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Judith Hubback's theme is that ‘who and how we are and what we do constantly interact and interplay in creative or frustrating or destructive ways’. She gives three examples of ‘illusions and interactions’ between therapist and patient that develop her theme.
The first is of Jung and Sabina Spielrein, the young woman patient who projected onto him the archetypal saviour and father. Whereas Jung may have acted out some shadow features and erotic needs with her in a pre-symbolic way because his understanding of transference and countertransference was inadequate at the time, a few years later, after the break with Freud and his own inner journer of self-discovery, he elucidated the processes of transference and countertransference in ‘The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction’, 1928. This progression from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic suggests to Judith Hubback that unconscious countertransference which is at first an interference, can become an indicator of what the patient needs to evoke in the analyst, in order to take back into himself what he has projected, and so move on to the next phase.
The second example, of power only half-understood, focuses on a physical action: by interpreting, rather than giving a young woman an ashtray, Judith Hubback hoped to engender a symbolic attitude. In this case, countertransference interference arose from her dislike of cigarette smoke, her wish to ‘protect’ other patients from the after-smell and its implications, and, at a deeper level, her anxious sense that the patient's description of conflicts with her mother sounded all too much like the way her own offspring may have perceived her. As a consequence, Judith Hubback suspects, she responded with a version of ‘mother knows best’ to a projection of the over-firm mother-image, and psychotherapy did not get under way.
Thirdly, Mrs Hubback describes a phase of work with a man in which, while carrying the image of the ‘good mother’, she became drowsy during sessions and felt bored and