Jung

by Phil Goss

  Freud’s influence and the analytic frame

  As we discussed in Chapter 4, despite their definitive differences in opinion on the theory and principles of a depth psychological approach, Jung owed a debt to Freud with respect to some key features of analytic work. These included:

  • the use of free association and dream analysis

  • working with the ‘transference’

  • the therapeutic hour

  • use of the couch.

  Mostly, Jung developed these features in line with the spirit of analytical psychology more than classical psychoanalysis, although the influence of the latter shows through.

  Spotlight: Jung’s consulting room

  Jung saw analysands in his consulting room in his family home in Kushnacht, Zurich. The room was upstairs, adjacent to his extensive library, and featured stained-glass windows showing the passion of Christ.

  Ethics and boundaries

  To be effective and safe, psychotherapy needs suitable boundaries and principles about how the therapist and client or patient will work together. Legal understanding (Jenkins, 2007) and ethical conduct are crucial in providing the parameters for good practice in the provision of counselling and psychotherapy. They inform the establishment of an appropriate and facilitative therapeutic relationship and process. As Palmer-Barnes and Murdin (2001, p. xv) put it, ‘Therapists should not impose their own values on patients, but respect their autonomy and choice. Patients should be safeguarded against sexual, financial or informational (that is, respect for confidentiality) exploitation by therapists…’

  These principles are worked on closely during therapeutic trainings and beyond; and this applies most vividly to Jungian analytic training (as with other depth psychological trainings) where trainees are preparing for psychotherapeutic work with analysands, which will often be intensive and lengthy. All Jungian analysts, like their fellow professionals working from differing therapeutic modalities, subscribe to such principles and are bound by the ethical protocols of their professional body, which accredits their right to continue to practise.

  Spotlight: Jung’s problem with boundaries

  Jung infamously had an intimate relationship with Sabina Speilrein (1885–1942), one of his patients at the Burgholzi, as portrayed in the 2011 film A Dangerous Method, although the specific details of how intimate are open to debate (Covington and Wharton, 2006). This could be looked at in the light of how formative a stage professional psychotherapy was in, or in relation to Jung’s anima problem being enacted in the therapy room. However, this does not excuse or explain away his alleged activity and this remains something that has tarnished his reputation. However, from his writing it is clear he firmly believed in the importance of a boundaried approach to analysis in order to provide a suitable psychological container to enable a meaningful therapeutic process to take place. In this case, though, rather than his anima, perhaps it was his shadow that got the better of him?

  The boundaries concerned include the importance of an appropriate setting and time frames for analysis. Contracting will also play an important part, although analysts will vary as to how concrete to make this. This can take the form of a written document which is agreed and referred back to. However, in order not to cut across the very important first moments of analysis, where often influential and early dynamics from an analysand’s childhood can be played out (e.g. about ‘making relationship’), some other analysts may look at questions around timing, confidentiality and money (and so on) as they arise during the first session, and then contract verbally.

  In terms of time boundaries, Jung concurred with Freud that a fixed time frame around the work, and regularity of analysis, were both crucial in order to provide the conditions in which effective and meaningful therapeutic work could take place. The 50-minute hour instigated by Freud was also Jung’s formula for maximizing the potential for the unconscious to reveal itself.

  An example of this is the so-called ‘door handle effect’, whereby people might reveal something important right at the end of the session: for example a buried memory, triggered by anxieties about endings or abandonment that the strict ending at 50 minutes may prompt. Jung also subscribed to Freud’s maxim that analysis needs to be intensive in order to enable defences to begin to weaken, transference to form and repressed material to begin to reveal itself. So, analysis at least three times a week was de rigeur in the establishment of a separate Jungian approach to analytic work.

  The analytic setting

  Finally, the analyst is expected to provide a suitably furnished and appointed consulting room, which will provide confidentiality as well as a sense of something ‘different’ compared to the outer world. This will include a couch, though its place in analytic work is not as central as in the Freudian model. In the Jungian approach, the couch is still seen as valuable in enabling the analysand, in their more relaxed, supine state, to be open to the unconscious and to allow associations and images to come into awareness. The analyst and analysand can then work together on any meanings arising. However, the chair also has an important role. The analysand sits in a chair across from the analyst, though often not directly so as to allow the analysand to have a choice about whether to make direct eye contact with the analyst, and to have their own sense of space for reflection and reverie. Jung thought it important that there be ‘face to face’ contact between the two, who are, as has been emphasized, ‘in the work together’.

  Often, the analysis will begin in this mode, as the two participants begin to establish a relationship and working alliance. Then, as the relationship and process deepens, the analysand might opt to use the couch to work at greater depth with the material arising within them and to further loosen up the border between conscious and unconscious. As with all aspects of the work, this latter development needs to be handled in the light of the analyst’s duty of care. The analyst has to consider, carefully, whether the analysand is in a stable enough place psychologically to thus open themselves to the sometimes unexpected insights that can ensue.

