As I look back over my long relationship with Carl Jung and his ideas, beginning in 1969 when I read Erich Neumann's The Great Mother as a college senior writing an honors thesis on the image of the Virgin in the Middle Ages, I am struck by one theme: transference.
Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., Jungian analyst (Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts)This paper was first presented at the National Congress of Jungian Analysts in Lake Tahoe in October 1994. It was published in The Round Table Review (March/April 1995) and is reprinted here with the permission of The Round Table Review.
As I look back over my long relationship with Carl Jung and his ideas, beginning in 1969 when I read Erich Neumann's The Great Mother as a college senior writing an honors thesis on the image of the Virgin in the Middle Ages, I am struck by one theme: transference.
Finding Neumann's ideas both wonderful and confusing, I went to my thesis advisor to ask about Jung. He said "Stay away from Jung and all that mysticism." His response was strong enough toe interest me, and so I dove headfirst into Memories, Dreams, Reflections on the advice of my roommate, who seemed to know a lot about mysticism. Opening that book was the start of an idealizing transference to Jung. He would be my perfect analyst because his life mirrored mine; I would also be his perfect analyst because I understood him from the insidehow he struggled and why he felt so alienated.
I too had had a lonely, other-worldly childhood with many inexplicable and emotionally charged happenings. I too had a parent (father, not mother as with Jung) who had a Number One and a Number Two personality. I grew up in the country and spent my early years with animals and very simple folk. I had had a terrible school phobia at ages seven and eight and, like Jung, had "snapped out of it" because I overheard my parents' decision to send me to a child psychiatrist.
After reading his autobiography, I yearned to know Jungnot to know more about his ideas, but to know him. When I read that Anais Nin, after she became acquainted with his work, wanted to go to Zürich to sleep with Jung, I resonated, and became more sympathetic to Nin who had previously seemed impossibly self-cantered to me. (Of course, I could not have known then how droves of women, young and old, must have flocked to Zürich with the same fantasy, conscious or not.)
In 1971, I visited Zürich for the first time. It was July and there were few people at the Jung Institute, the only place in the world that I was interested in pursuing psychotherapy. With tremendous excitement and trepidation, I approached the secretary, explaining that I was an American who was interested in Jungian analysis. I was in Zürich for only a few days, but had come expressly to visit the Jung Institute. She said that another American, a training candidate, was in the library and perhaps I should talk with her. I met Linda Leonard in that library and immediately had an idealizing transference to her! Everything she said was significant, and when I left the hour or so conversation we had, I announced to my husband (to his great dismay) that now I wanted to become a Jungian analyst; being in analysis was not enough. I knew nothing more about analytical psychology than that I liked recording my dreams and that I identified with Jung's life. I had no real awareness of my psychological problems or my development. (Incidentally I've seen many people seeking Jungian analysis over the years with the same condition: idealized identification with Jung, wanting to become an analyst rather than an analysand.) Although I was merely twenty-four years old at the time, I was the sort of person who says what she does and does what she says. The fact that I put my desire into words almost broke up my marriage on the spot. And, indeed, my marriage did break up when I returned to Zürich for analysis.
I begin with my idealized identification with Jung not only be cause it's true or even a good story, but because through reading about Jung's life I received psycho logical help. I suspect this is true for many others. His life story turned him into what self psychologists call a "selfobject" for me at the age of twenty-two. His autobiography gave coherence and transparency to my young life. Because the autobiography deals mostly with his inner life and his fantasies, I could project my own images of his relationships and life in the world. I did not have to deal with facts, others' accounts, the reactions of those who loved him or hated him. I felt I understood who and what he was, and that knowing more about him was vitally important to my knowing more about me. In short, to become Jung would be to become myself.
For me, Jung fulfilled the idealizing transference that he described so well in his paper on the transcendent function:
For the patient . . . the analyst has the character of an indispensable figure absolutely necessary for life. However infantile this dependence may appear to be, it expresses an extremely important demand which, if disappointed, often turns into bitter hatred of the analyst. Jung 1959/1969, p. 74)
As I have come to know Jung's work and life in greater detail over the years, he has often disappointed me. Because I have been able to analyze the complexity of my relationship to him, I have not developed a bitter hatred. I'm often in conflict with his ideas especially his theories of gender and ethnic differences. In my ongoing analysis, we dissolved the persona-restoring stage a long time ago, have been through the madness of discharging our complexes at each other, and now seem to be entering the stage of secure symbolizing. I'm still working through a rather intensely negative transference, as I will describe later, but I feel quite contained in being able to resolve it. I appreciate the depth and richness of our relationship. As in any good analysis, I feel also that I have helped Jung, by revising and furthering some of his fundamental contributions so that they cannot be easily dismissed by contemporary philosophers, psychoanalysts and feminists. I try to save him from the stumbling blocks of reification and essentialism. He has already saved me from self-hatred, dissociation and alienation.
