The Wounded Healer Countertransference from a Jungian perspective
CONCLUSIONS
It is surprisingly difficult to find examples of what actually happens in countertransference states.
The material presented in Chapter 3 is an attempt to demonstrate the phenomenology of countertransference—countertransference “from the inside out.”
In Jungian psychology (and even to some extent in the psychoanalytic literature) one looks in vain for the this kind of detailed discussion.
Almost nowhere in the Jungian literature, for instance, can a personal recounting of a countertransference dream be found, except for Jung’s oft-cited dream of the patient in the tower (Jung 1937, 1943, 1950, 196la)1.
In this instance Jung led the way and nobody followed.
Imperfect as it (or the analytic work) may be, the previous chapter is the most extensive written document to date on the phenomenology of countertransference from a Jungian perspective2.
This document is, of course, one Jungian’s perspective, and this chapter will attempt to generalize that individual perspective by theorizing further about a countertransference-oriented way of working.
It will put together more systematically the bits and pieces of countertransference detail and theory that composed the last one.
First, a general theory of countertransference will be described, and then a countertransference processing “model” will be outlined.
Finally, selected countertransference issues of general importance will be discussed.
A THEORY OF COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
The use of countertransference as a therapeutic instrument has undergone much change, in Jungian as in other analytic circles.
Jungian trends were outlined in the literature review.
It appears that Jung, by implication if not directly, was the first psychotherapist to endorse the positive potential of countertransference as an analytic technique.
This represents an appropriate and very “Jungian” (in the sense of having a
prospective tendency) supplement to his being the first analyst to recommend required training analysis as a safeguard against countertransference’s negative potential.
Unfortunately, as also noted earlier, Jung did not follow up on this aspect of his work.
However, the slack in countertransference study was admirably picked up by Fordham and the London SAP group. Jungians who are interested in countertransference processes are very much in their debt.
The wide range of possibilities within the Jungian view of the psyche has also given
rise to the other different and dynamic perspectives described in the review.
These theories are a boon to the countertransference theorist
Like most other Jungian writers, my thoughts about countertransference have been much influenced by psychoanalytic writers.
Harold Searles’ work has been particularly important to me (see Sedgwick, 1993).
I value highly the ideas of Margaret Little and Lucia Tower, whose work, along with that of other female analysts like Heimann, Cohen and Weigert3,
blazed the trail with Searles and Heinrich Racker in the early 1950s.
Also influential are the theories and deeply empathic spirit of Kohut and Winnicott,
which have important countertransference implications.
Langs’ technique is important and thought-provoking.
In all analytic schools, there has been a trend toward recognition not just of the value of countertransference but also of “mutuality” in the analytic process.
Jung, of course, opened the door to this dimension through his work on transference.
Even Freud (whose references, incidentally, to the term he invented are almost as sparse as Jung’s4) perhaps inadvertently encouraged countertransference usage.
While carefully advising his famous neutrality model of “the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even sympathy”
Freud adds:
[The analyst] must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the emerging unconscious of the patient, be as the telephone receiver to the disc.
As the receiver transmutes the vibrations induced by the soundwaves back again into sound-waves, so is the physician’s
unconscious mind able to reconstruct the patient’s unconscious, which has directed his associations, from the communications derived from it. (Freud, 1912, p. 122)
While this may speak more to empathy than what Freud saw as
countertransference, it still leaves room for the subjective reaction as an informative, reconstructive device.
There has been vigorous countertransference debate amongst Freudians.
Jungians have suffered less (but also benefitted less) from a global debate on the appropriateness of countertransference use, due to Jung’s technical flexibility and, until recently, a general inattention by most “classical” Jungians to the topic.
This is unfortunate, for a certain dynamic tension about the subject, collectively, mirrors the inner conflict the individual, countertransference-oriented analyst undergoes.
At any rate there has been a progression, as Fordham et al. (1974, p. ix) have discussed vis-a-vis London and Chapter 2 demonstrates here, from the earlier one-sided, transference-only focus to one where countertransference can be used therapeutically and in conjunction with transference developments.
The threads of the Jungian countertransference “schools” all unite in this latter region of alchemical coniunctio.
This book’s perspective partakes of all of the threads, with greatest emphasis on certain aspects and modifications of the “wounded-healer” and “rainmaker” positions. ~David Sedgwick, The Wounded Healer: Countertransference from a Jungian perspective, Page 103-105
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