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This book contains twenty-one of Michael Fordham's papers most clearly connected with technique, although, as Shamdasani comments in his introduction, ‘in a way all Fordham's papers are about technique’. Two are previously unpublished: The one from which the collection takes its title is his presentation of his position to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1975, the other, ‘Problems of a training analyst’ was presented to the Society of Analytical Psychology in the 1960s.
The collection opens with his 1957 paper, ‘Notes on the transference’, which raises almost all the issues that Fordham went on to develop with increasing authority over the years. In particular he takes issue with Jung's statements which seem to indicate a belief that the bulk of psychotherapeutic procedures do not involve transference analysis. Fordham's clinical experience was that ‘the transference cannot be left out, and it will sooner or later form the central feature of any thorough analysis, and though Jung seemed to believe this was not so, his later works point in the opposite direction’ (p. 29). In his 1974 paper ‘Jung's conception of the transference’ (ch. 11 of this collection) Fordham fully explores and maps the sometimes confusing and apparently contradictory development of Jung's views in this area.
In ‘Notes on the transference’, Fordham offers an analysis of the patient-analyst interaction which begins to explore how the art of analysis, with Jung's emphasis on the therapeutic effect of the analyst's own personality, is capable of being understood scientifically. One example of this is his use of his term syntonic countertransference to understand how the analyst can use his countertransference to make interpretations which are ‘created on every occasion out of the unconscious’—a necessary condition for Jung's recommendation that the analyst adopt ‘the attitude that shuns all methods’ (‘Principles of practical psychotherapy’, CW 16). The fact that the analyst's reactions are r