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This is an extraordinary book which provides a lucid overview of the phenomenon of transference and countertransference in the context of Jungian psychology. It helps me, as a non-clinician, understand the complexities and frustrations of analysts who have attempted to follow Jung's inspiration, but who have realized that it is a challenge to apply his ideas in the practical domain of psychotherapy. As Wiener writes, Jung often used his personality in the analytic process, rather than developing communicable methods or techniques as such. She also argues convincingly that Jung's vulnerability to erotic transference made him wary of too close a personal involvement with his patients. His clinical practice seemed to have been intuitive and idiosyncratic, and this was made clear in his autobiography, where he wrote: ‘In my analysis, I am unsystematic very much by intention. We need a different language for every patient’ (1963, p. 153). This forced those who followed him to develop methods that Jung either did not make explicit or ignored in the therapeutic situation. Wiener is in the British developmental school, influenced by Michael Fordham and Fred Plaut. Her book helps those who are unfamiliar with this school to see why British analysts felt impelled to integrate methods from Freudians, Kleinians and attachment theorists. Jung's legacy was slight from a clinical point of view, and it had to be supplemented and bolstered by other systems.
However, as Wiener concedes, some of these attempts to integrate methods and concerns from other traditions tended to lose the distinctively Jungian quality of Jungian psychology. The concern for process above content made some British schools less and less Jungian, and more like clones of the mainstream psychoanalytic traditions. This