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Fordham's Paper, ‘Technique and counter-transference’, in the last issue of this Journal, is a thorough survey of an area in analytical psychology (extending into dynamic psychology in general) as well as a statement of an original point of view. It has given me a much-wanted stimulus to review and clarify a phrase which in discussions has become connected with my name and goes back to a paper which I wrote fourteen years ago .
The paper was the third in a symposium called ‘Jung's contribution to analytical thought and practice’, and my title was ‘The transference in analytical psychology’. It is important to recall this for the following reasons: (a) In 1956 nothing, or next to nothing, had been published on the subject of counter-transference by analytical psychologists other than Jung (who, as Fordham said, did not use the term much). (b) My contribution had to be brief. (c) The second thoughts which I am about to present can touch on only one or two facets of Fordham's comprehensive survey, i.e. where they overlap or show up discrepancies.
Two further observations are: first of all, the phrase which I am supposed to have coined (Fordham, ibid., p. 109), i.e. ‘incarnating an archetype’ does not in fact occur in the paper to which it is attributed. True, in summarizing, the words ‘to incarnate the animus’ do appear, but the words animus-figure (i.e. a teacher) precede it in the text. Furthermore, I wrote in three places of incarnating an (archetypal) image (italics mine). Obviously archetypes are concepts and therefore cannot be logically conceived as becoming flesh and blood (‘incarnate’). Jung (1947, 1954, p. 213) is very well aware of this: ‘The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such.’ Why then have the misquotation and the quotation caught on? Instead of fighting a paternity suit I shall go into the psychological origins and consequences of this phenomenon.