I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
With the beat in now…
And your chest came out
’Cause you weren’t too scared.
Big Red Machine — “Deep Green / Deep Dream”
There is transference.
There just is.
Matthew Thomas
I. — The Pull That Isn’t Personal
It’s real because it’s grounded.
It’s real because the adult self is the one in the room.
That sentence might sound simple, but it marks a fault line between two entirely different ways of collaborating. The younger version of me would have blurred this difference almost immediately — not out of desire in any straightforward sense, but out of hunger. Out of the impulse to turn recognition into destiny, resonance into narrative inevitability, voltage into myth.
In earlier years, artistic encounters carried an undertow of idealization. When someone appeared whose sensibility aligned, whose aesthetic instincts felt familiar yet surprising, whose presence produced that unmistakable flicker of creative electricity, the experience was difficult to contain inside ordinary frames. Recognition felt like revelation. Shared language felt like intimacy. Creative energy felt like evidence of something larger than collaboration — something fated, symbolic, charged with meaning beyond the work itself.
But time has taught me that this interpretive inflation is not depth. It is transference — not as pathology, but as architecture. A current running through collaboration that invites projection, narrative layering, and emotional over-interpretation. A dynamic that can produce beautiful work, but also confusion, distortion, and boundary collapse when left unexamined.
What has changed is not the presence of that current but my relationship to it.
The boundary is no longer defensive; it is intelligent.
It is not erected to keep the other person out but to keep the work alive.
It is the condition that allows collaboration to breathe without suffocating inside symbolic noise.
And the boundary itself is deceptively simple:
We stand side by side, not on top of each other’s meaning.
We remain in our own psyches.
We allow resonance without fusion.
We allow voltage without blur.
We allow openness without myth-making.
This distinction may appear subtle, but it carries enormous implications. It is the difference between collaboration as encounter and collaboration as reenactment. The difference between creative exchange and symbolic entanglement. The difference between working together and unconsciously attempting to resolve unfinished narratives through one another.
In this sense, transference is neither villain nor obstacle. It is part of the terrain — inevitable wherever humans meet in creative space. The danger lies not in its presence but in its invisibility.
History offers cautionary examples. Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein, initially framed as therapeutic, evolved into a complex emotional and intellectual entanglement in which transference blurred professional boundaries and personal identities. Toni Wolff later entered Jung’s life as collaborator and intellectual partner, yet the triangular dynamic that formed illustrates how symbolic roles can quickly overtake relational clarity. None of these figures lacked insight or integrity; what they lacked was a boundary capable of containing the symbolic intensity generated by their shared work.
That boundary — the one Jung struggled to hold, the one Sabina never had the power to define, the one Toni inhabited with both strength and vulnerability — is precisely the boundary that matters in artistic collaboration. Not a line of separation but a line of differentiation, one that preserves psychological sovereignty while allowing creative permeability.
The collaboration that underlies this piece has tested that boundary in productive ways. The work carries voltage. The exchange of ideas, images, and aesthetic intuition generates moments of recognition that could easily be misinterpreted as evidence of deeper narrative convergence. The temptation toward symbolic overreach is real, as it always is when creative chemistry emerges unexpectedly.
But the boundary holds.
Not through suppression or distance, but through integration. Through the adult self’s capacity to remain present without narrativizing the encounter into something it is not. Through a commitment to form — not as rigidity, but as container. Through an understanding that artistic collaboration thrives when the symbolic field remains clear enough for the work to speak in its own voice.
Openness with form.
Exposure with spine.
Laid open, but not laid bare.
This is not restraint for its own sake. It is creative hygiene. It is the discipline that keeps collaboration from dissolving into projection, keeps admiration from mutating into idealization, keeps creative voltage from being mistaken for emotional destiny.
The boundary is not what limits the collaboration; it is what makes it possible.
And in that sense, the boundary is not a line between collaborators at all. It is a line that keeps the field clear so the work can keep happening.
This is how adults collaborate: with clarity, with shape, with mutual sovereignty intact, with symbolic noise turned down, with the quiet confidence that resonance need not imply fusion. The trio remains intact — internal voices aligned rather than fragmented — allowing openness without collapse and connection without reenactment.
Music has offered a parallel language for this dynamic. The Big Red Machine ethos — stepping forward without fear while remaining rooted in personal identity — models a form of creative openness that resists mythic inflation. The lines echo not as romantic declaration but as psychological instruction:
I will lay laid open…
I do it ’cause I’m a family man…
And your chest came out ’cause you weren’t too scared…
Openness is not the danger.
Losing oneself inside openness is.
This brings the piece to its quieter question, one that underlies all collaboration, all transference, all creative exchange:
Can I remain open without giving myself away?
Can I step into voltage without mistaking it for destiny?
Can I meet clarity without dissolving into it?
Can I collaborate without collapsing?
Can I inhabit a resonant field and still leave it as myself?
The answer, tentatively but firmly, is yes.
Not because discipline has replaced feeling, not because detachment has replaced intimacy, not because protection has replaced vulnerability, but because integration has replaced fragmentation. Because the internal architecture is stable enough to allow openness without fear. Because the dream that once blurred boundaries now functions as threshold rather than invitation. Because the symbolic layer — what I sometimes describe as the Draco grounding — operates not as mystical escape but as orientation, a reminder that identity persists across shifting relational fields.
Transference remains part of the architecture. It always will. A subtle undercurrent running beneath creative interaction, capable of enriching perception when acknowledged and distorting reality when ignored. The adult task is not to eliminate it but to refuse its authority as narrative director.
The adult self leads.
The trio leads.
The work leads.
And so the closing question emerges, less dramatic than the fears that once accompanied it, but more meaningful:
What does it mean to stay laid open and still stay mine?
That is the adult version of transference — not avoidance, not collapse, but clarity held with a steady hand.
Dedication
For the collaborators:
the drifters,
the drop-ins,
the ones who catch the tune mid-air and don’t flinch.
You keep the corners loose
and the truth a little crooked.
My kind of people.
Note: If you like this piece, you may also like “Elodie and Matt: A Modern Fairy Tale.” You can read it below.