Mutual Unconscious Couple

The mutual unconscious couple — or, in Stein‘s notation after Jung’s Rosarium diagram, the a’–b’ couple — is the subterranean dyad that constellates beneath any long analytic relationship. Where the surface analysis concerns the conscious transference of patient onto analyst and the analyst’s reflective countertransference in reply, there is another, deeper dimension: the relationship between the two unconscious players whose conscious personalities are also in the room.

Stein locates this contribution in carl-jung‘s essay on the psychology of the transference and its reading of the Rosarium Philosophorum. “What had not been recognized by Freud and later was much emphasized by Jung, is another kind of countertransference-transference relation, based upon the relationship between the two unconscious players in the analytic interaction (the a’ to b’ couple). Since Jung formulated his contribution, this relationship has become the center of much interest and attention in analytical psychology” (Stein 1998, Transformation). The a’–b’ relation is “an aspect of the relationship that is experienced long before it is, or even can be, analyzed — if indeed it ever is made fully conscious.”

Over the course of long clinical work, the a’–b’ couple does not merely operate but produces. What it produces Stein names the rebis — after the hermaphroditic figure of the Rosarium — a common image that binds the two participants: “the source of the intuitive foreknowledge which allows one to anticipate the words and thoughts of the other, the psychological factor which sends one of them dreams which pertain to the other as well, the unconscious link connecting the couple’s timing even when they are far apart. The Rebis is bound by neither time nor space. And it survives the absence or even the death of a partner, maintaining the relationship beyond the seemingly final limit of the grave.” The concept extends beyond the consulting room to marriage, to religious community, to any dyad or group that persists long enough for the unconscious to knit itself into a shared image.

The concept’s load-bearing work is to translate Jung’s alchemical coniunctio — historically read as a metaphor — into a clinically specifiable structure of long-term analytic relationship.

Relationships

• murray-stein
• carl-jung
• transference
• rebis
• coniunctio
• rosarium-philosophorum
• psychology-of-the-transference

Primary sources

• stein-transformation-emergence-self (Stein 1998)
• jungs-map-of-the-soul (Stein 1998)