Transference as Ego-Self Axis Repair

In Edinger’s clinical phenomenology, the transference is not a neurotic distortion to be dissolved but a structural phenomenon to be honored. The analytic encounter is the site at which a damaged ego-Self axis can be repaired. “The source of this transference seems to be the projection of the Self, especially in its function as the organ of acceptance” (Edinger 1972). The therapist, momentarily, becomes the carrier of what the patient cannot yet know belongs to her own depths.

The process has a recognizable phenomenology. “The therapist as a person becomes the center of the patient’s life and thoughts. The therapy sessions become the central points of the week. A center of meaning and order has appeared where previously there was chaos and despair” (Edinger 1972). These signs — the centripetal pull of the therapeutic frame, the relief from alienated meaninglessness, the partial return of ego-Self contact — are not symptoms of pathological dependence but markers that a repair is underway. “These phenomena indicate that a repair of the ego-Self axis is occurring” (Edinger 1972).

The movement is not unidirectional. The reactivation of latent ego-Self identity generates fresh inflations — “possessive expectations, etc. will emerge which evoke further rejection from therapist or environment. Once again the ego-Self axis will be damaged producing a condition of relative alienation” (Edinger 1972). The spiral is the form of the work. Ideal analytic process is a progressive dissolution of ego-Self identity gentle enough to leave the axis intact; actual analytic process is uneven, interrupted, and requires that inflations and alienations alternate until the ego can carry the axis without projective support.

This is Edinger’s decisive translation of Jung’s psychology of religion into clinical anthropology. The analyst is not a healer in the medical sense but a provisional site for the religious function — a carrier whose displacement into the patient’s own interior life is the treatment’s telos.

Relationships

Primary sources

edinger-ego-and-archetype (Edinger 1972, pp. 40–42)