Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy

The Therapeutic Relationship

David Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134671618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Asesoramiento psicoterapéutico

The unique relationship between patient and therapist is the main healing factor in psychotherapy. This book explains the Jungian approach to the therapeutic relationship and the treatment process. David Sedgwick outlines a modern Jungian approach to psychotherapy. He introduces, considers and criticizes key aspects of Jungian and other theoretical perspectives, synthesizing approaches and ideas from across the therapeutic spectrum. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with numerous examples, this mediation on therapy and the therapeutic relationship will be invaluable to students and practitioners of both Jungian and non-Jungian therapy.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The intelligent psychotherapist has known for years that any complicated treatment is an individual,dialectical process, in which the doctor, as a person, participates just as much as the patient…. We could say, without too much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient.

Jung wrote the words at the top of this chapter in 1951. Few, if any, psychotherapists were talking in these terms then. Even in psychoanalysis, the branch of psychotherapy most concerned with the patient-therapist interaction, considerations about the value of mutual emotional interactions in the therapeutic relationship were just beginning.¹ What's more, Jung had been talking like this for several decades, making him the first psychotherapist to suggest that the therapist's work with his own personal reactions to the patient (countertransference) was the central issue in psychotherapy. Jung's major treatise on the therapeutic relationship talks about the therapist “voluntarily and consciously taking over the psychic sufferings of the patient” (1946, p. 176), which follows from an earlier statement, “For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed” (1929a, p. 72).

But if few therapists were talking like this about countertransference and mutual therapist-patient transformation, few were paying any real attention back then either to Jung or to Jungian therapy. Jung was well known by name, but his theories had long since slid into the backwaters of mainstream psychotherapy. He was known perhaps to general psychology and psychotherapy as a famous Freudian dissident; in terms of psychoanalysis itself, which was then in its heyday, Jung had been abolished altogether.

This situation has changed. Jung had crucial things to say about psychotherapy, as the above quotes show, and many people are intrigued by his insights. Unfortunately, he is still difficult to locate. Most therapists or therapists-to-be who express an interest in Jungian psychotherapy have had limited prior contact with it. With a few important exceptions in America and the UK, Jungian theory and therapy is not taught in graduate or professional schools that deal with clinical work, nor has it ever been. As the result of a particular professorial interest, courses occasionally appear in undergraduate religion or philosophy departments, but there is usually nothing systematic in graduate-level clinical course work, perhaps a mention here and there of Jung as an early Freudian. As for C.G.Jung himself, he seems recently to have become, somewhat like Freud, an object of specialized biographical and literary interest. Freud seems to show up more often in English departments or book reviews than he does in psychology departments; Jung rarely shows up anywhere, really. These pioneer psychologists occupy space in the academic-intellectual canon but are studied as historical artifacts or for their personalities, often in overcritical ways.

Although Jung and Jungian psychotherapy remain, like the once wellknown literary hero, “damned elusive,”² some persistent clinicians and students still look beyond the academic inquiries and wonder: What is Jungian psychotherapy all about? They might hear or find something that strikes them, like a quote from Jung, and want to learn more. Sadly, when the determined few finally do find Jungian avenues, they may get lost in what can seem to be a very private Jungian world, a world with its own terminology and Weltanschauung (worldview), embedded in highly selective, postgraduate training institutes. The Jungian world can seem insular—a recent book called it a cult—but most of this mystery is simply the result of its being unknown.

WHAT JUNGIAN THERAPY IS

As this chapter's epigraph indicates, what Jungian psychotherapy is really about is the therapeutic relationship. Many people think it is about dreams, or “archetypes,” but it's not, at least not primarily. It's about psychotherapy in the context of a personal emotional interchange. Jung's statements give clear ideas of what Jungian therapy is like, not only for the patient but for the therapist. If you are a therapist, this is what Jung tells you in a nutshell: “Every psychotherapist not only has his own method—he himself is that method…. The great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor's personality” (1945, p. 88). Because of this personal factor, being a card-carrying Jungian per se is much less important than the content and therapeutic quality of the clinician's character. In an ironic sense, to be a Jungian is not to be a Jungian.

