Although to a certain degree he had read the language “spellingwise,” he still recognized many words by familiar combinations of letters and by the sense.
Sunning himself on the board steps, I saw for the first time Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke. He was dressed out in broad gaiters and bright tweeds, like an English tourist, and his face might have belonged to Dagon, idol of the Philistines.
Visual pleasure is a straightforward characterization, for example, when compared to terms with a more academic ring, such as ocularcentrism or the Freudian scopophilism.
Furthermore, although probably few analysts still believe
that transference occurs only in the context of the psycho-
analytic situation, many hold that this phenomenon pertains
only to object relationships. I submit, however, that the char-
acteristic features of transference can be observed in other
situations as well, especially in the area of learned skills.⁶
Thus, speaking a language with a foreign accent is one of the
most striking everyday examples of transference. In the tradi-
tional concept of transference, one person (the analysand)
behaves toward another (the analyst) as if the latter were
someone else, previously familiar to him; and the subject is
usually unaware of the actual manifestations of his own trans-
ferred behavior. In exactly the same way, persons who speak
English (or any other language) with a foreign accent treat
English as if it were their mother tongue; and they are usually
unaware of the actual manifestations of their transferred be-
havior. Such persons think of themselves as speaking unac-
cented English: they cannot hear their own distortions of the
language when they speak. Only when their accent is pointed
out to them, or, better, only when they hear their recorded
voices played back to them, do they recognize their linguistic
transferences. These are striking parallels not only between
the stereotyped behavioral acts due to previous habit, but also
between the necessity for auxiliary channels of information
outside the person's own self for recognizing the effects of
these habits. This view of transference rests on empirical
observations concerning the basic human tendency to general-
ize experiences.＊
