---
slug: samuels-transference-b56ae957
title: "Samuels on Transference"
author: "Andrew Samuels"
work: "Jung and the Post-Jungians"
section: ""
year: "1985"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - transference
fragment: |
  You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.... The patient influences [the analyst] unconsciously.... One of the best known symptoms of this kind is the counter-transference evoked by the transference.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  The passage cuts against every fantasy of the analyst as unmoved mover — the technically skilled professional who reads the patient's material from a safe remove. Jung's insistence that influence flows in both directions is not a therapeutic technique; it is an observation about how psychic contact actually works. If the analyst is sealed off, nothing real happens. The patient's unconscious reads the seal and speaks to it, or falls silent altogether.
  
  What this asks of the analyst is not more empathy in the conventional sense, but a willingness to be disturbed — to notice what the patient's material begins to do inside the analyst's own body, fantasy life, irritability, dreaming. Countertransference is not a contamination to be managed; it is data the analyst cannot generate any other way. The difficulty is that most training instills something closer to the opposite habit: containment as the primary value, the therapist's interiority as a problem to be regulated rather than a medium to be read.
  
  Jung named this mutual susceptibility because he had felt it himself, in the wreckage of his relationship with Freud and in the analysis of patients who changed him in ways no theory had predicted. The influence he describes is not warm attunement. It is closer to contagion — which is not a criticism, only the honest word for what passes between two people when the wall comes down.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The claim worth defending here is the one Jung doesn't bother defending: that susceptibility and influence are the same circuit. He moves quickly, as if it were obvious — you cannot transmit what you have sealed off. But it isn't obvious, and the history of technique is largely a history of people trying to prove the opposite: that the analyst's authority derives precisely from impermeability. What Jung insists, and what Samuels carefully preserves, is that the countertransference is not a contamination to be managed but evidence that the circuit is live. The analyst who feels nothing is not neutral — she has simply gone offline. There is something quietly demanding in this: to remain open to being changed by the person you are trying to help, without losing the thread back to yourself.
parent_id: Samuels_1985_Jung_and_the_Post-Jungians__par0150
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Samuels writes:

> You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.... The patient influences [the analyst] unconsciously.... One of the best known symptoms of this kind is the counter-transference evoked by the transference.

— Andrew Samuels

The passage cuts against every fantasy of the analyst as unmoved mover — the technically skilled professional who reads the patient's material from a safe remove. Jung's insistence that influence flows in both directions is not a therapeutic technique; it is an observation about how psychic contact actually works. If the analyst is sealed off, nothing real happens. The patient's unconscious reads the seal and speaks to it, or falls silent altogether.

What this asks of the analyst is not more empathy in the conventional sense, but a willingness to be disturbed — to notice what the patient's material begins to do inside the analyst's own body, fantasy life, irritability, dreaming. Countertransference is not a contamination to be managed; it is data the analyst cannot generate any other way. The difficulty is that most training instills something closer to the opposite habit: containment as the primary value, the therapist's interiority as a problem to be regulated rather than a medium to be read.

Jung named this mutual susceptibility because he had felt it himself, in the wreckage of his relationship with Freud and in the analysis of patients who changed him in ways no theory had predicted. The influence he describes is not warm attunement. It is closer to contagion — which is not a criticism, only the honest word for what passes between two people when the wall comes down.

---

Andrew Samuels · *Jung and the Post-Jungians* · 1985