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From Dr. Jung.
March, 1913.
At various places in your letters it has struck me that the problem of "transference" seems to you particularly critical. Your feeling is entirely justified. The transference is indeed at present the central problem of analysis.
You know that Freud regards the transference as the projection of infantile phantasies upon the doctor. To this extent the transference is an infantile-erotic relationship. All the same, viewed from the outside, superficially, the thing by no means always looks like an infantile-erotic situation. As long as it is a question of the so-called "positive" transference, the infantile-erotic character can usually be recognised without difficulty. But if it is a "negative" transference, you can see nothing but violent resistances which sometimes veil themselves in seemingly critical or sceptical dress. In a certain sense the determining factor in such circumstances is the patient's relation to authority, that is, in the last resort, to the father. In both forms of transference the doctor is treated as if he were the father—according to the situation either tenderly or with hostility. In this view the transference has the force of a resistance as soon as it becomes a question of resolving the infantile attitude. But this form of transference must be destroyed, inasmuch as the object of analysis is the patient's moral autonomy. A lofty aim, you will say. Indeed lofty, and far off, but still not altogether so remote, since it actually corresponds to one of the predominating tendencies of our stage of civilisation, namely, that urge towards individualisation by which our whole epoch deserves to be characterised. (Cf. Müller-Lyer: "Die Familie.") If a man does not believe in this orientation and still bows before the scientific causal view-point, he will, of course, be disposed merely to resolve this hostility, and to let the patient remain in a positive relationship towards the father, thus expressing the ideal of an earlier epoch of civilisation. It is commonly recognised that the Catholic Church represents one of the most powerful organisations based upon this earlier tendency. I cannot venture to doubt that there are very many individuals who feel happier under compulsion from others than when forced to discipline themselves. (Cf. Shaw: "Man and Superman.") None the less, we do our neurotic patients a grievous wrong if we try to force them all into the category of the unfree. Among neurotics, there are not a few who do not require any reminders of their social duties and obligations; rather are they born or destined to become the bearers of new social ideals. They are neurotic so long as they bow down to authority and refuse the freedom to which they are destined. Whilst we look at life only retrospectively, as is the case in the Viennese psychoanalytic writings, we shall never do justice to this type of case and never bring the longed-for deliverance. For in that fashion we can only educate them to become obedient children, and thereby strengthen the very forces that have made them ill—their conservative retardation and their submissiveness to authority. Up to a certain point this is the right way to take with the infantile resistance which cannot yet reconcile itself with authority. But the power which edged them out from their retrograde dependence on the father is not at all a childish desire for insubordination, but the powerful urge towards the development of an individual personality, and this struggle is their imperative life's task. Adler's psychology does much greater justice to this situation than Freud's.
In the one case (that of infantile intractability) the positive transference signifies a highly important achievement, heralding cure; in the other (infantile submissiveness) it portends a dangerous backsliding, a convenient evasion of life's duty. The negative transference represents in the first case an increased resistance, thus a backsliding and an evasion of duty, but in the second it is an advance of healing significance. (For the two types, cf. Adler's "Trotz und Gehorsam.")
The transference then is, as you see, to be judged quite differently in different cases.
The psychological process of "transference"—be it negative or positive—consists in the libido entrenching itself, as it were, round the personality of the doctor, the doctor accordingly representing certain emotional values. (As you know, by libido I understand very much what Antiquity meant by the cosmogenic principle of Eros; in modern terminology simply "psychic energy.") The patient is bound to the doctor, be it in affection, be it in opposition, and cannot fail to follow and imitate the doctor's psychic adaptations. To this he finds himself urgently compelled. And with the best will in the world and all technical skill, the doctor cannot prevent him, for intuition works surely and instinctively, in despite of the conscious judgment, be it never so strong. Were the doctor himself neurotic, and inadequate in response to the demands of the external life, or inharmonious within, the patient would copy the defect and build it up into the fabric of his own presentations: you may imagine the result.
Accordingly I cannot regard the transference as merely the transference of infantile-erotic phantasies; no doubt that is what it is from one standpoint, but I see also in it, as I said in an earlier letter, the process of the growth of feeling and adaptation. From this standpoint the infantile erotic phantasies, in spite of their indisputable reality, appear rather as material for comparison or as analogous pictures of something not understood as yet, than as independent desires. This seems to me the real reason of their being unconscious. The patient, not knowing the right attitude, tries to grasp at a right relationship to the doctor by way of comparison and analogy with his infantile experiences. It is not surprising that he gropes back for just the most intimate relations of his childhood, to discover the appropriate formula for his attitude to the doctor, for this relationship also is very intimate, and to some extent different from the sexual relationship, just as is that of the child towards its parents. This relationship—child to parent—which Christianity has everywhere set up as the symbolic formula for human relationships, provides a way of restoring to the patient that directness of ordinary human emotion of which he had been deprived through the inroad of sexual and social values (from the standpoint of power, etc.). The purely sexual, more or less primitive and barbaric valuation, operates in far-reaching ways against a direct, simple human relationship, and thereupon a blocking of the libido occurs which easily gives rise to neurotic formations. By means of analysis of the infantile portion of the transference-phantasies, the patient is brought back to the remembrance of his childhood's relationship, and this—stripped of its infantile qualities—gives him a beautiful, clear picture of direct human intercourse as opposed to the purely sexual valuation. I cannot regard it as other than a misconception to judge the childish relationship retrospectively and therefore as exclusively a sexual one, even though a certain sexual content can in no wise be denied to it.