---
slug: edinger-transference-c4341cf1
title: "Edinger on Transference"
author: "Edward F. Edinger"
work: "Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective"
section: ""
year: "2002"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - transference
fragment: |
  The transference is more than projection, being something archetypal, unconscious, and metaphorical, and as such represents phenomena and processes. The positive and negative projections only give it their appearance and sign. Because it transcends them, the term transference can legitimately be distinguished from the term projection, and used to designate the successive stages of the individuation process as it occurs in relation to the analyst.... Projections are aids to the "work," they reflect it but are not to be identified with it, and so the transference of the individuation process goes on behind, or one could also say within, them.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Edinger is marking a distinction that psychotherapy routinely collapses. The ordinary clinical understanding of transference treats it as a matter of misdirected feeling — you see your father in the analyst, the analyst holds your hunger for the mother, and the work consists of gradually withdrawing those projections until the other person becomes merely themselves. That is not wrong, but it is partial. What Edinger points to is the process running beneath the projections, using them the way a river uses its banks — shaped by them, visible through them, but not reducible to them.
  
  The individuation process needs a vessel, and the analytical relationship furnishes one. The projections — idealization, rage, longing, dependency — are not the goal, nor are they simply obstacles. They are the medium through which something impersonal moves toward articulation. Strip away every charged feeling about the analyst and you have not arrived at truth; you have simply removed the scaffolding before the structure can bear its own weight. The transference, in Edinger's sense, is how the psyche stages its own drama at a specific moment in a specific life. The projection is the costume. What wears it is harder to name and does not disappear when the costume is finally laid aside.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The preposition Edinger reaches for at the end — "behind, or one could also say within" — is where the real argument lives. He can't settle on one because both are true in different registers: behind suggests depth, a hidden substrate; within suggests immanence, the process woven into the very fabric of what looks like mere projection. What this small hesitation admits is that projection is not an error to be corrected but a medium through which something else moves — the way light is not the window, but needs the window. Hillman would be sympathetic here; for him too, the image is not the thing but its only available body. The practical consequence Edinger draws is quiet but significant: the analyst need not be alarmed by the charged projections landing on them, positive or negative, because those projections are the work's surface, not its substance. What you are entangled in with another person may be carrying more than either of you put there.
parent_id: Edinger_2002_Science_of_the_Soul__par0044
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Edinger writes:

> The transference is more than projection, being something archetypal, unconscious, and metaphorical, and as such represents phenomena and processes. The positive and negative projections only give it their appearance and sign. Because it transcends them, the term transference can legitimately be distinguished from the term projection, and used to designate the successive stages of the individuation process as it occurs in relation to the analyst.... Projections are aids to the "work," they reflect it but are not to be identified with it, and so the transference of the individuation process goes on behind, or one could also say within, them.

— Edward F. Edinger

Edinger is marking a distinction that psychotherapy routinely collapses. The ordinary clinical understanding of transference treats it as a matter of misdirected feeling — you see your father in the analyst, the analyst holds your hunger for the mother, and the work consists of gradually withdrawing those projections until the other person becomes merely themselves. That is not wrong, but it is partial. What Edinger points to is the process running beneath the projections, using them the way a river uses its banks — shaped by them, visible through them, but not reducible to them.

The individuation process needs a vessel, and the analytical relationship furnishes one. The projections — idealization, rage, longing, dependency — are not the goal, nor are they simply obstacles. They are the medium through which something impersonal moves toward articulation. Strip away every charged feeling about the analyst and you have not arrived at truth; you have simply removed the scaffolding before the structure can bear its own weight. The transference, in Edinger's sense, is how the psyche stages its own drama at a specific moment in a specific life. The projection is the costume. What wears it is harder to name and does not disappear when the costume is finally laid aside.

---

Edward F. Edinger · *Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective* · 2002