APA Dictionary of Psychology

in self psychology, any one of a set of transferences that involve, and are used in treatment to activate, the narcissistic needs of the patient in relation to significant others; this contrasts with the classical psychoanalytic concept of transference as a transposition of one’s needs (from various stages of psychosexual development earlier in life) to a person who can fulfill them. Narcissistic transferences include idealizing transference, mirror transference, and twinship transference. Also called self-object (or selfobject) transference. [first described by Austrian-born U.S. psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1913–1981)]