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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I intend to show in this paper that a developmental approach to understanding the psyche need not be reductive in the way it was when Jung made his distinction between reductive and synthetic analysis, and to propose that we need to revise our terminology to bring it in line with changes in the field.
One of the major beliefs that informs our work as Jungian analysts is that to reduce the psyche to ‘nothing but’ drives and defences, or to its infantile elements alone, is to violate its complexity and richness. As Jungians, we approach psychology always looking for the ‘something more’. We value the capacity to hold the opposites and let them speak to each other. We are not frightened by ambiguity or unknowing. In addition, many of us believe that the differing groups within and between our institutes need not be armed camps but can be voices in a dialogue. And some of us believe that the two major currents of depth psychology - analytical psychology and psychoanalysis - have a great deal to teach each other and to learn from each other. These complementarities will be one theme of this paper.
My own interest in Jung developed some years after I had done intensive postdoctoral training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It was foreshadowed by a dream in which the roof of the training centre (Mt Zion Hospital in San Francisco, closely affiliated to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute) was actually not a roof but a helicopter launching pad. And as I boarded the helicopter it was clear that I was going to take off for another destination, as yet unknown.