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While re-reading ‘The psychology of the transference’ (Jung 2) I was surprised to see how much Jung's views anticipated current views on the transference and how easily his ideas find a place at the heart of our reflections. In a word, I was struck by the relevance of his ideas for our modern age.
When Jung states that an instinct for relationship (kinship/libido) lies at the centre of the transference and, in the same breath, that ‘each [person] is a stranger among strangers’, this contradiction seems to illustrate in exemplary fashion the problem of our times. How can one become an individual without cutting oneself off from others? Jung also echoes, in a strange way, our present concern when he observes that the desperate efforts made by modern men and women to satisfy the need for this kinship libido, from which they are so estranged, cannot be replaced by any of the collective substitutes so abundantly available in our modern society.
To return to the transference. Starting from the fundamental proposition that only a relationship with another human being can satisfy the aim of kinship libido, Jung presents the transference as a phenomenon that is fuelled by this very aim. But how then are we to understand his contention that ‘we are strangers to one another’? Could there be a loss of this desire for kinship libido? Or a need to separate from this desire for the sake of a necessary psychic differentiation and to risk radically severing all ties with others? Since neither of the two terms can be eliminated, we are again confronted with a paradox which Jung set forth in the following way: ‘… relationship to the self is at once relationship to our fellow man, and no one can be related to the latter until he is related to himself’ (Jung 2, par. 445).
Stated in this way, the theory of the transference constitutes the