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For many years the criticism that psychoanalysts made of Jung and his followers was that, though some of their ideas and concepts were intriguing and even helpful in terms of understanding cultural phenomena, they could not see how they actually helped in the analysis of patients. Jung's papers on technique were sparse and required certain basic knowledge of the assumptions on which he worked, before they were meaningful to colleagues with a psychoanalytic training. One got the impression of a mystique that was not meant to be understood! It is easy enough to criticize from the side-lines, but I know from experience that to write on technique means not only to expose one's way of working to the criticism of others, but also to involve the hard and painful task of conceptualizing not only one's successes but also one's failures.
This book contains nineteen papers on different aspects of technique written by leading members of the London Society of Analytical Psychology. Over the last twenty years they have been attempting to meet the criticism referred to above, and they have provided an impressive presentation of both the development of their ideas on technique and their crystallization in current practice.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part contains six papers dealing with general problems of technique. The authors discuss technical issues relating to the rôle and influence of the personality of the analyst, the importance of his underlying affective attitude to the patient, the function of reconstruction in analytic work and its relevance to the dialogue that needs to be maintained between past and present, the importance of flexibility in technique with particular reference to the different phases met with in the course of analytic work and the termination of analyses, where a distinction is made between ‘stopping’ and ‘ending’.
In the second part the authors focus on different ways of understanding transference phenomena and on techniques of using