In working through my idealization of Jung over the years, I have increasingly learned to value uncertainty. By uncertainty, I mean the kind of reflective space in which there is no premature foreclosure on meaning. Just when I think I understand something between Jung and meas, for example, where we each stand on the theory of contrasexualityI discover something new in his writings or rediscover something I've forgotten. Then the dialogue moves on. In the remainder of the paper, I will describe in greater detail why this dialogue depends on both trust and conflict, and how it has saved me from turning my idealization into "bitter hatred of the analyst," as Jung puts it.
Although Jung lived far into the twentieth century, he saw only the dimmest beginnings of post-structuralism and its development into post-modernism. Jung's interests after about 1944 turned increasingly to ethology, evolutionary biology, and developmental processes of all sorts. I believe he was moving in the direction of contemporary developmental and post-modern psychologies, but he left behind him a trail of different assumptions and interpretations that span the range from realist to idealist, from essentialist to post-modern, from traditional to radical. It is possible to read Jung from highly divergent perspectives and believe (and find "proof" in the form of quotations) that Jung agrees with you.
I want to take a moment to explain why I think this contemporary critique of truth and culture is important in my relationship with Jung. What I mean by post-modern is the critique of truth, history, fact, or reality as being simply found or discovered "out there" or "in here." Post-modern critiques have been successfully aimed at both realism and idealism. The belief that reality lies within the physical and chemical processes of our world has been (in my view) fundamentally defeated by a number of philosophers, particularly Thomas Kuhn and Hilary Putnam of M.I.T.
Similarly, the belief that our mental or psychic experiences are primarily imposed on us by forms, ideals or categories that structure the mind (such as Kantian categories) has also been fundamentally put to rest, especially by philosophers like Charles Taylor, Rom Harre and Richard Rorty.
There is a branch of post-modern theory called deconstruction that often gets confused with the entire project. Deconstruction originated with philosopher Jacques Derrida in France. It has been carried into psychoanalysis, especially by some followers of Jacques Lacan. Deconstruction explicitly rejects a psychology of coherence, integration or universal principles of development in favor of a psychology of discontinuity, lack of coherence, and local influences on development. Deconstruction is also a political critique of human ideals and virtues. Often I have heard my Jungian colleagues be negative or critical of post-modernism, based on ideas about deconstruction. Deconstruction is a skeptical philosophy of doubt and criticism of established methods and theories in many disciplines. I see little resonance between Jung and deconstruction.
Instead, I have come to believe that Jung is a covert supporter of a branch of affirmative post-modernism: constructivism. Constructivism does not reject universals such as archetypes or universal emotions, but it assumes that both the concepts and the experiences to which they refer come directly from human interpretation. That is, archetypes do not move and shape human consciousness; nor are we caught in morphogenic structures. We create our worlds, but not unilaterally. Our experience is interdependent, an interaction of our perceptions and attitudes with an environment in flux. Even our perceptions are interpretations and so nothing is absolutely fixed and eternal in our phenomenal world, as we constantly influence its construction. In many passages of Jung's later work, I find significant traces of constructivism.
For instance, in 1939 he describes how human beliefs about the really real shift around over time, and how these beliefs inescapably constitute "reality":
On a primitive level people are afraid of witches; on the modern level we are apprehensively aware of microbes. There everybody believes in ghosts, but here everybody believes in vitamins. Once upon a time men were possessed by devils, now they are . . . obsessed by ideas.... Jung 1939/1994, p. 58)
But Jung's claims and premises are contradictory. Sometimes he sounds like a constructivist, then he sounds like a Platonic idealist, and then again occasionally like a biological realist. Consequently, I have learned that Jung also is a shifting project of interpretation and complexity that demands an ongoing dialogue. With this as background then, I want to introduce a framework that has helped me enormously in working through my transferences to Jung. The framework comes from psychoanalyst Arnold Modell. In Other Times, Other Realities: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment, Modell describes three competing and equally valid realities of psychoanalysis. Before I go into these in detail, I want to review Modell's central point about these three realities. For analysis to be effective as a transformation of perspective, the analyst and analysand have to become aware of these three realities and explore them as different worlds. When the analytic couple gets stuck in one reality, there tends to be a standstill or a rupture.
