You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reference to Jung's letters shows that in 1909 he wrote to Freud: ‘Honegger is now working with me with great understanding, and I shall entrust to him everything I know so that something good may come of it.’ However, this gifted pupil and analysand committed suicide in 1911, and Jung then wrote to Freud that he blamed his own lack of knowledge of dementia praecox for Honegger's death.
In his paper, Carotenuto claims that Walser is over-optimistic in his suggestion that greater awareness by Jung of his countertransference might have altered the outcome. Honegger, he thinks, was probably psychotic and the rapid transition from patient to pupil and quasi colleague placed too heavy a burden upon him. Furthermore, he maintains that Jung had an irresistible need of his pupil, a need shared by all training analysts. This is Carotenuto's springboard for a discussion of the problems and inherent contradiction in training analysis.
A profession in which doubts and anxiety are an unchanging feature drives the analyst to seek confirmation of his work and ideas by forming schools and acquiring pupils. The pupil—an erstwhile patient—represents a result for the analyst, a living witness to his reality so long as he goes in the same direction; if he strays he will be corrected. The analyst is the sole judge of his pupil's psychological evolution, being the only person in a position to form an opinion; but in what direction has he evolved? If it is one approved by his analyst it is his wishes which have been realised, but no evolution has occurred. The pupil, for his part, has moved from being a patient with a ‘destructive illness’ to a person with a ‘creative disturbance’ supposedly capable of relieving the sufferings of others. His analyst has become his Maestro, and he develops a block in his critical faculties coupled with guilt feelings in relation to him: Federn's lifelong attitude to Freud is an example. The inherent paradox in training analysis is that the analyst's ‘existen