  The analyst as ‘blank screen’?

  In Jungian analysis, the therapeutic relationship needs to be one where psyche can be given room to breathe and the unconscious can come more into the foreground. Here, the development of the relationship between neutrality and character come into play. Freud introduced the idea of the ‘blank screen’, based on the principle that the psychoanalytic process is best evinced via the psychoanalyst showing as little of their personality as possible, so they become like a ‘blank screen’ on to which the patient projects their key relationships, such as to their mother or father.

  This way, the psychoanalyst ‘becomes’ their mother or father, catching all the repressed psychosexual impulses and strong feelings (love, hate, anger, disappointment and so on) they were carrying. This is what Freud termed the transference: the ways in which we unconsciously transfer feelings and impulses outside our awareness on to other people, in particular those we build up significant relations with; for example partners, friends, colleagues and, in this case, therapists. The value of working with the transference and countertransference, including projections, is now well established across the psychotherapy and counselling field (Jacobs, 2010).

  The question then arises within the Jungian approach as to how much to adopt the Freudian position of a consistently blank screen. Jung stressed the uniqueness of each analysand and therefore how important it was to adapt one’s approach as analyst to meet the person as they were. As we have seen, he also emphasized how both analysand and analyst are ‘in the work together’. Jung was a strong and original advocate of the importance of analysts having extensive personal analysis themselves before they could practise, in order that they sufficiently know themselves, including their shadow tendencies, their early wounds and how their complexes might be activated. This was necessary to protect against their own vulnerabilities undermining the therapeutic process, and to be able to draw on their own psychological resources effe
ctively in support of it.

  The stance of the analyst is well summed up by Thomas Kirsch:

  The analysand and analyst are equally involved in the analytical relationship. The analyst’s subjective reactions are an integral part of the therapy and are not seen only as neurotic countertransference. Nor is the Jungian analyst considered a blank screen.

  Kirsch, 2003, p. 29

  Key idea: ‘In the work together’

  As implied here, the Jungian approach is that both analysand and analyst are ‘in the work together’, with the analyst using their reactions to the analysand (‘countertransference’) as a resource to intuit further the latter’s process. It is, again, the uniqueness of the analysand and how the work is unfolding which guide how the analyst works.

  Analytic principles and process

  Working with psyche takes time. Deep unconscious influences and processes, such as the hidden dynamics of complexes or those hinted at in dreams, require regularity of therapeutic sessions, but also a time frame which is traditionally open-ended. This is on the basis that the unconscious works to its own rhythm. Movement and change within the psyche happen at their own pace, and it is not uncommon for people to undertake analyses which last for many months, or years. Having said this, the reality in the fast-moving, and financially constrained, world we live in is that Jungian practitioners have had to adapt their approach. Some may provide versions of therapy that offer shorter-term, less intensive, integrative approaches to analysis: these still enable meaningful therapeutic experience and change to take place.

  Spotlight: Syntonic transference

  Michael Fordham, whose ideas on childhood and analysis will be introduced in Chapter 14, proposed the idea of the syntonic transference (Astor, 1995). This referred to the value of the analyst entering a ‘primitive’ state where they can more fully sense what is happening for the analysand via their countertransference. This involves a willingness to be sometimes overwhelmed by the analysand’s material, and so requires careful supervision.

  Jung’s four-stage model

  Jung identified four stages of analysis, with the recognition that any division into categories of what is such an organic, individual and unpredictable process as analysis is bound to be open to variation. Nevertheless, on the basis of his extensive experience of conducting analysis when he wrote about this (1929), he came up with the following four-stage model.

  1 CONFESSION

  As implied, there is a comparison here with the Catholic church’s use of the confession as a way of acknowledging our ‘sin’ and receiving absolution for this. Being able to share with a therapist what has been burdening us, or making us worried or depressed, does not make the problem go away; but it can lighten the load and help us get a feel for whether we can work with the therapist.

  The therapy cannot get far without some kind of ‘opening up’; this act of trust in the analyst allows the work to become established. Here, the analysand begins to face up to their shadow. It also gives an initial clue to what deep-seated influences, including complexes, may be at work.

  2 ELUCIDATION

  This stage involves focusing on further understanding what key unconscious influences may be at work, including those coming up in the transference. The therapist may well be asking: ‘Who am I for this person?’ (e.g. their mother) because of what the analysand seems to be projecting on to them, which is picked up by the latter in their countertransference. Like the first stage, there is a flavour of shadow work here, and while stage one might illustrate what could be present in shadow, the second stage provides a specific way into making this more conscious. Here, Jung drew on Freud’s reductive approach to interpreting the transference (i.e. tracing it back to its infantile roots).

