ABSTRACT
Jung wrote the words at the top of this chapter in 1951. Few, if any, psychotherapists were talking in these terms then. Even in psychoanalysis, the branch of psychotherapy most concerned with the patient-therapist interaction, considerations about the value of mutual emotional interactions in the therapeutic relationship were just beginning.1 What’s more, Jung had been talking like this for several decades, making him the first psychotherapist to suggest that the therapist’s work with his own personal reactions to the patient (countertransference) was the central issue in psychotherapy. Jung’s major treatise on the therapeutic relationship talks about the therapist “voluntarily and consciously
earlier statement, “For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed” (1929a, p. 72).
