just as all of us once did who shared life with you.
I was as happy in the dream as when we were friends, when it seemed we were one and the same. I no longer know to what extent I am you and you are me.
Where did the beginning of that Gestalt talk, they gave us yesterday at the office go?
I am me and you are you.
Here I am, with the worn soles of my shoes — not so old, just very used. Leaving the university, walking under the sun toward public transportation, with the feeling that I have never stopped being a student. They say Tomás chose well, that the multinational rewarded him. I chose this.
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Mirrors: A Gateway to the Phenomenon of Transference
The previous narrative can be read from multiple perspectives: as a reflection on identity, on nostalgia, on anima and animus, even on the shadow. However, on this occasion I want to use it as a starting point for thinking about the phenomenon of transference.
Not with the intention of reducing the story to a clinical explanation, but rather to broaden our understanding of a psychic process that runs not only through the therapeutic setting but through life itself.
Transference is not merely an erotic displacement or an Oedipal repetition; it is an unconscious dynamic that structures a large part of our vital relationships. It has biographical roots, yes, but also symbolic, archetypal, and even mythological ones.
Perhaps that is why it is sometimes so difficult for us to distinguish where the other ends and where we begin.
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Freud: Transference as Unconscious Re-edition
It was Sigmund Freud who systematically described transference in the context of psychoanalysis. For Freud, transference implied that the patient “displaced” onto the analyst feelings, desires, and unconscious fantasies originally directed toward significant figures from the past, especially parental figures (Freud, 1958).
In many cases — especially in the early developments of psychoanalysis — these contents included unconscious erotic cathexes. The analyst became invested with affective and sexual elements that did not belong to him or her in the current biographical sense but rather constituted the reactivation of repressed childhood relationships. Transference, understood in this way, was a re-edition of the past in the present: a living repetition within the therapeutic relationship (Freud, 1958).
From this perspective, the phenomenon has a triangular structure: the therapist occupies the symbolic place of father, mother, or another significant figure; the present relationship revives the intensity of the original bond; and the clinical setting becomes a privileged space for repetition and elaboration.
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Transference in Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Later, Carl Gustav Jung expanded this conception in various works. For example, in The Psychology of the Transference, Jung (1966) argues that transference cannot be reduced to an Oedipal re-edition nor exclusively to the erotic domain. For him, it is a broader psychic phenomenon, deeply symbolic, which can take on archetypal dimensions.
Jung proposes that transference mobilizes collective images and patterns: figures of savior, teacher, guide, lover, enemy, shadow. What is reactivated is not only the father or the mother, but deeper psychic configurations inscribed in what he called the collective unconscious. Hence his alchemical reading of transference: the analytic relationship as a transformative process, filled with mutual projections and symbolic dynamics (Jung, 1966).
In this sense, transference is not merely an obstacle that must be “interpreted,” but a relational field in which transformation becomes possible.
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Transference Beyond the Consulting Room
Post-Jungian authors have continued to expand this perspective. Marie-Louise von Franz emphasizes how archetypal projections can color seemingly ordinary relationships, turning a person into the bearer of a powerful inner image (von Franz, 1980).
Andrew Samuels has pointed out that transferential processes also run through the political, institutional, and organizational spheres, showing how leaders, authority figures, or even institutions can become screens for collective projection (Samuels, 1985).
From this perspective, transference is not exclusive to the patient–therapist relationship; it also manifests:
In the workplace: when a boss embodies the demanding father or the expected savior.
In the educational setting: when a teacher is invested as an ideal model or rival figure.
In romantic relationships: where the other becomes the bearer of the image of the anima or the animus.
In dreams: where dream figures condense projections that are later enacted in real relationships.
In clinical practice: not only from the patient toward the therapist, but also from the therapist toward the patient, in what we call countertransference. This phenomenon, although recognized in its early stages by Freud, found its greatest development and deepening in later traditions such as analytical psychology.
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References
Freud, S. (1958). The dynamics of transference. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1958). Observations on transference-love. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Hogarth Press.
Jung, C. G. (1966). The psychology of the transference. Princeton University Press.
Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the post-Jungians. Routledge.
von Franz, M.-L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology. Open Court.
© 2026 Rogelio Martín Lara. All rights reserved.
Work registered in Safe Creative (Registration Code: 2603164944364).
This work is fiction. Although it may appear to reflect real events or people, it is not based on actual events. Any resemblance to existing situations or individuals is purely coincidental.
Title: Mirrors
Registration Date: 03/16/2026
Type of Work: Narrative story followed by a brief essay on the psychological phenomenon of transference
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