ABSTRACT
Pastoral experience apart from counseling abounds with instances of persons thinking about and feeling toward their pastors as they previously felt toward parental figures. Thus transference, both negative and positive, occurs in many church situations. Pastors often evoke this response without seeking it or understanding it, but merely by living out a role that repeats patterns that people encountered in childhood. Leslie Moser states that "people constantly transfer other personalities onto their friends and acquaintances." l Previously Freud had explained it another way: "Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships. . . . It is everywhere the true vehicle of therapeutic influence; and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates."2
