Thawing the ‘frozen accidents’: The archetypal view in countertransference

Jung's concepts of psyche and psychic energy are relevant in countertransference. Working with Jung's archetypes as ‘transconscious’ dynamic fields of probabilities helps the analyst, as a clinician and teacher with limited human consciousness, to confront and recognize the unconscious cross-purposes of ‘anomalous’ countertransference, and to convert it to insightful ‘participatory’ countertransference. Jung's archetypes will be juxtaposed with William James's fields, Gerald Edelman's qualia, and most particularly with Murray Gell-Mann's ‘frozen accidents’. Two vignettes - from a clinical and a training setting - suggest that from a Jungian perspective, countertransference may be seen at the psychic juncture where ego, the personal shadow, the interpersonal other and the archetype of the collective unconscious meet in the determining images of a life, fantasy, dream, analysis, and seminar. So-called ‘parallel process’ will be seen as enclosure in the circles of reference emanating from the patient's experiences in those arenas deemed archetypal, i.e., structurally significant. The relativity of unconscious time will be mentioned. Jung's notion that, called or uncalled, the archetypes are present, informs the thesis that we must name archetypal images if we are to know them, and we must know them to be free.