The emotions of patients are always slightly contagious, and they are very contagious when the contents which the patient projects into the analyst are identical with the analyst's own un-conscious contents. Then they both fall into the same dark hole of unconsciousness, and get into the condition of participation. This is the phenomenon which Freud has described as counter-transference. It consists of mutual projecting into each other and being fastened together by mutual unconsciousness. Participa-tion, as I have told you, is a characteristic of primitive psychol-ogy, that is, of a psychological level where there is no conscious discrimination between subject and object. Mutual uncon-sciousness is of course most confusing both to the analyst and to the patient; all orientation is lost, and the end of such an analy-sis is disaster. 323 Even analysts are not absolutely perfect, and it can happen that they are occasionally unconscious in certain respects. Therefore long ago I stipulated that analysts ought to be ana-lysed themselves; they should have a father confessor or a mother confessor. Even the Pope, for all his infallibility, has to 140 LECTURE V confess regularly, and not to a monsignor or a cardinal but to an ordinary priest. If the analyst does not keep in touch with his unconscious objectively, there is no guarantee whatever that the patient will not fall into the unconscious of the analyst. You probably all know certain patients who possess a diabolical cunning in finding out the weak spot, the vulnerable place in the analyst's psyche. To that spot they seek to attach the projections of their own unconscious. One usually says that it is a character-istic of women, but that is not true, men do just the same. They always find out this vulnerable spot in the analyst, and he can be sure that, whenever something gets into him, it will be exactly in that place where he is without defence. That is the place where he is unconscious himself and where he is apt to make exactly the same projections as the patient. Then the condition of participation happens, or, more strictly speaking, a condition of personal contamination through mutual unconsciousness. 324 One has, of course, all sorts of ideas about transference, and we are all somewhat prejudiced by the definition which Freud has given; one is inclined to think that it is always a matter of erotic transference. But my experience has not confirmed the the-ory that it is erotic contents or infantile things exclusively that are projected. According to my experience, anything can be a mat-ter for projection, and the erotic transference is just one of the many possible forms of transference. There are many other con-tents in the human unconscious which are also of a highly emo-tional nature, and they can project themselves just as well as sexuality. All activated contents of the unconscious have the tendency to appear in projection. It is even the rule that an un-conscious content which is constellated shows itself first as a pro-jection.
— C.G. Jung
Jung's insistence that analysts be analysed themselves is not an institutional hygiene measure — it is a structural claim about what happens when the unconscious is not continuously worked. The "dark hole" he describes is not metaphor. When a patient's projected content finds the analyst's own unmapped territory, the two systems lock together in what Jung, borrowing from Lévy-Bruhl, calls participation — a condition prior to the subject-object distinction that Western psychology worked so hard to establish. All that developmental achievement collapses in the shared unconsciousness of two people who cannot tell whose feeling is whose.
What this cuts against is any picture of the analyst as a sufficiently trained, therefore sufficiently defended, container. The vulnerable spot is precisely where training has not yet reached — which is to say, where the analyst's own logic of not-suffering is still operating unchecked. That spot will be found. Jung does not soften this: the patient, with what he calls diabolical cunning, locates it unerringly. The word "diabolical" is worth holding — *dia-ballein*, to throw across, to divide. The projection thrown across the gap lands where the analyst is already divided from himself. The remedy Jung names is not more technique but continued descent: the analyst confessing to a confessor, keeping contact with the unconscious as an ongoing obligation rather than a credential earned once and thereafter owned.
C.G. Jung·Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life·1976