Your Boss Is Not Your Parent: Transference at Work

Your manager sends a two-line email: "Can we talk tomorrow?" Your stomach drops. By evening, you've rehearsed three defences and drafted a resignation in your head. The next day, she wants to discuss a deadline.

Or it goes the other way. A senior colleague praises your work, and for a week you feel ten feet tall. Then he forgets to copy you on one email, and you feel invisible — almost ashamed.

If your reactions at work sometimes feel too big for what actually happened, you're not oversensitive or unprofessional. You're probably experiencing one of the most common — and least talked about — dynamics in working life: transference.

In this article, you'll learn what transference is, how to recognise it when it happens with a boss, a client or a co-founder, how it shows up differently for each personality archetype, and a five-step exercise to loosen its grip.

Transference is when feelings that belong to an important person from your past are unconsciously redirected onto someone in your present. The person in front of you is real — but your reaction is partly to someone else.

Freud first noticed it in his consulting room: patients began to relate to him as they had to a parent, with the same longing, fear or anger. He realised this wasn't a problem to remove but a window into the patient's inner world.

Manfred Kets de Vries, a psychoanalyst and leadership professor at INSEAD, brought the idea into organisations. In The Leader on the Couch he describes transference as a kind of "confusion in time and place": we may relate to our boss as we once did to our mother, or to an important client as we did to our father. Because the mismatch between the real situation and the old script is unconscious, it can lead to bewilderment, anxiety, anger or withdrawal — and we rarely understand why.

This happens at work for a simple reason. Workplaces recreate the structure of a family. There are authority figures who evaluate us, siblings we compete with, rules we didn't choose, and someone whose approval decides our future. Our nervous system recognises the shape — and reaches for the oldest map it has.

Transference isn't a disorder. Everyone experiences it, every day. It only becomes a problem when it starts making decisions for you.

Psychodynamic coaches use a simple picture to make transference visible: the triangle of relationships, described by psychotherapist David Malan and used by Kets de Vries in his leadership programmes. It has three corners — you, a significant person from your past, and a significant person in your present.

The real relationship with your boss is happening now. But underneath it runs an older relationship, where your expectations of authority were first written. When feelings from that old relationship slide across onto the new person, you're reacting to two people at once — and only one of them is in the room.

Seven signs transference is running the show

You don't need to remember your childhood in detail to notice transference. The clues are in the present.

1. The reaction is bigger than the event. A neutral comment ruins your week; a small delay feels like betrayal.
2. It feels familiar. "This always happens to me" — with every boss, in every company.
3. You see them in absolutes. Your manager is either brilliant and protective or useless and against you, with nothing in between.
4. You become younger. In their presence you feel like a child or a teenager — eager to please, defiant, or tongue-tied.
5. You rehearse conversations that never happen, often with arguments you couldn't make to someone at home.
6. Their approval decides your self-worth for the day.
7. Other people don't react the same way to the same person.

If three or more sound familiar, it's worth asking a simple question: who does this person remind me of?

Your leading archetype shapes what kind of boss you're looking for — or bracing against. Here are the most common patterns I see in my practice.

Notice that transference flows both ways. Leaders transfer onto their teams, too — a founder may treat a talented employee as a rival sibling, or an underperformer as the child they have to rescue. Psychoanalysts call the reactions others stir up in us countertransference. Writing about coaches, Kets de Vries argues these reactions are a source of information rather than a flaw — and the same holds for leaders: if a team member makes you unusually irritated or protective, that feeling is telling you something.

Not sure which archetype leads you? Take the free 72-question test.

You can't stop transference from happening — it's part of how every mind works. What you can do is catch it sooner, so it stops choosing for you. Next time a reaction at work feels too big, take ten minutes with a notebook.

1. Name the reaction. Write down exactly what happened and what you felt, in one or two words: humiliated, furious, abandoned, invisible.
2. Rate the fit. On a scale of 1 to 10, how big was your reaction? How big was the event? A big gap is your clue.
3. Ask the triangle question. Who in my past made me feel exactly like this? Don't search for the right answer — notice the first face that comes to mind.
4. Separate the two people. Write two short columns: what this person actually did and what the person from my past did. Notice where the second column has leaked into the first.
5. Choose an adult response. Ask: if I weren't reacting to the past, what would I do here? Often the answer is simple — ask a question, state a need, wait a day.
6. Do this a few times and something shifts. You start to notice the old script while it's playing, and that small gap of awareness is where choice comes back.

When it's worth working with someone

Self-reflection takes you a long way. But transference is, by definition, unconscious — it's very hard to see your own blind spot. If the same pattern keeps returning with every boss, partner or team; if it's costing you jobs, promotions or sleep; or if you understand it perfectly and still can't change it, that's the moment to work with a professional.

In psychoanalytic coaching, the relationship with the coach becomes a safe place where these patterns show up — and can be noticed, understood and changed in real time, rather than just talked about.

1. What is an example of transference at work? An employee whose father was critical freezes every time her manager reviews her work, even when the feedback is mild. She's reacting to her father's voice, not her manager's words.
2. Is transference always negative? No. Positive transference — idealising a mentor, for example — can motivate you. It becomes a problem when it distorts what you see, such as missing a leader's real flaws or feeling crushed when they turn out to be human.
3. What's the difference between transference and projection? They're related. Projection is attributing your own feelings to someone else ("he's angry" when you are). Transference is relating to someone as if they were a person from your past.
4. Can a boss transfer onto employees? Yes, and it's common. Leaders can unconsciously treat team members as children, rivals or parents. This is part of why leadership coaching often looks at the leader's own history.
5. Should I tell my boss about it? Usually not in those words. The work is internal: once you recognise the pattern, you can respond to the real person in front of you.

Transference is one of the five lenses I use in my archetype guide, Your Archetype: a user manual for who you are, where each of the 12 archetypes has its own "On the couch" page. Start with the free archetype test to see which patterns lead you.

If you recognise yourself in this article and want to work on it, I offer executive and leadership coaching online in English or Russian. Get in touch.

• Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2006). The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations. Jossey-Bass.
• Kets de Vries, M. F. R., Guillén, L., Korotov, K. & Florent-Treacy, E. (eds.) (2010). The Coaching Kaleidoscope: Insights from the Inside. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Malan, D. (1979). Individual Psychotherapy and the Science of Psychodynamics. Butterworths.
• Luborsky, L. & Crits-Christoph, P. (1990). Understanding Transference: The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme Method. Basic Books.
• Psychology Today — How Your Attachment Style Impacts You at Work

This article is for self-reflection and education, not a clinical diagnosis. If you're struggling with your mental health, please reach out to a qualified psychotherapist or doctor.