Relational turn in depth psychology

The relational turn in depth psychology names a decisive reorientation that gathered force across the second half of the twentieth century: a shift from the vertical axis of the psyche — ego ascending toward Self, consciousness rising out of unconscious depths — to the horizontal axis of the analytic encounter itself. What happens between analyst and analysand, in the charged and often opaque field they share, becomes the primary site of therapeutic action. The shift is not merely technical. It carries a different theory of what the psyche is and where healing occurs.

Jung's own position was, as Wiener (2009) documents, genuinely ambivalent. He preferred the face-to-face setting precisely because it honored the analyst as a real human presence rather than a blank screen, yet that preference also systematically obscured the transference dynamics that a more classical technique would have rendered visible. His use of the term Übertragung — literally, the carrying of something from one place to another — was broad enough to encompass both personal projections and the full symbolic arc of individuation, which meant it could describe almost everything and specify almost nothing. The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16) is the most sustained attempt to think through what actually happens in the analytic dyad, and it does so through the ten woodcuts of the Rosarium Philosophorum: two figures descending into a bath, merging in a state of unconscious identity, dying, and eventually producing something new. The alchemical sequence maps a process Jung calls participation mystique — borrowed from Lévy-Bruhl — in which the boundaries between analyst and patient temporarily dissolve:

The real meaning, therefore, is Goethe's "higher copulation," a union in unconscious identity, which could be compared with the primitive, initial state of chaos, the massa confusa, or rather with the state of participation mystique where heterogeneous factors merge in an unconscious relationship. The coniunctio differs from this not as a mechanism but because it is by nature never an initial state: it is always the product of a process or the goal of endeavour.

The coniunctio as goal is a pneumatic image — union, resolution, the opposites reconciled. What the relational turn interrogates is whether that image of outcome has been doing too much work, whether the aspiration toward symbolic wholeness has been used to bypass the messier, more contingent, more personal reality of what two people are actually doing to each other in the room.

Jacoby (1984) names the structural blind spot directly: the Jungian preference for face-to-face work, grounded in respect for the analyst's personhood, also makes it easier for the analyst's unexamined narcissistic needs to infiltrate the field without detection. The couch renders certain transference dynamics visible precisely because it removes the analyst's face as a constant reality-check; the Jungian chair, by keeping the analyst present as a person, can inadvertently protect the analyst from scrutiny. Jacoby's recasting of transference through Buber's I-It and I-Thou distinction converts a philosophical opposition into a clinical instrument: the quality of the relational mode — whether the analyst is genuinely encountering the patient as a Thou or managing them as an It — determines the therapeutic outcome more than any interpretive content.

Wiener (2009) extends this into a full theory of the transference matrix, drawing on Winnicott's potential space, Ogden's analytic third, and Schwartz-Salant's interactive field to argue that the analytic encounter generates an emergent system that is larger than either participant and irreducible to either's intrapsychic contents alone. The three German verbs Jung used for conscious engagement with the unconscious — geschehen lassen (letting something happen), betrachten (becoming aware), sich auseinandersetzen (confronting and coming to terms) — she repurposes as a description of what the analyst does with countertransference: not suppressing it, not acting it out, but holding it as active imagination directed toward the shared field.

Sedgwick (2001) maps the institutional result: the developmental school within post-Jungian practice, with its emphasis on early object relations, infantile transference, and high-frequency work, has become the dominant clinical current since Jung's death. A fourth wave, oriented toward self psychology and intersubjectivity, has followed. These are not dilutions of Jung but consequences of his own insistence that there is no technique — that the analyst's personality is the method. Once that claim is taken seriously, the relational field becomes unavoidable as the primary object of study.

Hillman (1983) refuses the developmental frame entirely but arrives at a relational conclusion by another route: transference is not a distortion to be dissolved or a developmental residue to be metabolized, but the eros required by the awakening of psychic reality. Imagined against the background of the Eros–Psyche mythologem from Apuleius, the analytic relationship is de-historicized and de-personalized — not made less real, but freed from the literalism of developmental reconstruction.

Archetypal psychology imagines transference against a mythical background — the Eros and Psyche mythologem from Apuleius's Golden Ass — thereby de-historicizing and de-personalizing the phenomenology of love in therapy as well as in any human passion.

The three post-Jungian trajectories — developmental, intersubjective, archetypal — disagree sharply about what the relational field is. But they share the recognition that the vertical axis alone, the ego's ascent toward Self, cannot account for what actually moves in analysis. The relational turn is the collective name for that recognition.

transference — the carrying of unconscious contents from one relational context into the analytic encounter
participation mystique — the state of unconscious identity between analyst and analysand that precedes differentiation
Mario Jacoby — Swiss Jungian analyst who grounded the therapeutic relationship in Buber's I-Thou distinction
Jan Wiener — British developmental Jungian analyst and theorist of the transference matrix

Sources Cited

Jung, C.G., 1954, The Practice of Psychotherapy
Jacoby, Mario, 1984, The Analytic Encounter: Transference and Human Relationship
Wiener, Jan, 2009, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning
Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
Sedgwick, David, 2001, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship