The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects

The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects is a work by C.G. Jung (1954).

Core claims

• Jung’s “Psychology of the Transference” does not merely describe a clinical phenomenon but reframes the analytic relationship as an alchemical opus — a mutual transformation in which the analyst’s psyche is as much at stake as the patient’s, making the therapeutic container itself the object of individuation.
• The volume’s earlier essays systematically dismantle the fantasy that psychotherapy is a technique applied by a healthy subject to a sick object, replacing it with a dialectical model in which the analyst’s unconscious participation is not a contaminant but the active ingredient.
• By routing the transference through the Rosarium philosophorum, Jung embeds clinical psychology within a symbolic tradition stretching from Gnostic kinship mysteries through Renaissance alchemy, asserting that the modern consulting room enacts an archetypal process that predates and exceeds any single theoretical school.

Related questions

• How does Jung’s claim in Volume 16 that the analyst is chemically altered by the transference compare to Donald Kalsched’s argument in The Inner World of Trauma that the Self’s archetypal defenses can co-opt the therapeutic relationship?
• Jung insists that the transference enacts an archetypal coniunctio rather than a repetition of infantile object relations. How does this position engage with or undermine Edward Edinger’s developmental model of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype?
• In what ways does Jung’s critique of reductive sexual interpretation in “The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis” prefigure James Hillman’s rejection of monotheistic psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology, and where do their projects fundamentally diverge?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/jung-practice-psychotherapy-essays/

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