The fluidity of perspective (different worlds) that Modell advocates is consonant with Jung's transcendent functionthe dialectic of oppositesand with D. W. Winnicott's play space or potential space, and with Tom Ogden's dialectical space. All of these point to a particular kind of uncertainty. It seems to be an ability to hold multiple meanings in mind without foreclosure. Constructivism adds the caveat that to create a coherent interpretation is to constitute a reality. Holding in mind three different realities and moving among them interpretively, both patient and therapist are able to try on meanings and to discover what seems safe, exciting, coherent or persuasive in the moment.
Let me sketch Modell's three realities and then return to Jung and me. Modell (1990) proposes two different kinds of transference in the psychoanalytic situation. One kind of transference is rarely fully analyzed and continues to develop even after treatment has ended. He calls it the "dependent-containing transference." This is the core of the therapeutic alliance. It depends on the rituals of analysis (time, place, fee, confidentiality, safe boundaries, etc.), the relative anonymity of the analyst, and idealizing beliefs about the analyst (e.g., that the analyst is more powerful than one's symptoms). This kind of transference is what Jung referred to in the above passage as "an extremely important demand" that, if disappointed, can turn into "bitter hatred of the analyst."
The second kind of transference is called "iconic-projective" by Modell. This is what we usually call transference proper. It is the projection of images and complexes into the intersubjective field. Of course, it occurs from both sides, but I am talking here only about transference from my side, the analysand's. It would be hard to talk about Jung's countertransference for he has been dead throughout my analysis.
The important contrasts between these two transferences are usefully summarized by Modell (1990, pp. 48-52): the dependent transference is continually present throughout treatment, but the iconic transference is episodic and eventually absent. Within the dependent transference, both analysand and analyst experience symbolic enactments of developmental conflicts (such as attachment-separation, dependence-in dependence and aggression-love). But in the iconic transference, both experience the recreation of specific imagoes, such as Mother, Father, Brother, different from the general dynamic themes of the dependent transference. Effective interpretations enhance and strengthen the dependent-containing transference, but they resolve or diminish the iconic-projective one. The dependent-containing transference actually provides the safety, trust, and holding environment that allow the iconic transference to emerge and be understood. Poorly timed or ineffective interpretations of the iconic transference can be felt as a destruction of the dependent-containing one.
Finally, the third reality is the ordinary relationship-what Jung calls the kinship libido-between two people struggling together through life difficulties in the face of the demands of treatment. Within the ordinary relationship, it is important to keep in mind that the patient has hired the analyst. When we think of the asymmetry of the analytic situation we are often thinking only in terms of the dependent-containing transference, or in terms of the powerful images of the iconic-projective transference. From the perspective of the ordinary relationship, the asymmetry is reversed. The therapist's livelihood depends on the patient.
So back to Jung and me: I would like to describe how I see my psychoanalysis in each of these realities. I have already described my dependent-containing transference to Jung as he appeared to me initially in an idealizing identification. That changed as I began training to become an analyst in 1979. Careful and close reading of Jung's work, especially certain parts of Civilization in Transition, Aion, and Symbols of Transformation were poorly timed and overly rigidified interpretations They ruptured the containing transference. I found some of his ideas, especially about women, to be belittling and insulting. I doubt that I could have sustained our analytical relationship had I not begun reading his letters at about the same time. In the letters I found a different voice-more flexible, of often more imaginative and uncertain, and frequently inspiring. Over the years, the letters have helped me sustain a trusting interplay with Jung's more formal ideas and feelings. This interplay has sometimes been accompanied by comments from some colleagues that I am "not Jungian enough." This truly ineffective interpretation rouses indignation in me that I find mirrored in Jung. Especially in his letters, he criticizes any and all dogma, and vows that his approach is not a fixed set of ideas.
In regard to the iconic-projective transference, initially I fantasized Jung as Great Father. Having been fathered by a tortured, maddening, aggressive, loving man I had known little solid fathering. I longed for the Oedipal romance. I wanted to know that it was possible to feel proud of, and close to Father. Jung seemed wiser, more cultured, and more knowledgeable than any man in my life up to then.
