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To the extent that our ‘possession’ by one or the other of this range of metaphors [of the analytic process] blinds us to other possible models, our work is to that degree rigid and we are to this same degree blind. Not only does the analyst's individual myth or ‘personal equation’ influence his conception of the therapeutic process and his role as therapist, it also expresses itself in his most seemingly objective and scientific contributions.
In this paper I shall look at a number of metaphors used to characterise either the therapeutic process or the therapeutic ‘space’ in order to highlight their constructed nature. These metaphors are constructs and as such suitable for deconstruction and reconstruction, much as a patient's life history is a construction suitable to understanding and reworking.
These metaphors of the therapeutic process—the frame, the container, the holding environment—have wide currency. Each has a special flavour reflecting in some ways the life experience or personal myth of the theorist. And each should have certain consequences for the therapeutic process that differentiate one from another.
I turn first to the work of C. G. Jung, in order to make some inferences about his view of the psychotherapeutic space. I say ‘inferences’ because only in his ‘Psychology of the transference’ (Jung 7) did he make explicit the analogy between what happens in the analytic process and what the alchemists were attempting in their work of transforming base matter into the precious lapis or living philosopher's stone. Jung believed that the medieval alchemists were protopsychologists who were using the only language and symbols available to them to talk about the transformation of unconsciousness into consciousness and