The term ‘Transfer’ appears across the depth-psychology corpus in markedly heterogeneous registers, ranging from the technical vocabulary of motor learning and cognitive psychology through to the psychoanalytic concept of transference proper — a distinction the corpus itself sometimes collapses and sometimes sharply preserves. In the learning-psychological tradition represented most extensively by passages ascribed to James (1890), transfer designates the carry-over of trained behavior or knowledge to new performance contexts, with positive and negative valences determined by the degree of similarity between training and transfer tasks. This tradition regards transfer as ‘the ultimate goal of all teaching and training,’ anchoring the concept in questions of generalization, habituation, and identical elements. The psychodynamic literature, most explicitly in Wiener (2009) and Jung (1954), repositions transfer as the relational substrate of therapeutic encounter — the analysand’s unconscious projection of inner object-configurations onto the analyst — and links it indissolubly to countertransference, rapport, and the purposive-archetypal functions of the analytic relationship. A third, intergenerational usage appears in the recovery literature (ACA, 2012; Organization, 2007), where ‘generational transfer’ names the unconscious transmission of dysfunctional family patterns across generations, functioning as a mechanism of psychic inheritance. The tensions between these usages — behavioral, relational-projective, and transgenerational — define the conceptual field and demand careful contextual disambiguation throughout the concordance.
transfer is the ultimate goal of all teaching and training. Positive transfer occurs when the training task enhances learning or performance on the transfer task, and negative transfer occurs
This passage establishes the foundational behavioral definition of transfer as the directional carry-over of learned performance between tasks, distinguishing its positive and negative valences.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890thesis
transference happens and that it is a natural, archetypal process with a purposive function. Patients unconsciously project as-yet-unknown aspects of their psyches into their analysts in order
Wiener articulates the Jungian consensus that transference is an archetypal, purposive projection of unknown psychic contents onto the analyst, distinguishing it sharply from the classical Freudian reductive model.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009thesis
rapport, 116, 135; and transference, 134. *37> 177 … relationship: human, and transference, 136/; infantile, in transference, 170; symbolical, 260
Jung’s index entries explicitly bind transference to rapport and to the human analytic relationship, positioning it as the central organizing concept of his therapeutic practice essays.
, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954thesis
rapport, 116, 135; and transference, 134, 137> 177 … relationship: human, and transfer-ence, 136/; infantile, in transfer-ence, 170; symbolical, 260
The Practice of Psychotherapy index confirms that transference is conceptually inseparable from rapport and from the symbolical dimensions of the analytic relationship in Jung’s framework.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
classical vs. developmental transfer-ence perspectives, 102–103 … balanced use of transfer-ence/countertransference in, 106–10 … limitations of Jung’s model to, 79, 93–94, 108
Wiener’s index maps the internal debate within Jungian analysis between classical and developmental perspectives on transference, identifying the acknowledged limitations of Jung’s own model for clinical practice.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
how our actions and words served as the transfer mechanism for the disease of family dysfunction. This transaction is brokered by what we tell our children.
The ACA steps literature employs ‘transfer mechanism’ to name the intergenerational transmission of dysfunctional relational patterns, framing psychic inheritance as an active transactional process mediated by language and behavior.
, The twelve steps of adult children steps workbook, 2007thesis
Harms Inventory: Generational Transfer In this exercise, we inventor
The ACA textbook formalizes ‘Generational Transfer’ as a discrete inventory category within its harm-assessment framework, treating intergenerational transmission of dysfunction as a clinical and moral object of examination.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
split-brain animal gives no evidence of its prior learning, showing a failure of interocular transfer; that is, training fails to transfer from one eye to the other.
The split-brain interocular transfer paradigm demonstrates that transfer requires intact neural commissural pathways, grounding the concept in neurophysiological substrate rather than abstract learning theory.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890supporting
Osgood’s transfer surface remains an elegant way of organizing a large amount of research, at least to a first approximation.
This passage introduces Osgood’s transfer surface as the principal theoretical model for predicting transfer outcomes as a function of stimulus-response similarity, acknowledging both its organizational power and its empirical limitations.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890supporting
Transfer of training Training and transfer tasks Identical elements … Negative transfer … Transfer trials
This chapter glossary situates transfer within a technical vocabulary of motor learning, linking it to the identical-elements theory and distinguishing training from transfer trials as methodological categories.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890supporting
The right which the captor has over the captive, the transfer of prisoners, the sale of men by auction, such are the conditions in which the notions of ‘purchase,’ ‘sale’ and ‘value’ emerged.
Benveniste uses ‘transfer’ in its archaic socioeconomic sense — the physical conveyance of persons as property — to ground the etymology of value concepts in early Indo-European exchange institutions.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside
the entire agenda was devoted to the transfer of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s contribution from the Alcoholic Fund to the new Alcoholic Foundation.
Here transfer refers to a straightforward financial transaction within AA’s institutional history, carrying no depth-psychological valence but contextualizing the organizational substrate of recovery culture.
, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside