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.
The English version of the theme of the Ninth International Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology uses the word ‘approach’; and to characterise our practical and theoretical work on the human psyche as an approach is most appropriate, as the Latin word from which the English word derives, appropinquare, to approach something, suggests that what is approached is not something merely concrete and objective. In the Vulgate, for example, James 4, 8 reads: Appropinquate deo et appropinquabit vobis, translated by Luther as Nahet Euch zu Gott, so nahet Er sich zu Euch—‘Approach God and He will approach you’ (‘Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you’, in the Authorised Version).
The theme of the Congress specifies that there are at least two modalities in our approach: one more clinical, the other more symbolic, the use of which depends on the demands of the symptoms which have been constellated. I take ‘clinical approach’ in the sense of a concrete and specifically medical attitude towards the suffering of the patient, an attitude evoked by that suffering. A symbolic approach, on the other hand, is primarily psychological, an attempt to understand the sense, meaning and aim, a search for what is hidden below the surface, in order to make the complexities of the patient's neurosis comprehensible.
It seems important to me that both these modalities of the therapeutic approach are neither specifically psychoanalytic nor specifically Jungian, but are, and always have been, deeply rooted in medical practice. I do not regard this as our tradition which excludes non-medical colleagues, but rather as one which has included them in both aspects from, it may be said, earliest times.
When dealing with pain and chronic suffering, doctors in the past