Transference-Countertransference

Transference-countertransference is the paired clinical category at the center of the developmental-school‘s theoretical priorities, as named by Samuels in Jung and the Post-Jungians. Where Freud’s transference named the patient’s projection of early figures onto the analyst, and where countertransference was first conceived as the analyst’s unresolved response, the post-Jungian developmental tradition (Fordham, Lambert, Plaut, Jacoby) re-reads the dyad as a bidirectional intersubjective field in which archetypal material is enacted and worked through.

The paired term — not simply transference — marks the developmental school’s position that the analyst’s response is itself clinical material. See mundus-imaginalis-two-person for the archetypal-developmental synthesis.

Relationships

• transference
• developmental-school
• andrew-samuels