Romantic and Classical Views of Analysis: Primal relationship or working relationship?

What Follows is an attempt to delineate certain recurring basic issues in psychotherapy, without attempting a final answer to the questions raised and without even suggesting that there is an answer that is applicable at all times or in all patients. The reason for the title is the tendency for views on psychotherapy to polarise in a polemical way along the dimension ‘romantic v. classical’, which is roughly the same as what many Jungians refer to as the self-ego dimension or axis. These opposing or complementary views of therapy are of course analogous to the distinction between the classical and the romantic in art and other aspects of culture.

In using the term ‘primal relationship’ I mean the kind of relationship that mother and baby may have with each other. A holding or containing function is implied on the maternal side as well as an archaic type of functioning certainly on the side of the patient. The term ‘working relationship’ suggests the more adult aspects of the partnership, as well as being essentially cooler and more impersonal. The word ‘primal’, as it is used in such terms as primal scene, primal scream, primal therapy, primal experience and primal relationship, connotes an intensity and profundity of feelings and emotions as well as, or possibly because of, a return to first things. There is obviously an overlap between this territory and that which Jung called the universal or collective unconscious.

The terms which we use for mother-baby interaction at once betray our bias or convey the aspect we wish to emphasise. For example, Winnicott's term ‘nursing couple’ suggests a mutuality in the relationship. So does the term ‘symbiotic partnership’, and the term ‘symbiotic envelope’. The term ‘primal relationship’ also refers to the relationship aspect of early life rather than to the equally valid ‘individual’ aspect of each partner, which emphasises the fact that the baby has many experiences that are its own and have nothing to do with its mother or w