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After his Break with Freud in 1913 Jung Discarded Many of the “golden rules” of psychoanalysis. Instead of using the couch in order to render himself “invisible,” he had his patients sit in an armchair facing the analyst. He abandoned the basic psychoanalytic rule of free association and tried to facilitate a dialogue in which the patient's problems and “the manifestations of the unconscious” could be discussed. Instead of listening with free-floating attention, he would spontaneously express his ideas about dreams and other material. He did not restrict himself to interpretation, but allowed himself, as the therapist, to come forth with his own emotional reactions.
What are the reasons to justify these modifications? First, they came out of Jung's growing experience of the mutual influence of analyst and analysand. “By no device can the treatment be anything but the product of mutual influence, in which the whole being of the doctor as well as that of his patient plays its part” (Jung, 1929, p. 71). Jung was a pioneer with this insight, which anticipated such contemporary models of therapy as the interactive field, systems analysis, and so forth.
Furthermore, Jung began to look at “all theories of neurosis and methods of treatment as a dubious affair”—arguing that any method of treatment can be determined only “by the nature of the case” (Jung, 1926, p. 113).