Psychology of the Transference

The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16, 1946) is Jung’s extended commentary on the Rosarium Philosophorum — the sixteenth-century alchemical emblem sequence of the royal marriage — read as a phenomenology of the transference field in analytic practice. Jung takes the ten Rosarium woodcuts (the bath, the coniunctio, the death, the ascent of the soul, the return, the rebis) as an archetypal grammar for what occurs between analyst and analysand when the unconscious contents constellate in the shared field. The work is Jung’s most sustained treatment of the erotic and numinous dimensions of therapeutic relationship, and the authoritative source for his doctrine that the transference is a coniunctio Solis et Lunae — the psychological integration of unconscious content through its meeting with consciousness. The text grounds subsequent Jungian treatments of the analytic third, the interactive field (Schwartz-Salant), and the archetypal structure of clinical encounter. Key concepts articulated here: the massa confusa of the opening stages, the sacred marriage in aqua, the nigredo that follows union, the multiplicatio as terminal increase. Jung’s canonical gloss of the process: “Becoming conscious of an unconscious content amounts to its integration in the conscious psyche and is therefore a coniunctio Solis et Lunae.”

Psychology of the Transference

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