The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning

The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning is a work by Jan Wiener (2009).

Core claims

• Wiener’s central contribution is not a theory of transference but a diagnostic distinction—working “in” versus working “with” the transference—that exposes how clinical technique silently encodes competing assumptions about the unconscious inherited from both Jung and Klein.
• The “transference matrix” is offered not as a replacement for Jung’s Rosarium model but as a correction to its linearity, reframing the analytic field as an autonomous, emergent system with biological roots rather than a staged alchemical sequence prone to idealization.
• By integrating Stern’s “implicit relational knowing” with Jung’s transcendent function, Wiener provides the most convincing contemporary argument that Jungian metapsychology anticipated—and can absorb—the findings of affective neuroscience and attachment research without collapsing into psychoanalytic developmentalism.

Related questions

• How does Wiener’s critique of Jung’s Rosarium Philosophorum as “overdetermined and prone to idealization” compare with Edward Edinger’s use of alchemical stages as developmental landmarks in Anatomy of the Psyche—are both models vulnerable to the same linear fallacy?
• Wiener draws heavily on Fordham’s concept of deintegration and reintegration to ground the transference matrix. How does this model of infant selfhood compare with Donald Kalsched’s account of the archetypal self-care system in The Inner World of Trauma, particularly regarding patients who cannot symbolize?
• David Sedgwick in Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy argues that countertransference is the defining contribution of Jungian clinical thought. Does Wiener’s reframing of countertransference as a form of active imagination strengthen or subtly undermine Sedgwick’s claim by assimilating the relational back into the intrapsychic?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/wiener-therapeutic-relationship-transference/

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