Thinking about what lies beyond childhood when it comes to transference-countertransference, Jung was perhaps the ®rst therapist to understand that what the client sees and experiences in the therapist, whether as a positive or negative feature, is connected, via projection, with the client's own self or personality just as it is, as a whole, rather than in its infantile aspects. Hence, an admiring or idealising (in a positive way) transference projection will lead to the client appearing to discover in the therapist aspects of personality ± wisdom, tolerance, sensuality, imagination, intellect ± that do not belong to, or do not only belong to, the therapist. Here, Freud's `modesty' is also needed. Post-Freudian theorising about the self and self psychology (e.g., Kohut 1971) has taught us that idealisations are not only negative and defensive features of psychic life. Idealisations are ways in which someone discovers something about him or herself but in a projected form, so that another person carries these qualities. The projection has been necessary because the client is not yet ready to own their own strength and beauty. Maybe this is because they are caught in self-sabotage, or maybe they have had experiences in life that either contradict their more positive features, or make it impossible to claim them.
— Renos K. Papadopoulos
Jung's intervention here is quiet but decisive: he refuses to reduce what happens between two people in a room to a replay of the nursery. When a client sees wisdom or beauty in a therapist, something real is being perceived — not invented, not merely defended against. The perception is accurate as far as it goes; it is only the address that is wrong. The quality belongs to the one who sees it, carried for now by the one who is seen.
Papadopoulos invokes Kohut alongside Jung, and the pairing is right in spirit even if the genealogies diverge: neither thinker will let idealization be only pathology. The soul reaches toward its own unlived substance through projection because direct ownership is not yet survivable. What blocks that ownership is worth sitting with: sometimes it is active self-sabotage, the internal logic that revokes any claim to strength before it can be made. Sometimes it is history — experiences so consistently contradicting the positive self-image that assertion of it feels like a lie. Either way, the projected admiration is not error to be corrected. It is a form of knowing, distanced enough to be bearable, waiting for the moment the knower can close the distance and stand inside what they have been seeing all along.
Renos K. Papadopoulos·The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications·2006