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Relationships are a vehicle (like drawing, sculpture, active imagination, journaling, therapy, meditation, prayer, etc.) through which unconscious material emerges; interactions with other people are ideal containers for viewing unconscious material that might otherwise remain hidden.
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When a topic or feeling emerges, we can surrender the idea that one of us motivated it or even that it “belongs” to either of us. Instead, we can open to the possibility that this is the way psyche brings issues, emotions, and insights to us through a process we do not understand. Instead of focusing on our respective subjective experiences, using the transcendent function in this way requires us to let go of knowing whom the content of the interaction began with and assume that it relates to us both:
To do this, one must be willing to sacrifice the power of knowing “whose content” one is dealing with and instead imagine that the content . . . exists in the field itself and does not necessarily belong to either person. The content can be imaginally thrust into the field . . . so that it becomes a “third thing.” (Schwartz-Salant, 1995,
