ABSTRACT
My aim in this contribution will be to try to show that the use of the transference as a central philosophical and emotional orientation in analysis is not only appropriate, but that it is compatible with Jungian perspectives. Jung himself considered the transference, notwithstanding his unconcealed anxiety about methodically analysing the transference himself, to be ‘the alpha and the omega of analysis’ (Fordham, 1974). He asserted that ‘Thanks to this personal feeling Freud was able to discover wherein lay the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis’ (Jung (1913) quoted in Fordham, 1974). As in many other areas Jung was ‘ahead of his time’ when he considered that transference entailed much more than just the sexual area, as was thought by Freud at the time. Jung said that there are ‘moral, social and ethical components’, a view that seems nearer to Melanie Klein’s much later conception of the transference as the total situation than to Freud’s view in that period. He observed, for example, that the patient may bargain with the analyst like a child who wishes to get special favours from his parents, or may seek out ‘special adventures’ which the analyst must not prevent since they may contain value for the patient. ‘We have to let the patient and his impulses take the lead’ (Jung (1913) quoted in Fordham, 1974). He saw the sexual fantasies as analogies related to empathy, adaptation and ‘the urge towards individualization’. Jung saw that both negative and positive transference furthered individualization (Jung (1914) quoted in Fordham, 1974.)
Michael Fordham noted that Jung described transference as having ‘biological value’ as ‘a bridge across which the patient can get away from his family into reality’. Jung also thought that the infantile elements of the transference represented a ‘powerful hindrance to the progress of the treatment, because the patient assimilates the analyst to his father and mother’ and the more he does this so much more will transference do him harm (Jung (1913) quoted in Fordham, 1974). Fordham observed that although Jung credited Freud with the discovery that the transference itself is the therapeutic factor in analysis, it appears to have been Jung’s view, while the Freudians at that time seem to have believed that improvement lay in making unconscious contents conscious. Fordham wrote:
Jung went along with Freud in recognizing the incestuous, erotic and infantile characteristics of transference, as well as accepting its resistance phenomena.
