Carl Jung “Yet it is not the doctor’s whole task to instruct or convince his patient.”
Modern Man In Search of a Soul
Yet it is not the doctor’s whole task to instruct or convince his patient; he must rather show him how the doctor reacts to his particular case.
For twist and turn the matter as we may, the relation between physician and patient remains personal within the frame of the impersonal, professional treatment.
We cannot by any device bring it about that the treatment is not the outcome of a mutual influence in which the whole being of the patient as well as that of the doctor plays
its part.
Two primary factors come together in the treatment-that is, two persons, neither of whom is a fixed and determinable magnitude.
Their fields of consciousness may be quite clearly defined, but they bring with them besides an indefinitely extended sphere of unconsciousness.
For this reason the personalities of the doctor and patient have often more to do with the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says or thinks-although we must not undervalue this latter factor as a disturbing or healing one.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
We should expect the doctor to have an influence on the patient in every effective psychic treatment: but this influence can only take place when he too is affected by the patient.
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
It is futile for the doctor to shield himself from the influence of the patient and to surround himself with a smokescreen of fatherly and professional authority.
If he does so he merely forbids himself the use of a highly important organ of information, and the patient influences him unconsciously none the less.
The unconscious changes in the doctor which the patient thus brings about are well known to many psychotherapists; they are disturbances, or even injuries, peculiar to the profession, which illustrate in a striking way the patient’s almost “chemical” influence.
One of the best known of them is the counter-transference which the transference evokes.
But the effects are often more subtle, and their nature is best conveyed by the old idea of the demon of sickness.
According to this a sufferer transmits his disease to a healthy person whose powers subdue the demon-but not without a negative influence upon the well-being of the healer. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in
Search of a Soul, Pages 49-50.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
As therapists we are subject to the unavoidable destinies of our patients. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 113.
[One of my patients] dreamed that she was commanded to descend into “a pit filled with hot stuff.” This she did, till only one shoulder was sticking out of the pit. Then Jung came along, pushed her right down into the hot stuff, exclaiming “Not out but through. ~Carl Jung; from “From the Life and Work of C. G. Jung” by Aniela Jaffe.
Only then I learned psychological objectivity. Only then could I say to a patient, ‘Be quiet, something is happening.’ There are such things as mice in a house. You cannot say you are wrong when you have a thought. For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 188.
Two days later I was again at Kusnacht to be met at the door by the famous two dogs at the entrance to Dr. Jung’s house. I had heard that he arranged to have his two dogs meet a new patient, the dogs being more sensitive to a potential psychotic than any human observation. ~Robert Johnson, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 36-39.
As therapists we are subject to the unavoidable destinies of our patients. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 113.
The belief, the self-confidence, perhaps also the devotion with which the analyst does his work, are far more important to the patient (imponderabilia though they may be), than the rehearsing of old traumata. ~Carl Jung; CW 4; par. 584.
An exclusively sexual interpretation of dreams and fantasies is a shocking violation of the patient’s psychological material: infantile-sexual fantasy is by no means the whole story, since the material also contains a creative element, the purpose of which is to shape a way out of the neurosis. ~Carl Jung; “The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction,” CW 16, par. 277.
As a doctor it is my task to help the patient to cope with life. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 32
The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 32
The labours of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed towards that hidden and as yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and the future man. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 6
More than once I have had to reach for a book on my shelves, bring down an old alchemist, and show my patient his terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared four hundred years ago. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 325.
[The dream] shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 304
The patient must learn to go his own way. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 26.
Freud rightly recognized that this bond is of greatest therapeutic importance in that it gives rise to a mixtum compositum [composite mixture] of the doctor’s own mental health and the patient’s maladjustment. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 358.
The therapist must be guided by the patient’s own irrationalities. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 82.
Here we must follow nature as a guide, and what the doctor then does is less a question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 82.
One cannot help any patient to advance further than one has advanced oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 179
You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 291
Seldom in my analytical work have I been so struck by the “beauty” of neurosis as with this patient. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 4-8
He [Jung] said he had learned never to start an interview beyond a few pleasantries – ‘How are you?’ – but to wait for the patient, because the instincts, the archetypes, lie in between and we don’t know what may be there. ~E.A. Bennet, Meeting with Jung, Page 55
At times C.G. has had to re-create a neurosis in order to get vitality into the treatment – for instance when a patient is just flat and deflated. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 89
Also he [Jung] spoke of his great interest on reading that a neuro-surgeon, concerned with epilepsy, had stimulated the corpora quadrigemina and the patient had had a vision of a mandala, a square containing a circle. This vision could be reproduced – and was reproduced – by the stimulation. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 157