  However, Jung did not follow Freud down such a precise psycho-sexual avenue, or stick purely with transference phenomena (also working with whatever came up, including dreams). The principle of helping the analysand recognize and take ownership of their shadow is important in Jungian analysis.

  3 EDUCATION

  Jung was influenced more by Alfred Adler (1870–1937) than Freud in formulating this stage. Adler’s psychotherapeutic model was focused on enabling people to adapt themselves to the world authentically, for example in resolving imbalances between their superiority and inferiority complexes (Oberst and Stewart, 2003). Jung recognized how important it was for analysands to take what they have gleaned about their deeper influences (including shadow) from analysis and integrate this into their lives. In this respect, individuation has a social and interpersonal function as well as a purely personal one. As Jung put it (1966b, para. 152): ‘The patient must be drawn out of himself into other paths, which is the true meaning of “education”, and this can only be achieved by an educative will.’

  4 TRANSFORMATION

  It is important to stress that the previous stage can only go so far: adapting oneself, and the insights gathered from analysis, to the demands of the world can become damaging to one’s sense of authenticity if focused on at the expense of the key principle of individuation, which is to become as fully ‘oneself’ as can be. So the fourth stage of the work involves attending to what is within and still waiting to be revealed and actualized. The ground for this has been laid in the previous three stages.

  The container has therefore been created within which the final stage of therapy can happen – a realization of what has been lying quietly beneath the other processes of discovery and change thus far. The specifics of how this unfolding of a transformed psychic state will show up will be particular to the analysand and the analysis. It could be a person granting themselves permission to live out a previously repressed aspect of their sexuality, for example, or someone simply coming to life more and being better able to express their wishes, or their creativity.

  This stage requires the analyst to reorient themselves and allow whatever is around in the transference–countertransference as well as what might be picked up in other ways (dialogue about past, present and future; dream material, etc.) to guide the process of transformation. This takes us back to a key point about the analyst being part of the transformation, too (Jung, 1966b, paras. 167–8):

  ‘… be the man through whom you wish to influence others… the fourth stage of analytical psychology requires the counter-application to the doctor of whatever system is believed in…’

  The analyst therefore needs to adopt within themselves whatever struggle the analysand is engaged in (e.g. becoming more assertive, or more spontaneous) to help them be that, too.

  Jungian analysis in practice

  In order best to illustrate how the analytic process works, we will explore its application to one fictionalized analysis, which will be referred to again in the following chapters. The analysand concerned is ‘Jolanta’ and she is a young woman of 28 who moved to the UK from Poland five years before she first went for analysis, seeking work opportunities and a new life. She had managed this to some degree, establishing herself in a job in retail which was not very well paid but promised better prospects.

  Jolanta is gay and has had a couple of relationships with other women prior to the analysis; but these have not worked out well and both seemed to fall apart unexpectedly after about a year or so. This is the main factor that has brought her into analysis – she wants to understand better why her intimate relationships, which she had so wanted to work out well, have collapsed. She also wants to explore certain experiences from her childhood in Poland, where she says of her family situation ‘all seemed well on the surface, but there was something fragile about it’. There are dreams she wants to bring, too, and one of her friends suggested Jungian analysis because of this. To briefly set the scene, the initial sessions of the work go as far as the confession and elucidation stages.

  Confession: Jolanta reports feeling ashamed at how ‘controlling’ she has been with both previous partners, as well as describing how ‘ruthlessly ambitious’ and ‘restless’ she can be.

  Elucid
ation: The analyst is just beginning to identify key themes arising from the above around, for example, her mistrust of others and ‘always having to do tasks herself because other people never do them properly’. The analyst notices impatience and intolerance in her initial countertransference, presumably an echo of what Jolanta describes here. The analysis has not got as far as the education or transformation stages, nor has she brought any dream material into the sessions yet.

  LIMITATIONS OF THE FOUR-STAGE MODEL

  The four-stage model provides an outline map for describing the analytic process. It can seem somewhat formulaic and it also does not provide a very detailed description of how the analyst should actually work with the material around during the therapy. Nevertheless, the value of the model could be said to lie in its clarity, and as a guide to making sense of how the analyst approaches the challenge of working with both conscious and unconscious dynamics in the consulting room. This, combined with the professional considerations outlined in the first half of the chapter, provide a good basis for analytical clinical practice.

  Key terms

  Blank screen: Term derived from psychoanalysis to refer to the stance of the analyst where they deliberately avoid revealing their personality (or sometimes their warmth) in order to evince reactions and projections from the patient relating to key unconscious dynamics.