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This important new book by Jan Wiener is based on her 2006 Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology, an international forum held annually at Texas A&M University. The audience for these lectures is diverse and drawn together mainly by an interest in Jungian ideas. The result of this particular context is a book that goes to the heart of clinical practice and its controversies while maintaining a clarity and ease of expression in traversing complex areas of experience. As a result the reader is left both interested and enlivened. This is quite an achievement in itself and perhaps owes something to Wiener being a singer as well as an analyst so therefore mindful of the need to engage with her audience.
The agenda for the book is set out clearly in the introduction: the development of a contemporary Jungian approach to transference and countertransference which will include psychoanalytic thinking, in spite of different conceptualizations of the unconscious and will not shy away from ‘significant flaws’ (p. 2) in Jung's thinking.
She elaborates this clearly:
His discovery of the centrality of the analyst's personality and of the role of countertransference in the analytic relationship is evidence of his brilliant intuitions and pioneering thinking, but he lacked a coherent method and clinical technique for working with transference. What is more, his ambivalence and mercurial attitude toward matters of method could be seen to leave those eager to advance their skills in this area floundering and confused. (p. 2)
It is this positioning of the enquiry in a field that is problematic, historical and controversial that raises the book from an introductory text to a major invitation to both psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic practitioners to engage in debate over the nature of our work.
The book is laid out in five main chapters with useful notes and an extensive bibliography. The clarity of the format and presentation will make it a useful teaching text. Throughout the autho