An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship

An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship is a work by David Sedgwick (2001).

Core claims

• Sedgwick’s central provocation is that Jung’s alchemy, mythology, and religious investigations are “private research” — and that the actual clinical legacy worth defending is the radical claim that the therapist’s personality is the method, making countertransference the spine of Jungian psychotherapy rather than symbolic amplification.
• The book redraws the axis of Jungian work from vertical (ego-to-Self) to horizontal (unconscious-to-unconscious between therapist and patient), which effectively relocates individuation from an intrapsychic heroic journey to a relational, intersubjective event — decades before relational psychoanalysis would claim this territory as its own.
• By distinguishing Jungian psychotherapy from both classical Jungian analysis and psychoanalytically-informed Jungian analysis, Sedgwick creates a third clinical position: one that retains Jung’s insistence on mutual transformation but strips away the archetypal inflation that has kept Jungian practice walled off from mainstream psychotherapy.

Related questions

• How does Sedgwick’s demotion of Jung’s alchemical and mythological research to “private research” compare with James Hillman’s elevation of image and myth as the primary therapeutic agents in Re-Visioning Psychology?
• Sedgwick argues that Jung brought psychotherapy the countertransference neurosis rather than the transference neurosis. How does this claim reframe Edward Edinger’s account of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, where the therapeutic action seems to occur entirely within the patient’s intrapsychic structure?
• Sedgwick draws a sharp line between mutual affective involvement and role reversal when discussing Ferenczi. How does Donald Kalsched’s account of the self-care system’s resistance to relational contact in The Inner World of Trauma complicate Sedgwick’s claim that the patient fundamentally seeks “a real presence” in the therapist?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/sedgwick-introduction-jungian-psychotherapy/

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