---
slug: jung-transference-de3a1abd
title: "Jung on Transference"
author: "C. G. Jung"
work: "Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies"
section: ""
year: "1902"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - transference
fragment: |
  The psychological process of transference-whether negative or positive-consists in a "libidinal investment" of the personal-ity of the analyst, that is to say he stands for an emotional value. (As you know, by libido I mean very much what the ancients meant by the cosmogonic principle of Eros, or in modern lan-guage, "'psychic energy.) The patient is bound to the analyst by ties of affection or resistance and cannot help following and imitating his psychic attitude. By this means he feels his way along (empathy). And with the best will in the world and for all his technical skill the analyst cannot prevent it, for empathy works surely and instinctively in spite of conscious judgment, be it never so strong. If the analyst himself is neurotic and in-sufficiently adapted to the demands of life or of his own per-sonality, the patient will copy this defect and reflect it in his own attitudes: with what results you can imagine, Accordingly I cannot regard the transference merely as a projection of infantile-erotic fantasies. No doubt that is what it is from one standpoint, but I also see in it, as I said in an earlier letter, a process of empathy and adaptation. From this stand-point, the infantile-erotic fantasies, in spite of their undeniable reality, appear rather as a means of comparison or as analogical images for something not yet understood than as independent wishes. This seems to me the real reason why they are uncon-scious. The patient, not knowing the right attitude, tries to grasp at the right relationship to the analyst by way of com-parison and analogy with his infantile experiences.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Jung is wrestling here with what transference actually is — not the infantile wish dressed up as adult feeling, but something more like a soul reaching for the right shape of relationship and having nothing to borrow from except old templates. The erotic and infantile images that Freud would have taken as the content turn out, on Jung's reading, to be scaffolding: the patient is not trying to re-enact the past so much as trying to grasp an unknown present through the only analogy available. That reframing is subtle but decisive. It moves the center of gravity from pathology to search.
  
  What the passage opens underneath is the mirror problem: the analyst's own adaptation is not background — it is the transmission medium. Libido, in the cosmogonic sense Jung is reaching for, invests the other person and then moves through them. An insufficiently adapted analyst does not just fail the patient technically; the patient's empathic body reads the defect and incorporates it, because empathy, as Jung insists, runs below conscious correction. The analyst cannot argue himself out of this by technique. The only counter is the analyst's own genuinely worked interiority — not as credential, but as the substance actually being transmitted, whether or not either party knows it.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The claim worth pressing on is the one Jung slips past almost without argument: that infantile-erotic fantasies in the transference are not primary wishes but analogical images — comparisons the unconscious reaches for when it cannot yet name what it is actually trying to find. This is a quiet reversal of Freud, and Jung knows it. Where Freud reads the transference backward into infantile desire, Jung reads it forward: the patient is groping toward a right relationship, and the erotic imagery is the nearest available map for territory that has no proper name yet. Hillman would extend this further, arguing that all psychological images function this way — as metaphors the soul generates in the absence of literal understanding. What stays with me is the word "grasp." The patient grasps at the analyst the way a hand in the dark reaches for a familiar shape — not to stay there, but to orient.
parent_id: Jung_1902_Collected_Works_Volume_1__par0090
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Jung writes:

> The psychological process of transference-whether negative or positive-consists in a "libidinal investment" of the personal-ity of the analyst, that is to say he stands for an emotional value. (As you know, by libido I mean very much what the ancients meant by the cosmogonic principle of Eros, or in modern lan-guage, "'psychic energy.) The patient is bound to the analyst by ties of affection or resistance and cannot help following and imitating his psychic attitude. By this means he feels his way along (empathy). And with the best will in the world and for all his technical skill the analyst cannot prevent it, for empathy works surely and instinctively in spite of conscious judgment, be it never so strong. If the analyst himself is neurotic and in-sufficiently adapted to the demands of life or of his own per-sonality, the patient will copy this defect and reflect it in his own attitudes: with what results you can imagine, Accordingly I cannot regard the transference merely as a projection of infantile-erotic fantasies. No doubt that is what it is from one standpoint, but I also see in it, as I said in an earlier letter, a process of empathy and adaptation. From this stand-point, the infantile-erotic fantasies, in spite of their undeniable reality, appear rather as a means of comparison or as analogical images for something not yet understood than as independent wishes. This seems to me the real reason why they are uncon-scious. The patient, not knowing the right attitude, tries to grasp at the right relationship to the analyst by way of com-parison and analogy with his infantile experiences.

— C. G. Jung

Jung is wrestling here with what transference actually is — not the infantile wish dressed up as adult feeling, but something more like a soul reaching for the right shape of relationship and having nothing to borrow from except old templates. The erotic and infantile images that Freud would have taken as the content turn out, on Jung's reading, to be scaffolding: the patient is not trying to re-enact the past so much as trying to grasp an unknown present through the only analogy available. That reframing is subtle but decisive. It moves the center of gravity from pathology to search.

What the passage opens underneath is the mirror problem: the analyst's own adaptation is not background — it is the transmission medium. Libido, in the cosmogonic sense Jung is reaching for, invests the other person and then moves through them. An insufficiently adapted analyst does not just fail the patient technically; the patient's empathic body reads the defect and incorporates it, because empathy, as Jung insists, runs below conscious correction. The analyst cannot argue himself out of this by technique. The only counter is the analyst's own genuinely worked interiority — not as credential, but as the substance actually being transmitted, whether or not either party knows it.

---

C. G. Jung · *Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies* · 1902