ABSTRACT
I first read Joseph L. Henderson’s book Thresholds of Initiation in 1971, while I was in a Freudian psychoanalysis and training setting. At that time, I felt at home when I read Jung, who wrote about inner life in a way I could immediately recognize from my own experience. However, as a professional-intraining, I valued rationally-framed developmental constructs and found security in a method which interpreted defenses, conflicts, and pathological transferences. At the same time, I felt that I was missing, or could not speak to, an essential aspect of my patients – just as my own analyst seemed to miss me and the meaning of my suffering when he made his transference interpretations of Oedipal conflicts. My dilemma was that I could not see how to bring Jung’s more profound work into my clinical work.
