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The Psychology of the Transference
The Psychology of the Transference
Die Psychologie der Übertragung (1946), published in English in CW 16 (The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954), is Jung’s most sustained treatment of the analytic relationship. Written when he was seventy-one, it takes the ten woodcuts of the rosarium-philosophorum as its pictorial spine. Jung introduces the work as “an account of the transference phenomena based on the illustrations to the ‘Rosarium philosophorum’” (Jung 1954). Each chapter treats one woodcut in sequence — The Mercurial Fountain, King and Queen, The Naked Truth, Immersion in the Bath, The Conjunction, Death, The Ascent of the Soul, Purification, The Return of the Soul, The New Birth.
The central theoretical contribution is the diagram of “counter-crossing transference relationships,” later called the marriage quaternio: analyst and analysand each bear a conscious relation to the other and an unconscious relation to the contrasexual figure the other constellates. “Wholeness is a combination… the unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You’” (Jung 1954). The work is the foundation for the post-Jungian literature on transference as a mutual and archetypal phenomenon rather than a one-sided projection onto the analyst.
Jung acknowledges the work’s difficulty: “the work, drawing as it does on a series of woodcuts with complicated imagery is not to everyone’s taste and seems from one perspective to be more about the stages of individuation than about transference and countertransference per se” (Wiener 2009). The ambiguity is structural: for Jung, transference is individuation made clinical.