Flexibility in Analytic Technique

Analytical Psychologists as a group appear to concern themselves less with problems of technique than perhaps any other comparable group of therapists. Most of the published work follows Jung's own writings in concentrating on psychological content rather than on method, and yet this very content, the data on which we depend to enlarge our knowledge, may well depend on the method used to collect it. If, for example, we are discussing dream material, it may be relevant to consider such questions as ‘Was the dream related spontaneously by the patient or had the analyst asked the patient to tell his dreams (as Jung frequently did)?’; ‘What was the context of the dream in terms of the on-going analytical process—had the associations arisen spontaneously in the patient or had the analyst picked out dream-elements and asked him to associate to them?’; ‘Do dreams in general play a major or minor part in what the patient tells the analyst?’; and so on.

The more these considerations are ignored, the more easily we shall arrive at the collective, universal symbolism of the dream, but we shall at the same time lose the significance of this symbolism for the dreamer. It is this latter aspect which has been relatively neglected in the literature, but it is this with which we are primarily concerned in our actual work with patients.

In this day-to-day work of analysis, the analyst lives in a state of perpetual conflict between his wish to react spontaneously ‘as a person’ to the patient and the need to put his special analytical skills in the patient's service. Thus, as well as ‘responding’ to the patient, he is constantly reflecting on his contribution to the analytic dialogue—whether to comment, remain silent, make an interpretation or leave it till later, how much to say, how to phrase it, and so on. A very experienced analyst working well may be barely conscious of this process of reflection. It tends to become conscious when difficulties occur in the analysis and,