Still, there are uniquely Jungian aspects to psychotherapy. As noted, C.G.Jung, at his best, was way ahead of his time. His bold statements have come home today: they match current, cutting-edge conceptions of psychotherapy as a two-person interchange in which the therapist is unavoidably involved in an intersubjective process and sometimes changed as well.³ Jung says precisely that and more. Furthermore, although cognitive therapies (therapies emphasizing regulating thoughts rather than pursuing feelings as such) are effective and popular, much of psychotherapy, especially insight or psychodynamic therapy, has moved from being a psychology of interpretation to being a psychology of relationship and repair.

So, again, what is Jungian therapy about? It is about a specifically therapeutic kind of emotional experience, at unconscious as well as conscious levels, that takes place between a therapist and patient. Their affective connection—the therapeutic relationship—ultimately takes precedence over insight and interpretation, however important and however intertwined they all are. Everyone wants explanations and to understand, but for these to have weight, they must be based on the emotion that comes from a personal relationship. The emotional experience in the therapeutic relationship is what makes therapy feel therapeutic. As Jung observed, the therapist's engagement on a feeling level, whether it be spoken or unspoken, is required.

This two-person involvement usually takes place over a significant period of time, so Jungian psychotherapy typically is not short-term psychotherapy, though its principles can apply to brief treatment. Rather, over time the therapeutic relationship has its ups and downs, unique qualities and tones. Like a marriage, it develops its own history, and a multilayered commitment is involved. In fact, the term “therapeutic marriage” has sometimes been used to describe in-depth psychotherapy, and the analogy is apt in many ways. Every therapy relationship is fundamentally different from all others, no matter how experienced the therapist is, just as every marriage or person is different from others. As Jung says, when two personalities meet, both are transformed. The chemistry between the persons—how they mix—is therefore crucial. To get all this right, some time is usually needed.

It is not the case, however, that psychotherapy can never work in a short time, or that Jungian therapy decries this. The length of Jungian therapy, just like the length of most therapies, varies with the case and psychopathology involved. Jung himself preferred briefer treatments, suggesting that “other therapeutic factors” besides a time-consuming therapeutic involvement can sometimes do the job: the patient's own insight and good will, and the therapist's “authority, suggestion, good advice, understanding, sympathy, encouragement, etc.” But he cautiously warned that “more serious cases do not come into this category,” and drily footnoted, “‘Good advice' is often a doubtful remedy, but generally not dangerous because it has so little effect” (1946, p. 173).

How psychotherapy works—what makes it work—is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. But it works. This was settled subjectively in most people's minds long ago—we know we feel better when we are listened to and feel understood. It was settled objectively and definitively by powerful statistical research three decades ago and continuing research now.⁴ Therapy works better, in fact, than many other social or educational methods of change, relatively speaking (Smith, Glass, and Miller, 1980). Although questions about psychotherapy's efficacy have been answered, this does not mean, of course, that it always works. Nothing always works, but the current debate, and the current push, for handier, perhaps cheaper or quicker methods of treatment (including excessive use of pharmacology) does not in itself invalidate psychotherapy's effectiveness. Medications, for instance, if they are appropriate and if they work, only enhance psychotherapy, and vice versa. An either/or dichotomy is not necessary in this instance, and appears to be driven by corporate economics, habits of dichotomous thought, and a general resistance to the inexactitude of psychotherapy. Therapy depends on the personalities of individuals and their personality mix, which are difficult to predict. Also, therapy is hard to do well, and places emotional demands on the therapist, not to mention the patient. Finally, not everything can be put in a box—especially the things that matter most.

SCIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY

Although psychotherapy has solid research to back it, and although it can be tested by statistical and scientific methods, it is not, in essence, a science. Psychology is inherently subjective: the psyche studies itself, the mind looks at the mind, or someone else's mind (a therapist's) looks at another's (a patient's). In simpler terms: one studies psychology with one's own psychology. From the early days of psychoanalysis, when Jung reminded readers that “all knowledge is subjectively conditioned” (1914b, p. 182), he continued to note the difficulties in psychological epistemology, and its innate limitations: “There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and—fatally enough—also its subject” (1938/40, p. 49). The subjective is the subject.

