Response to ‘Tina Keller's Analyses with C.G. Jung and Toni Wolff, 1915-1928’

Swan has put together some very interesting, and tantalizing, excerpts from Tina Keller's autobiographical writings, giving us snapshots of her analyses with Jung and with his protégée, Toni Wolff. Despite the fact that these snapshots are incomplete and inevitably portray a one-sided view of these analyses, they do provide us with an idea of how both Jung and Wolff worked clinically, the experimental nature of Jung's analytical technique, and something of the social climate in which these three characters lived and worked. It seems that above all, according to Swan, what Keller benefited most from was learning the technique of ‘active imagination’, primarily through her work with Toni Wolff.

What is so evident in Keller's account is the way in which social and therapeutic boundaries were ignored, denied, and transgressed as a matter of course. Contrary to Jung's emphasis on the power of the symbol, the interpretations Keller records of her dreams and fantasies more often than not revealed a literal rather than symbolic understanding of the contents. This seems to have been the case especially in both Jung's and Wolff's failure to acknowledge Keller's transference. Here it is not clear whether this is Keller's failure or whether indeed it reflects a mutual failure on the part of Jung, Wolff and Keller. From the way in which Keller describes her analysis with Jung, it does seem that little, if any, account was taken of her transference to Jung. Instead, Jung seems to have recoiled from Keller's fantasy material about the ‘black doctor’ which he dismissed derisively and which led to Keller's first break with Jung. Although Keller's analysis with Wolff was certainly more supportive, it seems that Wolff too did not explore the reductive aspects of Keller's material nor her continuing transference to Jung. It also seems more than likely that Keller's transference to Jung had begun before her therapy, during the weekly discussion groups that the Keller and Jung families en