Gems

A friend and I have begin reading together my favorite recent Jungian book, The Mystery of Analytical Work by Barbara Stevens Sullivan. This is at least my third time through this book and still I find new gems to savor and reflect on. From this morning's reading: Clinical training may tell us what the therapeutic relationship should be like, but in practice the transference relationship develops between two people who are both present and fully participating, even when they are trying to withhold themselves or to block each other out. We can never leave our depths at home. They always muddy the waters, communicating things we do not know we know to people who do not know what they are learning even as their deeper selves store away these new understandings in parts of themselves they know nothing or little about. Furthermore, a relationship, even between a mother and a newborn or a therapist and patient, is an interdependent experience, although one person may be much more helpless and out-of-control than the other. After all, the analyst needs the patient if she is to be an analyst and the patient needs the analyst if he is to be a patient. A relationship can never be fully dissected; it branches out in infinite directions into the unknowable inner reaches of each participant’s soul. Like the growth process, a relationship will always include some mystery, highlighting our vulnerability to the inner or outer realities that we can never be sure ...
Source: Jung At Heart - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs