A Goddess to Her Only Worshiper : TRANSFERENCES<i> by James Twiggs (University of Arkansas Press: $16.95, cloth; 0-939626-89-2; $9.95, paper; 0-939626-90-6; 231 pp.) </i>

Transference in real life is a horrible thing. This entirely reasonable proposition is the theme of James Twiggs’ new novel, “Transferences,” an ambitious work that takes on one of the essential problems of the therapeutic relationship (or indeed of any relationship, in Twiggs’ view): In therapy, and in love, what is real? Who is real? When a man loves a woman, to quote the old Percy Sledge song, is it really her known and essential self he loves, or is it an image of his own device: a ghost of lovers past, a flight of fancy, an ardent transference?

The notion of the transference, of course, is a central and powerful tenet of psychoanalysis. In therapy, so the theory goes, patient transfers those looming figures from the past--father, mother, sister, brother, lover--onto therapist. Having drafted his therapist as a stand-in, he proceeds to re-enact inside therapy the powerful scenarios that trouble him outside. Say in reality he is the fearful son of a harsh and punitive father. In fantasy, he now becomes the fearful patient of a harsh and punitive therapist. And, having made this leap, he can begin the process of working through.

So far so good, but the problem is (as analysts soon came to see): What happens when the therapist has his own transference complicating the proceedings? Suppose the therapist really does see his patient as a less than perfect son--what then?

Then you have a countertransference, and in Twiggs’ novel, that is where the fun (so to speak) begins. All of Twiggs’ characters are in the grip of raging transferences, counter--or otherwise. There is, most centrally, the manic and eloquent ex-patient Tim, desperately in love with his own fevered construction of his long-lost therapist, Wanda. (Long-lost because, having finished her graduate work, Wanda has moved away, leaving Tim behind.) Tim’s perverse and perverted love letters to her form the spine of the story. But then there is Wanda herself, in love with her own fantasy of “a quiet life with a man she could count on,” which, as the novel opens, has come to be embodied for her by Robert.

Wanda marries Robert, a rather dull, beer-drinking small businessman entirely different (so she believes) from her arrogant analyst father, more for what he represents than for who he really is. For his part, Robert is in a state of utter disarray: voyeur to Tim’s obsession with his wife, Robert reads Tim’s letters to her with a growing sense of identification. As we gradually come to see, it is Tim’s Wanda he “loves,” not Wanda’s Wanda.

And Tim’s Wanda is a monster, a woman who seduces her patients then abandons them to cruel fate. Nevertheless, Tim’s Wanda is precisely the kind of monster the real-life Wanda might well wish to be. In reality a heavy-thighed 6-footer, the neglected and overweight daughter of a famous analyst (famous, worse yet, for treating a beautiful movie star), in her patient’s eyes she becomes a goddess. A large and fractured goddess, perhaps, a goddess as she might be painted by the sexually ambivalent Picasso, but a goddess nonetheless. For Wanda, the sad truth is that Tim, patently crazy as he may be, is the only man who will ever worship her. And so the question inevitably arises: Has Wanda done something, however unawares, to encourage her patient’s hopeless fantasy?

Twiggs’ answer seems to be that even if she hasn’t (and we never know for sure), she is certainly guilty of enjoying it. Twiggs tells us that transference in real life--transference outside the proper confines of the therapeutic session--means that a therapist can secretly require her ex-patient’s continued adoration, and a man can want a woman purely because he sees her wanted by another man.

Twiggs’ handling of these themes is most successful in the epistolary sections of the novel containing Tim’s letters to Wanda, less so in the seriocomic sections that trace Wanda’s relationship with Robert and his friends, Marie and Floyd. Tim’s letters are crazed and compelling; as repulsive as they frequently are, I looked forward to each one. (Guilty pleasures!) Handled right, sick people can make great characters, and Twiggs’ Tim Jinks, with his weekly outpouring of love, hate and pornographic longing, is a great sick character.

But the scenes among the four friends do not play as well. They are much flatter, less full of life. And the novel unravels at the end. As Twiggs heaps ever-escalating pain and abuse upon his lady therapist, inevitably the reader recoils. Wanda is a character we care about, and her awful fate, insufficiently motivated by story, seems to spring directly from an author’s mind. By novel’s end, you feel yourself in the presence of a writer with a major bone to pick, a writer getting even perhaps with some long-lost therapist of his own. Whatever the truth of the matter (and it is entirely possible that the real Twiggs has never set foot in a therapist’s office), that is how the novel feels: It feels like a story told by a storyteller out for blood.

Thus, by the last 50 pages of the book, Twiggs is hoist by his own petard. In “Transferences,” the patients have transferences, the therapists have transferences, and ultimately you get the feeling writers have their transferences, too. If you can’t trust your therapist (and in Twiggs’ world you can’t) you can’t necessarily trust your novelist either. Transference in art is a real thing, too, and when it shines through this clearly, it is not a pretty sight.