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Steinberg's book explores the particular quality of care that a patient ought to experience in the therapeutic situation. This care heals by providing a safe container or ‘magic circle’ within which the analyst strives to empathize accurately with the patient's psychological state. With this context in mind, Dr Steinberg undertakes a dual project. The first situates analytical psychology within the mainstream of psychological thinking by making use of general psychological and analytic terms, such as idealization, separation anxiety, narcissistic and borderline character disorders. The second project sets out to inform clinicians how analytical psychology in general and Jung in particular contribute to the understanding and practice of psychotherapy and analysis.
Dr Steinberg's book consists of seven essays that discuss various topics, including transference/countertransference phenomena, masculine identity conflicts, and depression. His perspective draws from the current thinking of both classical and developmental Jungians, and classical and object-relations orientated Freudians. While appreciating Jung's psychological contributions, Dr Steinberg, as teacher and clinician, none the less, feels free to disagree with Jung, particularly with respect to what he sees as evidence of countertransference resistance on Jung's part. For example, in the opening essay, ‘Jung's ideas on the transference', Steinberg suggests that it was countertransference anxiety which prompted Jung to interpret his patient's transference as archetypal.
Early in his essay Steinberg notes that ‘Jung's thinking on the transference is remarkably consistent', and acknowledges that Jung deepened his perspective on this subject over time. In assessing Jung's contradictory views on the value of the transference, i.e., transference as the essence of analysis, or as a hindrance to treatment, Steinberg posits that Jung was responding to the intensity of pre-oedipal transferences and his own difficulty in