Coco, I have had a hard time too distinguishing between transference and attachment. There is so much overlap between the two.

Attachment can refer to any very close relationship such as a romantic partnership, but is most commonly refers to the relationship between a child and caregiver. Depending on personal history, the style of a therapist, and other factors, many of us form a kind of attachment relationship with our T's. Essentially the reason this happens is that we are trying to get from out T's something that we needed but didn't get from our parents when we were smaller. It doesn't mean you necessarily had an awful childhood. For example, I had a generally happy childhood, but my mother was emotionally volatile when I was little and I didn't feel like I could rely on my parents to be a stable base for me emotionally (they had their own problems), so I attached to my T trying to get this security I didn't have. Other people might have felt their parents didn't fully understand or pay attention to them in some way, or that they didn't do enough to affirm their worth, and look for these things in a T also.

You'll also hear people talk about "secure" versus "insecure" attachment and different attachment "styles." There is only one kind of secure attachment, which means that as a child you felt safe knowing that your caregiver would be there for you. In terms of insecure attachment, it's usually divided into three types: anxious/preoccupied, avoidant/dismissive, and disorganized. Anxious attachment means you behave in a clingy way because you're constantly afraid of your attachment figure not being there for you when needed. Avoidant means that you act as though you don't need close relationships at all, because your caregiver was so unavailable that you simply gave up on the whole thing and became very independent. Disorganized is the rarest type and means that you were actually afraid of your own caregiver (usually because of abuse) and so you weren't sure whether to move towards them to get the comfort of being close to someone, or to avoid them to avoid getting hurt. In practice some people might have a combination of these styles, depending on the circumstance.

Transference basically means that feelings, expectations, or dynamics from a previous relationship get transfered onto someone else, like your T. An example would be that if my parents yelled at me when I cried, I might be afraid to cry in front of my T and expect her to react in the same way. Transference actually happens all the time with people in our lives, but it can become amplified in therapy and therefore be more obvious.

The way these overlap is that if we do become attached to a T, it usually results in a LOT of very strong transference. All our longings, fears, expectations, etc. about our parents from our childhoods tend to play out all over again in our relationship with our T's. And whatever attachment style we had with our parents when we were little will usually transfer to our T's as well.

I hope that helped a little... It can still be really confusing at times.