Living Archetypes by Stevens Anthony

Author:Stevens, Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317595618
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Contemporary research leads to similar conclusions. Yet many analytic organizations continue to insist that patients must attend at least three or four times a week over long periods of time; otherwise, they insist, the patient is not getting proper analysis find therefore not receiving adequate treatment. Unless these organizations can produce evidence in support of this contention, they should face up to a need to reconsider their position.

Analysing to live

One aspect of Jung’s practice which most analysts have chosen to ignore (often for financial reasons) is his advice to break off the analysis every ten weeks to throw the patient back into life, to discourage dependence on the analyst, and to encourage reliance on the Self. Then the patient does not live to analyse, but analyses to live. This can be of immense benefit to analysts as well as to patients, for if helps prevent. the exhaustion that can so easily afflict hard-working therapists and ensure against their work becoming routine or lifeless. Provided they can afford it, a regular break from clinical responsibilities can enable analysts to follow other pursuits, such as studying, writing, lecturing, painting, pottery, travel, sport, and participating more fully in the lives of their family and friends, so that they can recharge their creative energies and strengthen their immunity to those forms of psychic contagion and ‘burn out’ that are common among therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists. Jung could afford to do this because he married a rich wife. Others are less fortunately placed, but it remains an ideal goal.

However, a number of patients find it impossible to work in the manner that Jung advocated, especially those who, as a result of defective parenting in childhood, suffer from personality disorders or from what Bowlby called ‘anxious attachment’. Such patients need time to establish with their analyst a working relationship through which they can begin to conceive of themselves as capable of sustaining a lasting bond of intimacy and trust. Only when this has been achieved can they benefit from the kind of imaginative work with the unconscious that Jung regarded as the crux of analysis. Apart from these and some other exceptions, the classical Jungian approach seems to be of help to patients with widely differing kinds of personal difficulties and neurotic disorders, although a great deal of research needs to be done to substantiate this.

In Jung’s view, the factor of primary importance which determines the success or failure of treatment, is the personality of the analyst. For this reason Jung introduced the training analysis as an indispensable requirement for becoming an analyst, while he was still a member of Freud’s psychoanalytic circle. ‘You must yourself be the real stuff,’ he wrote. ‘If you are not, God help you! Then you will lead your patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis of yourself‘ (MDR, p. 134). Elsewhere he wrote:

An ancient adept has said: ‘if the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way’. This Chinese saying, unfortunately,

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