Jung thought that transference was an entirely natural occurrence in any relationship, and so it also happens often though not always during analysis. It must therefore have not only a cause but also a purpose. He became interested in the question of what meaning the transference might have. Second, Freud believed that transference was a repetition of repressed childhood experiences. This would mean that only material from the personal life-history, the personal unconscious, would be involved in it. But in such a deep, frequently occurring and important phenomenon as transference, one would expect that archetypal contents from the collective unconscious would also come into play. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928), Jung describes a case where the dreams of a patient who had an intense transference to Jung showed clearly that unconsciously the analyst meant god, a spiritual, divine being, for her. Jung saw this as a projection of the Self the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche onto the analyst. The patient was tied to and dependent on the analyst as long as she had not realized the projected content in herself, that is, her own center. 21 I think also of a case of mine. The patient came to the analytic hour in an angry mood because the previous week things went wrong for him: a girl whom he seemed to love left Page 19 him. He was angry with me, his analyst, because he felt that I denied him the pleasure of having and loving a girl, and that therefore fate was bad to him. On the other hand, of course, he knew that I had nothing to do directly with the breaking of his relationship with the girl. All the same, the irrational idea had taken hold of him that I should have intervened in the form of Venus or at least her son Eros and shot some love-arrows at the girl at the last moment. The patient did not let this fantasy come to consciousness at first because of its absurdity, but felt only intense anger. He knew that I had nothing to do with this break, that I was only trying, together with him, to find out why girls always left him after a certain time. Nevertheless, he got in a rage about his fate, and took it out on me; he quarreled with me as one quarrels with a god. At this period the patient was so dependent on me that he always wanted advice for everything, or at least a later absolution once he had done something. There was more in this transference than just an ordinary father-projection, for unconsciously he bestowed superhuman power on me. He also thought that I knew the outcome of everything and was cruel because I did not tell him for it was clear to him that if I was the master of his fate, I must already know everything in advance. This is only one example to show how archetypal contents may be activated in a transference situation.
— Mario Jacoby
Jacoby's patient doesn't simply want advice. He wants what advice cannot give: immunity from loss. He wants the analyst to have intervened as Venus, or at minimum her son with the arrows, which is to say he wants the analyst to be the guarantor of love returning — to be the one who could have prevented the suffering and simply chose not to. The rage follows from that logic with perfect coherence. If you are god and you withheld, then you are cruel. The irrationality is not a regression or a muddle; it is the soul's precision.
What the archetypal transference reveals is how completely the longing — *de-sidera*, from the stars, literally the ache of something volatilized and unrecovered — can reorganize a relationship. The analyst becomes the site where the patient deposits the fantasy that someone, somewhere, holds the thing he lacks and could release it. The projection onto the Self, or onto the divine figure, is not pathology asking to be corrected. It is the disclosure of how much is riding on the equation: *when I am loved enough, the suffering will stop*. Analysis becomes interesting precisely at the moment that equation begins to fail — not when it is interpreted away, but when the patient feels the failure from inside, still raging at the god who won't intervene.
Mario Jacoby·The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship·1984