ABSTRACT
Although the quotation above from Jung makes reference to analysis, its contents apply equally well to Jungian psychotherapy. Its six sentences epitomize Jungian therapy’s thinking about the therapeutic relationship. First and perhaps foremost, the Jungian perspective stresses the personal over the technical: above all, the specific personalities of the participants are the main thing. Furthermore, analytical psychology emphasizes the preponderance of the unconscious factors in psychotherapy over the already known or conscious side: there is more unknown than known in people, and this particularly applies to the therapist and patient in psychotherapy, where the unknown or the evolving will be studied, even encouraged. In addition, in Jungian psychotherapy the participants meet on relatively equal terms: each of them, not just the patient, brings “irrational factors” to the treatment situation. This discourages therapists from putting themselves on a pedestal, because in this paradigm rationality zv53 (or even, perhaps, normalcy) does not reside exclusively with therapists, irrationality with patients. Akin to all this is the Jungian assumption of a fluidity of personality: in therapy it is possible, perhaps inevitable, for personalities to fuse unconsciously to some degree. Finally, in psychotherapy these two indefinite elements form a new compound: two personalities merge at an unconscious level and something new, a third thing, is created. This new creation is, at bottom, the healing of the patient. In short, psychotherapy is the affective mixing of two personalities at several levels, resulting in something better, especially for the patient but also, as a by-
product, for the therapist-hence, a mutual transformation. This emphasis on the therapist’s personality and mutual influence through the blending
of personalities is a radical view of psychotherapy, a view that is unexpected, anxietyprovoking, and, in a sense, risky for all parties involved. Most therapies do not go quite this far (and certainly did not go this far in 1929, when Jung articulated these principles against a backdrop of psychoanalytic techniques that recommended keeping the therapist’s personality out of the treatment). In place of the usual doctor-patient paradigm, with the patient here and the doctor over there dispensing diagnosis and good counsel, this model emphasizes a deeper, more personal interchange. Jung himself was adamant about the importance of an intimate therapeutic involvement between therapist and patient, and subsequent Jungian therapists have followed suit (though with individual variations around self-disclosure, neutrality, and other technical issues). Jung insisted on the therapist’s authentic presence, much as Carl Rogers’s client-centered therapy would later call for “genuineness or congruence” (Rogers, 1961, p. 49). Any stance that artificially placed the doctor at a distance was, Jung felt, a “smokescreen,” that is, a defense against involvement and against the patient’s pathology. (Indeed, some of Jung’s harshest words about Freud, with whom he started as a colleague and ended as a polemical enemy, are around this issue.)1 Quite simply, Jung thought it was neither possible nor helpful for a therapist to be emotionally distant from his patients. He believed it and meant it when he said a therapist is as much in the process as the patient. For Jungian therapy, emotional engagement is in the nature of unconscious processes and hence in the basic nature of psychotherapy.
