The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning

The Distinction Between Working “In” and Working “With” the Transference Is Wiener’s Diagnostic Instrument for the Entire Jungian Tradition

Wiener frames her argument around a deceptively simple grammatical shift: analysts are always working in the transference—this is a neuroscientific and developmental fact, not an interpretive choice—but deciding when and how to work with it is where clinical art, theory, and ideology collide. This distinction is the book’s spine. It allows Wiener to map the fault lines within analytical psychology without reducing them to tribal labels. The “classical” Jungian who trusts the self’s autonomous symbol-making capacity and the “developmental” Jungian influenced by Fordham and Klein who foregrounds here-and-now interpretation are not simply disagreeing about technique; they hold incompatible epistemologies of the unconscious. Wiener names this directly: the Kleinian total-situation model, so influential at the Society of Analytical Psychology where she trained, presupposes that infantile unconscious fantasy is the bedrock of all psychic life, while the classical Jungian orientation trusts that archetypal energy can irrupt as genuinely new content, not reducible to early object relations. She refuses to choose. Instead, the “in” versus “with” distinction becomes a clinical compass: in acknowledges the irreducible intersubjectivity of the field; with demands that the analyst assess the patient’s developmental level before deciding how to interpret. The echo of David Sedgwick’s insistence—in Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy—that countertransference is “not so much used as discovered and realized” is explicit. Wiener quotes Sedgwick’s river metaphor approvingly, but she pushes further: discovery without disciplined appraisal becomes acting out.

Jung’s Rosarium Is Beautiful but Clinically Insufficient—The Transference Matrix Corrects Its Idealized Linearity

Wiener’s most daring move is her respectful dismantling of Jung’s Psychology of the Transference. She acknowledges that the Rosarium Philosophorum woodcuts capture something essential about the mutual “undressing” required of analyst and patient, and she honors Jung’s own humility—his admission that the alchemical model was an experiment and that “it would be possible to set up various other working models of the transference.” She then takes him at his word. Her critique is precise: the Rosarium stages are “overdetermined and prone to idealization”; patients do not move linearly through conjunction, death, and rebirth but oscillate, regress, and get stuck for years. More damningly, Jung’s broad archetypal strokes offer little guidance for the clinician facing a patient who cannot symbolize at all. Here Wiener draws on Fordham’s developmental model of deintegration and reintegration—a self that reaches out for relational experience from the start—and on Bovensiepen’s relational reframing of the symbolic attitude. The result is the “transference matrix,” a term evoking both womb and geological mold: a cocreated, autonomous field with its own structure and energy, unique to each analytic dyad. This is not simply a new label. The matrix concept repositions the transference as an open, emergent system rather than a closed alchemical vessel, making room for both infantile regression and prospective archetypal imagery without hierarchically ranking them. It is Wiener’s answer to the stalemate that has haunted post-Jungian clinical debate since Fordham’s 1954 address to the SAP.

Countertransference as Active Imagination Reframes the Analyst’s Subjectivity as a Creative—Not Merely Reactive—Process

Chapter three performs an integration that is arguably the book’s most original theoretical contribution. Wiener connects Jung’s concept of active imagination—beginning, as Jung insisted, with a “disturbing experience”—to the analyst’s processing of countertransference. The sequence she describes is phenomenologically exact: first a receptive letting-go, akin to reverie or meditation, in which the analyst remains porous to the patient’s projections; then an active, ego-oriented engagement with what has been received, appraising its purpose and meaning. This dual movement mirrors the structure of active imagination itself, where one first allows unconscious imagery to arise and then dialogues with it. Wiener enriches this parallel through the British philosopher Mary Warnock’s distinction between imagination as a mental state and imagination as a mental function, and through Patrick Trevor-Roper’s work on artists with impaired vision—a metaphor for the analyst’s countertransference “blind spots.” Her clinical vignette of Sophie—in which Wiener falls asleep during a session, is alerted by the patient, and subsequently discovers that the lapse enacted the patient’s experience of an anxious, inattentive mother—is not offered as confession but as evidence. The enactment was a “joint creation,” initially illusory but ultimately syntonic, converted into meaning only because Wiener could recover the “other room” of her mind. This reframes countertransference from a contaminant (Freud’s early view) or even a useful signal (the Heimann position) into something closer to co-created art. Warren Colman’s distinction between the imaginative (leading to symbolization) and the imaginary (clinging to fantasy) provides the necessary caveat: not all countertransference reverie is productive.

Neuroscience Validates Jungian Metapsychology—But Only If Jungians Accept a Relational Turn

Wiener systematically marshals findings from Schore, Pally, Beebe and Lachmann, and Stern to argue that subjectivity is “emergent and interactive”—that right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere affective communication between patient and analyst is the biological substrate of transference. Jung’s emphasis on mutual transformation and his concept of the transcendent function, she contends, map remarkably well onto Stern’s “moments of meeting” and the broader intersubjective paradigm. But Wiener is not triumphalist. The neuroscience validates Jungian intuitions while simultaneously exposing Jung’s methodological deficit: he never developed the clinical technique to track, moment by moment, the affective states his theory predicted. Fordham began that work; Wiener continues it. Her insistence that analysts must learn to “fine-tune their subjective experiences” and “internalize a capacity to self-regulate” is a training prescription as much as a theoretical claim.

This book matters today because it occupies a position no other single text does: it stands at the crossroads of Jungian archetypal theory, Kleinian technique, Fordhamian developmental thinking, and contemporary neuroscience, and it provides a working clinical model—the transference matrix—that holds all four in productive tension. For any clinician who senses that the alchemical metaphors of classical Jungian work are beautiful but insufficient for the patient sitting across from them, and who simultaneously suspects that relentless here-and-now transference interpretation flattens the psyche’s prospective dimension, Wiener offers not a compromise but a genuinely new framework. It is the book that bridges the gap between what Jung intuited and what the consulting room demands.