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As the title suggests, it is the author's aim to demonstrate the essential elements of Jungian psychotherapy as they are related to symbols. The book revolves around the major themes of complex, archetype, and symbol, and is concerned largely with the relationship between symbol formation and the therapeutic interaction. It is here that the author shows her bias: the theory comes alive for her, and for the reader too, in the clinical exchange with her patients. The transference-countertransference relationship is itself a symbol by means of which the complexes can become available to experience. As Kast says, a symbol is a ‘workshop’ where the complexes are worked out, and more, a ‘focus of psychic development which carries the creative process in therapy’ (p. 40). The word I have translated as ‘focus’ is Brennpunkt, meaning ‘combustion point’; ‘focus’ seems an inadequate rendering until it is recalled that the original meaning of ‘focus’ in Latin was ‘hearth’.
The book covers a number of ‘topical’ issues such as the treatment of narcissistic and borderline patients, and there is a discussion of psychosomatic phenomena which Kast links interestingly with synchronicity. She illustrates her book generously with clinical material, which ranges from vignettes to extensive case studies, and includes reproductions, some in colour, of her patients' drawings and paintings.
The idea of the complex is a central one in Kast's approach. As an analyst who makes relatively little use of it as a working concept, I found her definition helpful: ‘unconscious contents which are bound together by a common emotion and by a common core of meaning (archetype)’ (p. 45). Parallel to, or perhaps counterbalancing, the unconscious complexes is the ego-complex, which Kast is at pains to distinguish from the ego. Struggling with this differentiation I turned to an early statement of Jung's in ‘The psychology of dementia praecox’: ‘By this [the egocomplex] we mean the whole mass of ideas pertainin