Interactional Dialectic

Interactional dialectic (ID) is Michael Fordham’s term, adopted by Samuels as the governing concept of the Developmental School’s clinical method. Fordham defines it as the analyst’s total experiential response to the patient, of which countertransference is one component:

I would call the rest part of the interactional dialectic. (Fordham 1979a, p. 208, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 151)

ID extends countertransference beyond the analyst’s projections and internal reactions into the full texture of what passes between two persons in the consulting room — thought, affect, bodily sensation, image, and behaviour. Samuels positions ID as the clinical hallmark that distinguishes the Developmental School from the Classical and Archetypal Schools, both of which, “form the other camp” on method (Samuels 1985, p. 156).

The importance of ID for the post-Jungian field is that it provides the conceptual bridge by which the Developmental School’s “microscopic” attention to the analytic encounter can be reconciled with the Archetypal School’s imaginal ontology. If the full interactional field — not only verbal content but the analyst’s images, bodily states, and moods — is regarded as psychic reality, then ID and Hillman’s “all events as psychic realities” converge. This convergence is precisely what Samuels names the [[mundus-imaginalis-two-person|two-person mundus imaginalis]] (Samuels 1985, p. 213): ID is the Developmental-School substrate on which the imaginal reading is built.

Relationships

• transference
• mundus-imaginalis-two-person
• developmental-school
• archetypal-school

Primary sources

• samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985, pp. 151, 156, 213)