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‘Fascination’, ‘contagion’ and naming what we do: rethinking the transcendent function
Author(s) -
Clark Alison
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2010.01873.x
Subject(s) - psychic , psychoanalysis , psychoanalytic theory , psychology , terminology , epistemology , countertransference , function (biology) , analytical psychology , philosophy , linguistics , medicine , alternative medicine , pathology , evolutionary biology , biology
: Taking ‘The psychology of the transference’ (Jung 1946) and ‘Problems of modern psychotherapy’ (Jung 1931) as its text, this paper begins by challenging the usefulness of the term ‘transcendent function’ in contemporary debate about the nature of ‘imagination and psychic transformation in analysis’. It argues that Jung's language in The Practice of Psychotherapy ( CW 16)— fascination, suffering, infection, influence —is closer and truer to the experience it describes than the philosophically inspired terms transcendent function and conflict of opposites . His ideas in these writings anticipate later trends in psychoanalytic theory concerning countertransference and the effect of one mind on another, and constitute a theoretical basis for the concept of mutual transformation. Jung's radical insistence on an analytic relationship founded on mutual unconsciousness as the locus of transformation cannot, it is argued, be satisfactorily accounted for by the traditional terminology.