Reply to Plaut's ‘Comment’

Just as my paper ‘Technique and counter-transference’ stimulated Plaut (1970), so has his ‘Comment’, in the last issue of this Journal, stimulated me in a number of ways, some of which I believe it will be profitable to develop.

To start with a disclaimer. The almost complete absence of the term archetype in my article is not due to its being ‘omitted’ but is the result of considering technique as a manifestation of ego functioning.

Let me next answer a reproach: am I wrongly attributing to him the term ‘incarnating the archetype’? In his original paper Plaut (1956) refers more than once to ‘incarnating it’, referring to the archetypal image. While he may be right in reproaching me for inexact attribution and for not including the term ‘image’, it remains that the phrase ‘incarnating the archetype’ has been widely used as a shorthand and I must record in my defence two observations: 1, I did not put the phrase in quotation marks, and 2, in the phrase ‘incarnating the archetypal image’, the word ‘image’ is redundant because an archetype could not be embodied without there being an image.

I believe that I was also in order to interpret (i.e. to ‘misrepresent’) a formulation that was obscure in a number of respects. Clear definition is not always necessary or desirable and it is not my intention to criticize so long as the formulation be recognized as imprecise and that it will provoke differing understandings and interpretations by others. That interpretations of such formulations often appear to the originator as ‘misunderstandings’, ‘misquotations’ and the like, is more or less the rule, so I need only say that to me the religious association to incarnating was not important; I recognize, however, that in saying so I must state my difficulties more clearly than I have done in my paper. There I compressed my thoughts unduly and so I welcome this opportunity to expand them.

In the first place Jung's case that Plaut cited showed that the patient could distinguish Jung from