Although I can barely recall the timeuntil I was four years old or soin which I idealized my own father, I have many clear memories of being disgraced or demeaned by him. Gradually, as I learned more of Jung's history, of his relationships with women, including women patients, and of his advice to men about women, I could feel the old familiar shame and rage. When I first met Jung's concept of contrasexuality I found it freeing and enhancing. But as I read more and heard more, the images of anima and animus, and Masculine and Feminine, seemed like stereotypes into which one's experiences had to be fitted. Even more damaging was my sense that Jung misunderstood himself, that he never seriously respected any woman with whom he had a close relationship because he insisted that she carry for him some kind of long-term projection , anima or something else. As I wrestled with this Terrible Father, his power grew even stronger. The more I read new accounts of Jung's life, the more I found images that contrasted with my ideal Jung of the autobiography. I probably would have quit our relationship altogether had I not been able to renew again and again my dependent-containing transference by reading his letters.
This process culminated finally in a book that I wrote with James Hall called Jung's Self Psychology A Constructivist Perspective. There I was able to dialogue in depth with the Jung I found in the letters. Through that book especially, I spoke to Jung about our differences. He answered in a way that . strengthened our bond. I can't say that the negative Father transference has been resolved. New information about Jung's life history is constantly emerging. Some of it has increased my familiar sense of disgrace and shame from Father as it burns within my own complex. But now I trust that I can resolve enough of my iconic transference to sustain the dependent-containing one that I need in order to go on developing in my analysis with Jung.
Our ordinary relationship often sustains me. Many times I remind myself that I chose to pursue all of this; I hired Jung (not Freud or Winnicott or Kohut) to treat me, so to speak. No one forced me into this. No one else is responsible for the pain or transformation, and besides, I feel how much Jung needs me for his livelihood. I sustain and expand his ideas and take them into new worlds. This is a way of claiming my roots: I am Jungian; this is where I fell in love. Although it's been a complicated relationship, it's produced fertile material in the transcendent function, the play space in which I can entertain his ideas and mine from many different perspectives.
Considering my relationship to Jung to be a psychoanalysis brings me hope that it will never deaden or rigidify. Even if I fully resolve my negative Father transference, it will be replaced by some other image, equally rich in its analytical possibilities. In expanding my understanding of the transcendent function through constructivism, Modell, Winnicott, Ogden and others, I made it a priority to keep open a dialectical space. In this space I review Jungian concepts, analyze the iconic transference, develop the containing transference, and take responsibility for having hired Jung.
Sometimes, though, I encounter a kind of rigidity among my Jungian colleagues, both analysts and other followers of Jung. Either it is an idealizing transference that has never developed through feeling deep conflict with Jung, or it is a Great Father-Mother or Genius projection that remains stuck in the form of seeing Jung as right, good, or all-knowing. Sometimes the iconic image seems even to be of God: to doubt Jung is blasphemous. In such cases there is little recognition of the ordinary human relationship in which Jung is a human being like oneself, and in which one has sustained Jung by hiring him to be the analyst/theorist.
I used to say that I was glad that I was a Jungian and not Jung-meaning that I was not forced into the hothouse of the dichotomies and splits of early psychoanalysis. Sometimes now, I'm not so sure. Although I still wouldn't want to be Jung, I often feel better when I think of myself as a psychoanalyst (a Jungian psychoanalyst) rather than a "Jungian" per se. My psychoanalytic colleagues have long since given up the idolizing of Freud. They expect that I will have a complex, conflict-ridden, evolving dialogue with Jung, as they have had with Freud. Some of my Jungian colleagues still seem shocked, if not hurt, by my open struggle. Psychoanalysis has moved on to whole new horizons beyond Freud's original themes and theories. Critiques of Freud's essentialism and sexism, revisions of his major concepts, and debates about his model of mind have enriched psychoanalysis enormously. In the writings of many of our contemporary Freudian colleagues, there is a healthy respect for the transcendent function and the dialectic of development. I would like to feel the same openness to a dialectical space in the Jungian circle-in regard toe our major concepts, our transferences to Jung, and our responsibilities for using and revising his ideas. It is in this spirit that I have offered this brief introduction to the multileveled relationship that has been my psychoanalysis with Jung.
References
Jung, C. G. (1959/1969). The transcendent function. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Vol. 8). pp. 67-91. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1939/1994). Psychological commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, in D. J. Meckel and R L. Moore (Eds.) Self and Liberation The Jung-Buddhism Dialogue: New York: Paulist Press.
Modell, A. (1990). Other Times, Other Realities Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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