Within the field of psychiatry, and more specifically psychotherapy, "transference" refers to the shifting of feelings or biases about someone or something toward someone or something else.
In most cases—and this is how the concept seems to have been originally coined and developed—this meant a patient would transfer their feelings about an overbearing mother, an abusive spouse, or a beloved pet or coworker or park to their therapist; they would love (or eroticize) or hate or mistrust the person they were sitting with while working through these feelings (or psychological postures) that were originally aimed at someone or something else.
This is a concept that applies beyond the doctor-patient dynamic, as well.
Someone might feel anxious when meeting a new co-worker who looks like an abusive ex, for instance, and it's not uncommon for soldiers to transfer the internal experience of being at war to peacetime scenarios on the other side of the world, because a sound or smell or some other trigger recalls and reapplies that earlier state of mind and body.
In some cases transference reaches a pathological level, causing people to cycle through an endless stream of lovers who look like "the one that got away" when they were teenagers, or in some (thankfully rare) instances, causing them to go on killing sprees, serially murdering a sequence of people who have the same hair color as someone with whom they've become infatuated.
Transference has, at times, been used as a tool for helping patients identify and flag behaviors that may be contributing to a negative psychosis: see how you keep pursuing partners with x, y, and z traits? Where do you think that tendency comes from, and what might happen if you tried something different for a while?
In other cases, though, the concept has been used as a means of backing the therapist's own biases toward or abuses of their patients.
Psychotherapists have sometimes justified their sexualization and even inappropriate relationships with their patients (inappropriate because of the power-dynamics at play) by pointing at so-called "countertransference," which basically means their emotional entanglement with the patient and the shifting of their preferences and behaviors as a consequence of that entanglement.
It's possible to derive useful insights from this concept, then, if we can identify trends in how we think and behave, and trace those threads back to potential sources. Doing so can clarify why we do what we do, and allow us to more rationally decide how to proceed and what to work on in the future.
We can also be manipulated by these biases and urges, though, and historically, those on the receiving side of this type of analysis have been especially prone to such manipulation.
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