Carl Jung: Transference, Willingness to Follow and Responsibility

Carl Jung: Transference, Willingness to Follow and Responsibility

Transference, Willingness to Follow and Responsibility

March 19, 1958

The following comments came a short time after Jung had told me how Freud had exhorted him – like father to son – to uphold the latter’s 

theory of sexuality; Jung, however, had very early on fostered his own ideas which deviated .from Freud’s.

just before this conversation, Jung had looked through a collection of essays written by Toni Wolff and sent them to the publisher Daniel Brody, including the two articles “The Individuation Process in Women” and “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche.”

He had also recently received some letters and publications dealing with the topic of nationality.

The attitude of men and women in the case of transference onto a man is very different.

I have often experienced that a man with a positive transference toward me wants to act like me, or rather wants to adopt my psychology, while a woman wants to live out the feelings.

The man may then display a boundless, crazy enthusiasm.

In cases of idealistic transference of a man toward me, there was the danger that he would try to extend himself beyond the limits of his own being.

He would lose all sense of proportion and follow his projection enthusiastically and often blindly, functioning from then on as a kind of follower or “henchman,” with me as the “general.”

Such a man has to learn that this “general” is basically a part of himself.

I have often perceived this follower phenomenon in the souls of the Germans, in whom it plays a major role.

It has something to do with their dangerous tendency to absolutism.

I once had an experience which was very telling, indeed downright comical, in this regard.

When I was still working at Burgholzli, a young doctor joined our ranks, a psychiatrist from Stuttgart.

He had come to Burgholzli to find out about new psychological and psychiatric viewpoints.

He soon realized that I had something to say.

He immediately assumed the role of an acolyte. What I said was gospel!

He was a nice fellow by the way, a real Swabian from a very good family.

At the time at Burgholzli, we had our own clinical jargon, a witty medics’ slang, in which we used all the unlikely and funny phrases that schizophrenic patients came out with.

For example, if we had to be particularly friendly to an older woman patient, we would say “Today I oiled my aunt!”  or “Today I made a nerve attachment with her.”

That was supposed to mean: I made an emotional connection with her.

If you managed to convince the boss to grant you leave, you would say: “I oiled the boss so that he would give me a vacation.”

Normally you might say you buttered him up or soft-soaped him, i.e., got him in the right mood.

we wanted to particularly ingratiate ourselves with someone, we would say: ”I’ll make a nerve attachment with him.”

We used these expressions and turns of phrase in casual conversation and of course always in jest.

We would exclaim, for example:

“My God, now I’ve had a thought withdrawal!”

Or say, playing on Schreber’s expression: “Damn it, scilicet again!” and other such inanities.

4 If an idea suddenly occurred to us, we might say: “One of them as invaded me,” referring to the little men that according to Schreber

crawled around on the skin.

Some time later I saw the young Swabian doctor again, and we chatted in our medics’ jargon like in old times. It was good fun.

A while after that, he died. 

A few years after his death, a young doctor, also a psychiatrist, visited me.

He said that he had learned a lot about psychology from said German physician and was very interested in the subject.

In all seriousness, he then claimed that one could see how important psychology was when, for example, one “made a nerve attachment”

with schizophrenics.

My ears pricked up! And then he started talking about “thought withdrawal”! “My God, what expressions are you using? That was just our medics’ jargon!” “Dr. X taught me these expressions!” he answered.

My erstwhile colleague had actually believed they were technical terms!

There you see what effect an unconscious transference can have when it takes the form of this desire to follow.

“Watching him spit and watching him cough … “

The worrying thing, though, is not so much the ludicrous mimicry, but the fact that the follower ventures too farbeyond his own limits.

He is no longer himself – and therein lies the danger.

I experienced another case like that, with a certain Mr. van X. He was homosexual.

I hardly knew him personally; I was only introduced to him once.

But apparently an immediate transference onto me had taken place.

Incidentally, he was also a psychiatrist. I had no idea about his transference.

He was in analysis with someone else, I don’t know who.

The analyst had apparently gone to great lengths to talk him out of his homosexuality!

In his transference onto me, Mr. van X always thought that would particularly please me.

So he suppressed his homosexuality and even got married to a woman.

Of course the marriage went wrong and he had to get divorced.

One day he came to me and threw the whole mess at my feet, so to speak, claiming it was all my fault. “But I don’t even know you,” I

said to him.

No, no, it was my fault that everything had gone so badly, that he had married and was now divorced.

Since then he had been a nervous wreck.

But I had never even worked with him, I had had nothing to do with any of it!

Here too, the man had this particular kind of transference: “He knows.

He is right, so I will blindly follow him – and absolve myself of all responsibility.”

In doing that, he lost himself That, by the way, is exactly what happened in Germany. How “glorious” it was when Hitler came!

Until then one always had to take care of oneself and take personal responsibility.

But then along comes a man who says to everybody: “I will bear the responsibility!”

And they followed the devil as far as Moscow! Are we now “the land of poets and thinkers”?

It can happen to individuals that they venture too far, live in an illusion and lose themselves in the process.

And then the resistances manifest themselves. In the case of Mr. van X, that happened right off the bat.

The other examples show the danger of transferring responsibility onto another person, of seeing the responsibility as someone else’s.

Just think about what the Germans said after the Second World War: “The British should have invaded!”

Yet another attempt to evade responsibility!

But what would have happened if the British had actually done that?

How would the Germans have reacted then? All of their hate would have come down on the British.

Someone with a transference of this type onto another person needs to recognize the danger involved and to acknowledge their own reality and responsibility – to enable them to really represent themselves and not someone else.

At one time I jumped into the fray and flew the banner for Freud, but only up to the point where I could still accept responsibility for

I had always, from the very beginning, had a reservatio mentalis in relation to his concept of sexuality.

In transference situations, a man must know where he himself stands.

And know that only he is responsible for himself. That is hard for German people.

They easily fall into the intoxication of following and stumble into a kind of drunken consciousness.

Then an ambivalent barbarism emerges which as a result of the lack of freedom and independence can have a very negative effect.

One does not just endanger others, but also oneself.

People with this desire to follow are just waiting for someone to obey and run after.

They wait, like the Germans, for their monarch or supreme commander, to be wonderfully freed from their own task, from the need to think independently and bear responsibility for themselves.

It was diabolical when Hitler said: I will bear the responsibility!

That is exactly what a follower is waiting for.

But it does not work – no one can take on another person’s responsibility.

People who want to be or become wholly themselves must bear their own responsibility and be accountable for their own

lives and actions. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, Page 36-40