Jung's Contribution to Psychoanalytic Thought

Jung's most significant clinical contributions to analytic practice are:

1. His emphasis on the primacy of affect as the central organizing principle of psychic life—instead of the drives—and how this leads to an understanding of the psyche's inherent dissociability.

2. His insistence that psychoanalysis was best conducted in a “bipersonal field” in which both partners sit face-to-face and mutually influence the result.

3. His understanding of dreams and the symbolic expressions of fantasy life as images that give form to unconscious affects and hence are agents of evolving consciousness, not “compromise formations.” This led Jung to use various nonverbal techniques within the analytic situation, including drawing, painting, and active imagination.

4. His structural model (archetypes) of the psyche, which includes a “collective” or “psychoid” layer in which events occur that are not just psychological but psysical as well (echoing recent discoveries in both psychosomatics and atomic physics). This “magical” or “mystical” realm is the basis for religious experience and for synchronicity and other noncausal connective events otherwise known as “transgressive” or “paranormal.” Many patients have religious or mystical experiences when this layer

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   is stimulated (e.g., in the psychotic-like transferences, known in analytical psychology as archetypal transferences). To be familiar with this layer and its phenomenology is enormously helpful in supporting certain patients through a phase of deep healing.

The Centrality of Affects

The centrality of affects has many important clinical implications, especially for ongoing work with a patient's dreams and fantasy life. In describing his psychology, Jung (1907) declared that “the essential basis of our personality is affectivity” (p. 38). For Jung, affects arise in interpersonal relations and organize the unconscious psyche—they structure it. Some of these structures are highly pathological. For exam