Post-Jungian Dialogues

Jung's Insistence that the Analyst be “IN” the Treatment Just as much as the patient is was a clinical turning point. Although there is now overwhelming evidence that, in many respects, this could also be said to be Freud's position in practice, I think it would be true to say that the Freudian tradition over the years has not been so interactively or relationally based. Once the analyst is in the treatment on an open, regular, even official basis, it is possible to begin to theorize—again, openly, regularly, and officially—about this phenomenon. Hence, Jungian analysis has been for a long time a rather good laboratory in which the practitioner's role has been scrutinized more throughly than in other schools of depth-psychological therapy.

But of course analytical therapy is more than an interactional or relational process. Each participant has inside a ceaseless conscious-unconscious dynamic, which means that there are at least three important relations to consider—the interactive one and the conscious-unconscious dynamics of the two participants. Moreover, all of this is going on simultaneously. (There is a famous diagram, famous at least in Jungian and post-Jungian circles, that tries to give the flavor of this simultaneity. In a moment, I present my own particular version of this diagram.)

First I want to emphasize another of Jung's clinical principles, which is that the analyst is almost always a “wounded healer.” Here, I believe there is more at stake than the conventional view that personal neuroses drive one to become a shrink. I recognize, of course, that guilt and reparation, personal history as a parental child (one who