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Transference

Transference

Transference, in the Jungian reading, is not merely the patient’s projection of childhood affect onto the analyst. It is a mutual and archetypal phenomenon — the analytic instance of the coniunctio. Jung formalized this in the diagram of “counter-crossing transference relationships,” also called the marriage quaternio: analyst and analysand each relate consciously to the other and unconsciously to the contrasexual figure (anima, animus) the other constellates.

“The point about Jung’s ‘counter-crossing transference relationships’ is that they are both intrapsychic and interpersonal. He takes account not only of the patient’s and the analyst’s relationships with their own unconscious contents but also of the effects they have on one another” (Wiener 2009). The clinical consequence is that “for both to undress” — for both to enter the bath — is structurally necessary if the opus is to proceed.

The archetypal reading was given its pictorial grammar by the rosarium-philosophorum. In The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16, 1946), Jung works through the ten woodcuts in sequence as a picture-by-picture account of what happens between analyst and analysand: the meeting clothed, the undressing, the bath, the conjunction, the death, the ascent and return of the soul, the new birth.

“Individuation has two principal aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship. Neither can exist without the other” (Jung 1954). Transference is where the two aspects meet in clinical reality.

Later analytic traditions — Fordham in London, Jacoby in Zurich, the relational school more broadly — have extended, critiqued, and developmentally inflected Jung’s account, but the Rosarium schema remains the canonical Jungian picture of what is at stake in the analytic pair.

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