Case Response I

I appreciate the invitation to respond to Nikolai's case. Given the brevity of the therapeutic work and the suggestion from the editors to explore my own reverie, I have allowed myself to muse and reflect freely upon the clinical material and hope it will be helpful to the presenter.

My formal Jungian training began in Venezuela many years ago with an emphasis on the archetypal approach to the human psyche. Specifically, we conducted analysis by ‘sticking with the image’ and allowing various archetypal patterns to emerge and inform the work. Later, I incorporated a more classical understanding, which stressed the importance of the individuation process - a process understood to be guided by the Self, which functions, archetypally, as the centre of all psychic life. I have since incorporated other psychoanalytic approaches that explore early development, object relations and trauma with the result that my observations are my own syncretic form of these various fields. As Andrew Samuels (Samuels 1985) has noted, these approaches are all part of Jungian theory and practice today.

Nikolai's analyst clearly describes their work which, at the time of the vignette, has only been three months. These sessions have an ‘on again/off again’ quality due, in part, to the early nature of the work and the client's overwhelming feelings in the face of the upcoming birth of his son. The analyst notes, ‘Our sessions often turned into separate consultations on different issues …’ underscoring Nikolai's anxious state and difficulty contacting his deeper feelings. These unconscious affects appear to contribute to an inability to make use of his analyst and made me wonder if the geographic distance between them and the COVID-19 pandemic may have inhibited the building of a more facilitating transference. Had analyst and analysand had the luxury of a more stable container where face-to-face meetings could have taken place, I wonder if Nikolai might have been able to feel more connected to hi