Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is a work by Marie-Louise von Franz (1993).

Core claims

• Von Franz reconceives active imagination not as a creative technique but as the sole criterion by which an analysand demonstrates genuine autonomy — making it the ethical fulcrum of the entire analytic relationship, not an optional supplement to dream work.
• The book’s treatment of transference dismantles the common Jungian shorthand of “withdrawing projections” by insisting on a four-stage phenomenology (archaic identity, mutual projection, personal relationship, fated togetherness) in which premature interpretation of projection is itself a clinical violation.
• Von Franz’s polemic against group therapy is not conservative nostalgia but a structural argument: the transference is the vehicle of individuation, and any modality that dilutes it sacrifices the only mechanism through which genuine transformation — as opposed to social adjustment — occurs.

Related questions

• How does von Franz’s four-stage phenomenology of transference (archaic identity, mutual projection, personal relationship, fated togetherness) compare to Jung’s alchemical model of transference in The Psychology of the Transference, and where does von Franz depart from her teacher?
• Von Franz insists that active imagination requires ethical purity of intention; Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology argues for honoring the image without moral judgment. Are these positions fundamentally incompatible, or do they address different dangers in the analytic process?
• Von Franz claims that without the numinous, therapy achieves only social adjustment. How does this position relate to Edinger’s argument in Ego and Archetype that the ego-Self axis must be consciously maintained, and does Edinger’s developmental framework soften or sharpen von Franz’s clinical claim?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/von-franz-psychotherapy/

---

This is a Tier 1 stub node, generated from the library catalog. It provides the work’s place in the graph and basic typed edges. A Tier 3 deep recon can enrich it with passage-level concept development, figure engagements, and inter-work edges.