Jung - The practice of psychotherapy : essays on the psychology of the transference and other subjects

B O L L I N G E N S E R I E S X X

THE COLLECTED WORKS

OF

C. G. JUNG

VOLUME 16

EDITORS

SIR HERBERT READ

MICHAEL FORDHAM, M.D., M.R.C.P.

GERHARD ADLER, PH.D.

WILLIAM MCGUIRE, executive editor

ESSAYS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE TRANSFERENCE AND OTHER SUBJECTS

C. G. JUNG

SECOND EDITION

TRANSLATED BY R. F. C. HULL

B O L L I N G E N S E R I E S X X

COPYRIGHT 1954 BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION INC., NEW YORK, N.Y. COPYRIGHT RENEWED 1982 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW MATERIAL COPYRIGHT 1966 BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, PRINCETON, N.J. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED, 1966

Second printing, 1970

Third printing, with corrections, 1975

Fourth printing, 1977

First Princeton / Bollingen Paperback printing, 1985

THIS EDITION IS BEING PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS AND IN ENGLAND BY ROUTLEDGE AND KEGAN PAUL, LTD. IN THE AMERICAN EDITION, ALL THE VOLUMES COMPRISING THE COLLECTED WORKS CONSTITUTE NUMBER XX IN BOLLINGEN SERIES. THE PRESENT VOLUME IS NUMBER 16 OF THE COLLECTED WORKS AND WAS THIRD TO APPEAR .

ISBN 0-691-09767-4
ISBN 0-691-01870-7 ( PBK .)
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Since this volume was one of the first to appear in the Collected Works, its second edition calls for considerable revision. As with each new edition of these volumes, the reference materials (footnotes and bibliography) have been corrected and brought up to date, taking into account the subsequent publication of nearly all of Jungs works in this English edition. The use of numbers for bibliographical citations having been found to be inconvenient for readers, references by title have been substituted.

The first eleven papers are unchanged, except for new information in some of the editorial footnotes (indicated by an asterisk). The translation of The Psychology of the Transference has, however, been extensively reworked. The translations from Latin and Greek have been revised by Mr. A. S. B. Glover, and improved readings have been substituted in the text. Among the other revisions are several taken over from the subsequent Swiss edition of the volume and the changes noted at pars. 405 and 433.

In 1958 the present work, with the title Praxis der Psychotherapie, was the first volume to appear in the Gesammelte Werke von C. G. Jung, under the editorship of Marianne Niehus-Jung, Lena Hurwitz-Eisner, and Franz Riklin, in Zurich. Acknowledgment is gratefully made to the Swiss Editors for suggestions which were helpful in the preparation of this second English edition. The foreword which Jung specially wrote for Praxis der Psychotherapie has been added to the present volume.

A 1937 lecture, The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy, previously unpublished and recently rediscovered among Jungs posthumous papers, has been added to this second edition as an appendix.

Certain of the essays in this volume were previously translated and published in Contributions to Analytical Psychology (London and New York, 1928), Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London and New York, 1933), and Essays on Contemporary Events (London, 1947). I wish to thank Mrs. Cary F. Baynes and Miss Mary Briner for permission to make full use of those texts in preparing the present revised versions. My particular thanks are due to Miss Barbara Hannah for placing at my disposal her draft translation of the opening chapters of The Psychology of the Transference.

It may be noted that two papers, Some Aspects of Modern Psychotherapy and The Therapeutic Value of Abreaction, were written in English, and are published here with certain editorial modifications.

This volume, number 16 in the series, is the first of the Gesammelte Werke to be published. It contains both early and late writings on questions concerned with the practice of psychotherapy. I am indebted to the Editors not only for their careful revision of the texts, but in particular for their choice of material. This testifies to their appreciation of the fact that my contribution to the knowledge of the psyche is founded on practical experience of human beings. It was, indeed, my endeavours as a medical psychologist to understand the ills of the soul that led me, in more than fifty years of psychotherapeutic practice, to all my later insights and conclusions, and in turn compelled me to re-examine my findings and to modify them in the light of new experience.

The reader will find in these essays not only an outline of my attitude as a practising psychotherapist and of the principles on which it rests. They also contain an historical study of a phenomenon that may be regarded as the crux, or at any rate the crucial experience, in any thorough going analysisthe problem of the transference, whose central importance was recognized long ago by Freud. This question is of such scope, and so difficult to elucidate in all its aspects, that a deeper investigation of its historical antecedents could not be avoided.

Naturally, if an historical study like this is seen in isolation from my later writings, the unprepared reader will have some difficulty in recognizing its connection with his conception of what psychotherapy should be. Psychotherapeutic practice and the historical approach will seem to him to be two incommensurable things. In psychological reality, however, this is not the case at all, for we are constantly coming upon phenomena that reveal their historical character as soon as their causality is examined a little more closely. Psychic modes of behaviour are, indeed, of an eminently historical nature. The psychotherapist has to acquaint himself not only with the personal biography of his patient, but also with the mental and spiritual assumptions prevalent in his milieu, both present and past, where traditional and cultural influences play a part and often a decisive one.

For example, no psychotherapist who seriously endeavours to understand the whole man is spared the task of learning the language of dreams and their symbolism. As with every language, historical knowledge is needed in order to understand it properly. This is particularly so since it is not an everyday language, but a symbolic language that makes frequent use of age-old forms of expression. A knowledge of these enables the analyst to extricate his patient from the oppressive constriction of a purely personalistic understanding of himself, and to release him from the egocentric prison that cuts him off from the wide horizon of his further social, moral, and spiritual development.

In spite or because of its heterogeneous composition, this book may serve to give the reader a good idea of the empirical foundations of psychotherapy and its widely ramifying problems.