Furthermore, in the course of comparing his own psychological perspectives with those of others, Jung observed that every psychological theory was inevitably a “subjective confession” (1929b, p. 36). This subjectivity undermines pretenses not only to psychological objectivity but to universality. Jung (1926) also suggested that therapists might need to construct a new theory for each patient. He did not mean this literally, of course, but the spirit of respect for and openness to the individuality of every patient— and for the limits of one's own knowledge and theory—is vital, and a hallmark of the Jungian approach to psychotherapy. The ultimate mystery of personality goes along with the mystery both of how treatment works and how the therapeutic relationship works.

Contributing to the mystery of things is the reality that there are multiple truths about most psychological situations. Not only that, but the truth changes, not just due to subjective differences but to apparent advances in understanding. Thus, for instance, the Oedipus complex looked like the ultimate truth in psychoanalysis for decades (and still does to some), but this was supplanted by a suggestion and new possible truth that Oedipal issues can be a defensive maneuver concealing pre-Oedipal anxieties. As Jung said about Freud, we don't differ on the facts, just their interpretation (1973a, p. 405).

On not knowing beforehand

What do these ruminations on subjectivity, pluralism, and uniqueness imply? In the midst of therapists' zeal to know and patients' need to be known—both of which are important—therapists must, paradoxically, allow room for their “not knowing” (Fordham 1993). This is yet another hallmark of a Jungian attitude. Consider, for instance, Jung's understanding of himself towards the end of his life, a time when one would anticipate a surer wisdom about life and personality:

The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am capable of all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundations of something I do not know….

When Lao-tzu [an ancient Taoist philosopher] says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.

(1963, pp. 358-9)

Jung's late-in-life musings may not hold true for everyone (and probably not for Jung all the time), but they express some truths about the difficulties of self-knowledge and the inevitable falling short of it. They give rise to humility, properly so, and provide a sober wisdom about life's goals—and psychotherapy's. In relation to this book's subject, Jungian psychotherapy, Jung brought home these modest concepts forcefully:

No psychotherapist should lack that natural reserve which prevents people from riding roughshod over mysteries that they do not understand and trampling them flat. This reserve will enable him to pull back in good time when he encounters the mystery of the patient's difference from himself, and to avoid the danger— unfortunately only too real—of committing psychic murder in the name of therapy.

(1937a, p. 337)

Jungian psychotherapy holds that patients, and the story and curve of their lives, represent an unknown quantity. In therapy the story is discovered—created perhaps, or at least told—and the therapy itself also becomes part of the story. Too much preconception, too much fore-knowledge, as Jung suggests above, can be misguided or even arrogant. Thus the difficulty for Jungian psychotherapy, as for other viewpoints, is this: therapists need to know and are asked to know a person, yet they cannot know ahead of time and must try to know this unique person uniquely. (And in the end, of course, we are all faced, as Jung implies, with the limits of understanding ourselves or others.) Therefore, paradoxically enough, Jungian psychotherapy cultivates ignorance, because, as Jung also put it, “Nothing is more deleterious than a routine understanding of everything” (1945, p. 87). In fact this stance of informed ignorance is cultivated as a matter of technique by some post-Jungian therapists, who find meaning in the precepts of Wilfrid Bion, a psychoanalyst who suggested therapists begin each session without memory, desire, or understanding: “The psychoanalyst should aim at achieving a state of mind so that at every session he feels he has not seen the patient before. If he feels he has, he is treating the wrong patient” (Bion 1967, p. 244). All this means: forget what you know, or think you know, put aside the goal of curing or helping, do not hold tight to pri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Jungian approach: selected theoretical principles
• 3 The therapeutic relationship I: basics and overview
• 4 The therapeutic relationship II: processes and issues
• References
• Index