Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 22, 2018
Hillman, J. (1971/1998) ‘The feeling function’, in M.-L. von Franz and J. Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Woodstock, CT: Spring.
——— (1973) Experimental Researches, trans. L. Stein and D. Riviere. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marshall, I. (1968) ‘The four functions: a conceptual analysis’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 13(1): 1–32.
Este artículo lo tengo
Myers, I. and Myers, P. (1980) Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Sabini, M. (1988) ‘The therapist’s inferior function’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 3(4): 373–394.
Sandner, D. and Beebe, J. (1995) ‘Psychopathology and analysis’, in M. Stein (ed.) Jungian Analysis. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Habla de como trabajar hablando en el lenguaje de la función superior para fortalecer el Yo antes que entrar en el idioma del complejo bajo el cual se encuentra en posesión
Shamdasani, S. (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sharp, D. (1987) Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology. Toronto: Inner City.
von Franz, M.-L. (1971/1998) ‘The inferior function’, in M.-L. von Franz and J. Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Woodstock, CT: Spring.
The roots of psychoanalysis do lie in hypnotism and worries about there being too much ‘suggestion’ at play in clinical work, leading to the establishment of ‘neutral’, ‘abstinent’ and ‘blank screen’ ways of working stem from this aetiology;
the therapist’s role in the construction of the client’s transference is a much theorised phenomenon.
Intense anxiety surrounds the question of whether Jung did or did not have an adequate conception of transference. Sometimes, he can be understood as dismissing its importance: transference is a ‘hindrance’ and ‘you cure in spite of transference and not because of it’ (CW 18: 678–679).
At other times, such as the moment when he sought to reassure Freud of his orthodoxy (CW 16: par. 358), he is very keen to stand up and be counted as a reputable psychoanalyst who has fully understood the centrality of the idea of transference as the ‘alpha and omega of analysis’; Freud apparently told him that he had ‘grasped the main thing’ (see Perry 1997: 141–163; Samuels 1985: 182–183 for a full discussion of this ambivalence of Jung’s).
with his idea of the ‘transference neurosis’ he made it possible for therapists to transform what had been seen primarily as a problem into the very thing that made depth work possible.
In the Jungian therapeutic tradition, there is much more to transference than its infantile or regressive version (see Kirsch 1995: 170–209)
The reason why infantile transferences do so often seem to be in play has to do with the nature of what Freud (e.g., 1900: 4–5) called ‘primary process’, meaning the typical ways in which the unconscious functions, overlooking the rules of space, place and time.
not all seemingly infantile transferences are infantile, many have to do with what is felt about and projected onto psychological experts and mental health professionals (Hauke 1996; Papadopoulos 1998).
Jung was perhaps the first therapist to understand that what the client sees and experiences in the therapist, whether as a positive or negative feature, is connected, via projection, with the client’s own self or personality just as it is, as a whole, rather than in its infantile aspects.
Idealisations are ways in which someone discovers something about him or herself but in a projected form, so that another person carries these qualities.
both the unrealised gold and the unrecognised shit of a life will find their concrete form in the lived experience of the transference.
in transference projections, the client will often or usually encounter material from his or her own shadow – ‘the thing a person has no wish to be’, in Jung’s words (CW 16: par. 470) – but, according to the notion of the shadow, actually is.
First, there is a tension between an understanding of transference-countertransfernce that gives it an important but limited place in any consideration of the therapeutic process as a whole, and one that considers everything that takes place in therapy as connected with transference-countertransference and subsumed into it.
My own view is that it is necessary to state explicitly what is not transference in the therapy relationship; this provides a sensible basis for delineating what is transferential in the general sense of having been imported into the two-person therapy relationship from the subjectivity of the client.
in my opinion, it remains necessary to mention the ‘real relationship’ or ‘treatment alliance’ and to distinguish these from the transference-countertransference dynamics of the therapy relationship while allowing for massive overlap and influencing of one kind of relationship by the other. Jung insisted that therapy rests upon a dialectical relationship
Jung is a profound precursor to contemporary psychoanalytic and other interest in the relational base of psychotherapy.
Jung’s crucial contribution was to stress that both therapist and client are involved in the process as individuals and that both have conscious and unconscious reasons and motives for being there.
The second tension is over the presence of archetypal, as opposed to personal, factors in transference-countertransference material.
what is usually meant by archetypal transference is that the transference does not emanate from a personal experience
The third tension concerns whether transference is better understood as a cul-de-sac or blind alley that it may be necessary to explore before turning back, having mapped all its nooks and crannies and feeling able to disregard it as a highway for future development – or whether going into the transference as comprehensively as possible is a road (or the road) to further personality integration and individuation.
