the whole promise of individuation is carried temporarily in projection onto the analyst. In certain cases this issue is of such extreme importance that it takes on the urgency of a life or death situation. That means the ultimate archetypal projections are often activated: God and the devil, two sides of the same phenomenon. Another way of seeing it is that an extreme transference is a psychological version of the clutchings of a drowning person. One has to be very careful when one is the recipient of such extreme projections. Usually the transference is positive at first; if it is initially a negative projection of any size, then the patient will go to somebody else or the whole process will break down. But usually the archetypal transference appears in positive form and the analyst is then granted some of the attributes and prerogatives of deitynot consciously and overtly, but subtly and unconsciously. And it is exceedingly important that the analyst not fall into a passive acceptance of that state of affairs which is easy to do since it's so flattering. It's very gratifying to be so perceived, you know; it's a great balm to one's vanity. But it is exceedingly dangerous to accept the projection of God, because if you accept it, you then take on divine responsibility which you are not able to fulfill; and sooner or later the projection will reverse and you'll be seen as the devil.
— Edward F. Edinger
Edinger is describing something most people who've been in a healing relationship know from the inside, even if they've never had the vocabulary for it: the moment someone else becomes, quietly and overwhelmingly, the figure on whom all hope is staked. That is not pathology to be corrected; it is the soul's most serious business. When the ordinary routes to relief have failed — when the pneumatic strategies, the strategies of desire, the strategies of protection and isolation have all come back empty — the psyche throws its full weight onto another person, asking them to carry what nothing else has been able to carry. The transference Edinger describes is the drowning person's grip not because the patient is irrational but because the longing underneath it is legitimate. Something real is being sought.
The danger Edinger names is not that the analyst feels flattered. The danger is what happens when the flattery is metabolized as truth — when the figure who was supposed to be a provisional vessel for projection starts to believe he is actually what the patient needs him to be. Accepting the projection of God doesn't destroy the patient by cruelty; it destroys them by kindness. The analyst who accepts it will fail, not because he is weak, but because no human being can discharge divine responsibility. The reversal — God becoming devil overnight — is not a betrayal. It is the correction the psyche always intended.
Edward F. Edinger·The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis·1995