Who does this remind me of?

Freud kept running into the same awkward fact. His patients came to feel things toward him, love, anger, fear, a hunger for his approval, that had little to do with the reserved doctor in the room. The feelings fitted someone else: a father, a mother, an older brother.

He called this transference. At first he saw it as an obstacle to treatment. By 1912, in "The Dynamics of Transference", he saw it as central: the old relationship was being replayed in the room, where it could finally be looked at.

It doesn't only happen in therapy. A new manager, a partner's parent, a teacher, a friend: anyone who resembles an important figure in a few ways can pick up the feelings that belong to that figure.

Most of Freud's claims are hard to test. This one has been tested. From the 1990s, the social psychologist Susan Andersen gave people descriptions of a stranger who shared a few traits with someone important in their own life. Later, they "remembered" the stranger as having other traits of that person, ones they had never been told about. They also tended to feel about the stranger, and expect from them, what they felt about and expected from the person they resembled.

In other words, a few familiar features are enough to call up a whole relationship, and we fill in the rest without noticing.

Two cautions. First, both things can be true: the new person may really be a bit like the old one. The point is to judge them on their own record, not to excuse them. Second, this isn't about blaming your parents, and it isn't for telling other people "you're just seeing your mother in me". That rarely goes well. Use it on your own reactions.

When Daniel was growing up, his mother would watch him start a chore, sigh, and say "Fine, I'll do it myself."

In his second week at a new job, his manager Claire looks over a report he has drafted and says, "Thanks, I'll take it from here." Daniel spends the evening sure she thinks he's useless. He drafts an apology email and starts looking at other jobs.