--- slug: samuels-transference-8749198a title: "Samuels on Transference" author: "Andrew Samuels" work: "Jung and the Post-Jungians" section: "" year: "1985" tradition: jungian-core themes: - transference fragment: | accept the projection in a wholehearted manner, making no direct attempt to help the patient sort out what belongs to him, what to the analyst and what to neither as well as to both. On the contrary, they will allow themselves to become this image bodily, to 'incarnate' it for the patient, (pp. 156-7) Plaut went on to note that it is not simply a question of timing interpretation of transference phenomena, but 'a totally different attitude to the transferred image' (ibid., p. 157, emphasis added). The analyst who incarnates the image is doing so in response to the transference. The analyst should not state that he is incarnating the image in this way, but when he becomes aware of it the implication is that he must 'be able to recognise the boundaries of his own ego' (ibid.). The skill required by an analyst to let the patient make him what the patient's unconscious insists he be does not necessarily correlate with an intent to amplify. Then the material is, as I suggested earlier, more likely to be conceived of as 'on the table' for consideration by analyst and patient. It follows that those ID practitioners who work like Plaut do not think in terms of an early introduction of 'reality' to the analytical situation; this may be contrasted with Adler's CSS remarks (see p. 195, above). The transference fantasy is the sought after field of work for the ID practitioner. lead_in: "" reflection: | Plaut's idea of incarnation cuts against one of analysis's most persistent self-protective moves: the interpreter who stands slightly outside the field, sorting what belongs to whom, maintaining the clean partitions of a well-run property dispute. That stance is not neutral. It is a form of not-quite-arriving, a way of remaining usable and legible while the patient's unconscious insists on something altogether less comfortable — that the analyst become the image, bodily, without editorial distance. What makes this genuinely difficult is that incarnating the image asks the analyst to surrender the interpretation before it is formed. The classical move — "let us see what this material is doing" — presupposes a shared table with two rational parties seated at it. Plaut is describing something prior to that table, a stage at which the analyst is already the furniture. The skill, as Samuels reads it, is not interpretive sophistication but ego-boundary recognition: knowing where you end precisely because you have permitted the patient's unconscious to begin inside you. That is not passivity. Nor is it merger. It is a form of disciplined permeability that the more intellectually tidy schools of analysis tend to find scandalous — because it admits that the analyst's coherence is temporarily the patient's to requisition, and that this may be exactly what the work requires. reflection_v0_3: | The word "incarnate" is doing the decisive work here, and it is not chosen casually. To interpret a transference image is to remain outside it, handing it back labeled; to incarnate it is to become, for a time, the thing the patient's unconscious has already decided you are. Plaut's insistence that this requires "recognising the boundaries of one's own ego" is the passage's quiet paradox: the analyst must be permeable enough to be made into the image and anchored enough not to disappear into it. Hillman might read this as a vindication of soul's primacy over technique — the image precedes and shapes the clinical encounter rather than being material to be processed by it. What follows from incarnation is a different geometry of the session: not analyst-and-patient examining something together across a table, but two people inside a field neither fully controls. The question worth sitting with is whether you can truly enter that field and still find your way back to yourself. parent_id: Samuels_1985_Jung_and_the_Post-Jungians__par0157 source: oracle-v3-retrieve generated: 2026-04-17 regenerated: 2026-04-18 prompt_version: v2.7 status: draft --- Samuels writes: > accept the projection in a wholehearted manner, making no direct attempt to help the patient sort out what belongs to him, what to the analyst and what to neither as well as to both. On the contrary, they will allow themselves to become this image bodily, to 'incarnate' it for the patient, (pp. 156-7) Plaut went on to note that it is not simply a question of timing interpretation of transference phenomena, but 'a totally different attitude to the transferred image' (ibid., p. 157, emphasis added). The analyst who incarnates the image is doing so in response to the transference. The analyst should not state that he is incarnating the image in this way, but when he becomes aware of it the implication is that he must 'be able to recognise the boundaries of his own ego' (ibid.). The skill required by an analyst to let the patient make him what the patient's unconscious insists he be does not necessarily correlate with an intent to amplify. Then the material is, as I suggested earlier, more likely to be conceived of as 'on the table' for consideration by analyst and patient. It follows that those ID practitioners who work like Plaut do not think in terms of an early introduction of 'reality' to the analytical situation; this may be contrasted with Adler's CSS remarks (see p. 195, above). The transference fantasy is the sought after field of work for the ID practitioner. — Andrew Samuels Plaut's idea of incarnation cuts against one of analysis's most persistent self-protective moves: the interpreter who stands slightly outside the field, sorting what belongs to whom, maintaining the clean partitions of a well-run property dispute. That stance is not neutral. It is a form of not-quite-arriving, a way of remaining usable and legible while the patient's unconscious insists on something altogether less comfortable — that the analyst become the image, bodily, without editorial distance. What makes this genuinely difficult is that incarnating the image asks the analyst to surrender the interpretation before it is formed. The classical move — "let us see what this material is doing" — presupposes a shared table with two rational parties seated at it. Plaut is describing something prior to that table, a stage at which the analyst is already the furniture. The skill, as Samuels reads it, is not interpretive sophistication but ego-boundary recognition: knowing where you end precisely because you have permitted the patient's unconscious to begin inside you. That is not passivity. Nor is it merger. It is a form of disciplined permeability that the more intellectually tidy schools of analysis tend to find scandalous — because it admits that the analyst's coherence is temporarily the patient's to requisition, and that this may be exactly what the work requires. --- Andrew Samuels · *Jung and the Post-Jungians* · 1985