Psychoanalysis

jungian analysis

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘psychoanalysis’ functions less as a settled method than as a contested horizon — simultaneously the tradition from which Jungian analytical psychology emerged and the foil against which it has perpetually defined itself. Jung’s own Collected Works Volume 4 documents the founding ambivalence: he defended Freud’s method in early polemical pieces, then systematically retheorized libido, infantile sexuality, and the causal-reductive standpoint, culminating in his formal distinction between the Viennese school’s retrospective causality and his own prospective, finalistic orientation. Samuels, surveying the post-Jungian landscape, shows how this founding tension fractures into institutional debates: the Developmental School borrows freely from object-relations and Kleinian technique, while the Classical-Symbolic-Synthetic camp resists the very notion of formalized ‘technique,’ insisting analysis is an art. Hillman radicalizes the departure further, arguing that psychoanalytic categories such as ‘sublimation’ distort rather than illuminate psychic events. Sedgwick notes that despite these polemics, Jungian treatment in actual practice has always more closely resembled psychotherapy than the intensive psychoanalytic frame. Carhart-Harris, approaching from neuropsychology, treats the psychoanalytic framework as psychedelics research’s dominant early rationale. What emerges is a picture of ‘psychoanalysis’ as the generative antagonist of depth psychology — indispensable, contested, and never entirely superseded.

In the library 15 passages

As long as we look at life only retrospectively, as is the case in the psychoanalytic writings of the Viennese school, we shall never do justice to these persons [neurotic] and never bring them the longed-for deliverance.

Jung’s letter to Dr. Löy crystallizes his fundamental epistemological objection to Freudian psychoanalysis: its retrospective, causal orientation forecloses the purposive dimension of the psyche that analytical psychology insists upon.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009thesis

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Post-Jungian debates can be seen as occurring within the overall psychotherapeutic milieu; very few Jungian analysts have been unaffected by developments in psychoanalysis.

Samuels establishes that the entire post-Jungian theoretical landscape is shaped by ongoing dialogue with psychoanalysis, making the relationship between the two traditions structurally formative rather than merely historical.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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The second stage Jung referred to as elucidation. This he equated with Freud’s ‘interpretive method’ and he referred in particular to the working out of the transference relationship, involving reductive explanation.

Samuels maps Jung’s four-stage model of the analytical process, situating Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation as a necessary but limited second stage that must be superseded by transformation toward individuation.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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the difference from classical psychoanalysis is intact. The key thing here is not to split hairs about defining Jungian vs Freudian analysis per se, but to note that Jungian treatment has almost always involved a style and frequency close to what is currently known as psychotherapy.

Sedgwick argues that the practical difference between Jungian work and classical psychoanalysis is structural — frequency, frame, and therapeutic ethos — rather than merely theoretical.

Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001thesis

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This cultural process is mistakenly called ‘sublimation’ (another of those words like ‘transference,’ ‘psychodynamics,’ ‘therapeutic eros’ that disturb our perception of psychological events).

Hillman argues that core psychoanalytic vocabulary, including ‘sublimation,’ systematically misrepresents archetypal psychological processes by importing hierarchical and mechanistic metaphors alien to the soul.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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The dominant theoretical and therapeutic approach during the early era of psychedelic research was psychoanalytic. Psychedelics were used therapeutically under the rationale that they work to lower psychological defenses to allow personal conflicts to come to the fore.

Carhart-Harris documents that psychoanalytic theory — specifically its model of defense, repression, and ego — provided the operational rationale for early psychedelic psychotherapy, demonstrating the method’s reach beyond clinical consulting rooms.

Carhart-Harris, Robin, The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs, 2014supporting

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As in psychoanalysis, some form of compromise has been proposed and we would then refer to ‘analytical psychotherapy’ to describe treatment of less than analytical intensity but with analytical methodology and goals.

Samuels traces how debates within psychoanalysis about frequency and intensity directly shape analogous debates in analytical psychology, producing the hybrid category ‘analytical psychotherapy.’

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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there is a considerable divergence of view as to how that experience should be structured. Fierz pointed out the paradox in analysis by which formalised structure serves as the background to a release of elusive and fluid psychic contents.

Samuels identifies the structural paradox at the heart of analytical practice — shared with psychoanalysis — that formal technique must contain and enable precisely those experiences that resist formalization.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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While there are many books on Jungian analysis, there are few on Jungian psychotherapy. Even those books or articles that touch on the Jungian perspective on therapy often wind up being about Jungian analysis.

Sedgwick identifies a systematic conflation in the literature between Jungian psychotherapy and Jungian analysis proper, a confusion that mirrors the broader definitional instability of psychoanalysis as a category.

Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001supporting

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the idea that there could be a ‘technique of analysis’ is, for some Jungians, quite foreign to Jung’s conception of analysis as an art, as defying formulation, and ignoring Jung’s admonitions against the excessive use of theory.

Samuels exposes a persistent tension within analytical psychology between those who import psychoanalytic notions of codifiable technique and those who insist the analytical encounter exceeds any technical formulation.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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these observations have led to more precision about details of the technical procedure of analysis and to a great appreciation and valuation of transference/countertransference phenomena, not only as therapeutic and diagnostic tools, but also as the immediate situational structure in which neurotic behaviour and ideation can be observed.

McCurdy’s assessment, cited by Samuels, shows how psychoanalytic developments in transference-countertransference theory have been absorbed into and sharpened Jungian analytical technique.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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when theory follows scientific models, there are corresponding methods: statistics, questionnaires, measurements and machines for the study of dreams, types, psychosomatics, psychopharmaceutics, and synchronicity. The patient now may become an empirical subject and the clinic a laboratory setting.

Hillman critiques the drift of complex psychology toward natural-science empiricism, arguing it transforms the analytic encounter in ways that converge — problematically — with positivist tendencies latent in psychoanalytic theory.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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Psychoanalysis, I, 14, 19, 28, 52, 54, 64, 178, 182, 183, 164, 192, 201, 202, 203, 207

The extensive index entries for psychoanalysis in Rank’s Trauma of Birth confirm the concept’s centrality to his revisionist metapsychology, even as he stretched the method beyond Freud’s own boundaries.

Rank, Otto, The Trauma of Birth, 1924aside

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The method focuses especially on the relationship between the dream ego and other figures in the dream and the extent of activity of the dream ego.

Roesler’s empirical methodology, developed in explicit dialogue with psychoanalytic dream research traditions, illustrates how contemporary Jungian scholarship positions itself relative to psychoanalytic theory while seeking independent scientific validation.

Roesler, Christian, Jungian Theory of Dreaming and Contemporary Dream Research: Findings from the Research Project Structural Dream Analysis, 2020aside

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On the Criticism of Psychoanalysis… Concerning Psychoanalysis… The Theory of Psychoanalysis

The table of contents for Collected Works Volume 4 documents Jung’s sustained early engagement with psychoanalysis as both a theoretical system to be expounded and a clinical method to be critically revised.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961aside

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