Transference-driven explorations of the past or of the unconscious situation in the client in the present may play a part in converting ghosts into ancestors, transforming our cul-de-sac into a highway pointing in the direction of psychic richnesses in the future.
The fourth tension concerns whether transference is truly a natural phenomenon (as Jung claimed) or more something induced by the therapeutic situation.
The fifth tension concerns the interweave between transference projection and ‘reality’ and how the therapist handles that interweave.
Plaut (1956) referred to this as ‘incarnating the archetypal image’ and had in mind that the therapist would neither confirm nor deny the feeling in himself, nor explain the mechanisms of transference or projection, nor amplify the material by educating the client via references to the ambivalence of mythological father figures to son figures (Chronos, Uranos, Zeus, Laius, Pharoah, Herod). The next possibility would be to work in the knowledge that this feeling exists and allow for its influence on all aspects of the therapeutic relationship.
Some have alleged that, far from being a mutative (i.e., change inducing) technique, here-and-now transference interpretations have become an addiction, a sign of hopeless narcissistic preoccupation on the part of the therapist (Peters 1991).
Jung’s overall position was that the therapeutic relationship must be distinguished from a medical or technical procedure and that therapy will take a different course according to the particular combination of therapist and client. Hence it is not surprising that Jung’s attitude to transference varied so much.
Jung shows greater consistency when it comes to countertransference and has been recognised as one of the pioneers of a general movement in psychotherapy to regard the emotional, fantasy and bodily states of the therapist as being of importance for a deeper understanding of the client’s situation. Up until the 1950s, psychoanalysis, following Freud, tended to regard countertransference as invariably neurotic, an activation of the analyst’s infantile conflicts and an obstacle to his functioning (Freud 1910, 1913). To the contrary, Jung wrote in 1929 that ‘You can exert no influence unless you
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Contemporary post-Jungian analytical psychology has assiduously pursued this interest of Jung’s in countertransference as usable in the service of the client’s development.
We can state that there are numerous countertransferences that are not primarily neurotic on the part of the therapist without ruling out the existence of an omnipresent neurotic ‘bit’, even in such usable countertransferences.
It may be that the client is feeling depressed right now and neither of us was aware of it. In this instance, my depression is a reflection of his or her depression. I call this phenomenon (my depression) an example of ‘reflective countertransference’.
The client may have experienced a parent as depressed, and my reaction precisely embodies the client’s emotionally experienced parent.
This entire state of affairs I have come to call ‘embodied countertransference’ and I distinguish it from reflective
experientially, the two states may seem similar and perhaps many usable countertransferences are both reflective and embodied.
I think many Jungian analysts and therapists who have considered countertransference have become aware that what has been termed ‘the countertransference revolution’, in which practitioners are legitimised in regarding their own subjective states as somehow linked to the client’s, may have gone too far.
drew up a list of the problems with understanding countertransference as ‘an important organ of information’ in Samuels 1993: 45–46.)
The Political Psyche
It would be mistaken to take Jung as preoccupied with the relational dimension of therapy to the exclusion of an internal exploration of the unconscious on the part of both persons involved. Rather, Jung’s particular contribution may be to have found ways of combining the ‘one-person psychology’ of Freud in which making the unconscious conscious is the main thing and later, two-person psychologies which, in diverse ways, stress the importance of the relational dimension of psychotherapy.
Jung thought that alchemy, if regarded metaphorically, was a precursor of the modern study of the unconscious and therapeutic concern for the transformation of personality.
Alchemists had two aims. First, to create something valuable out of base elements in themselves of little value. This is sometimes expressed as ‘gold’, or ‘the philosopher’s stone’. Second, to convert base matter into spirit, freeing the soul from its material prison.
The alchemist, usually represented as a male figure, worked in relation to another person (sometimes real, sometimes an imaginary figure), called the soror mystica, mystical sister. That is to say, the alchemist needed an ‘other’ with whom to relate to get his work done at all. There would be no therapist without the client.
(See Papadopoulos 1984, 2002 for a groundbreaking review of the theme of ‘the Other’ in Jungian psychology.)
the vas or sealed alchemical vessel puts one in mind of the containing aspects of the frame within which therapy is constructed. The coniunctio, an important alchemical symbolic image of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, refers metaphorically to the deep and pervasive intermingling of the two personalities involved in therapy.
