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When Jung wrote in 1929 that ‘the doctor is as much “in the analysis” as the patient’, he meant it. Carolyn Stack's recent paper ‘The analyst's new clothes’ tells us specifically what Jung's statement really means: ‘Some patients need to accomplish their therapeutic work on the terrain of their analysts’ unconscious psychological conflicts’. She means it too - this business about ‘the analyst's unconscious conflicts’ - and she is not referring to occasional, pretty well worked through countertransference problems that may crop up. Stack insists on the distinct ‘possibility that the analyst's unconscious material may be far more complicated, pathological, crazy, tenaciously unconscious, or destructive’ than is usually considered, even by analysts who are countertransference orientated in their treatment. Her paper asks us to acknowledge this possibility, accept it, and think about what we are to do about it.
To set up her argument, Stack succinctly reviews several countertransference orientated theories (Langs, Ferenczi, Racker), then notes the ideas of Searles, Sandler, Ogden and Bollas, and touches finally on current ‘relational’ and intersubjective perspectives. This historical account is useful, though slightly slanted in favour of her own thesis. (Her evaluation of Searles, for instance, is not accurate: a closer reading of his theories would surely show that he pioneered the very viewpoints about the analyst's unconscious as the ground of the therapy, and the analyst as potentially and truly pathological, that Stack espouses.) Stack's point is that, for all their emphasis on the mutuality of analysis, even these analysts (except Ferenczi, whose ‘mutual analysis’ apparently could lose track of the patient altogether) do not maintain a position wherein the analyst in analysis is fully, ‘humanly vulnerable’. Even the always empathic, patient-focused positions of self and intersubjective psychologies, and the emphasis on creative ‘narratives’ advocated by others, pu