C G Jung, therapy

On Transference in Therapy: where the work truly begins

aleksandrastaneva

In therapy, there comes a moment when something shifts: the client begins to feel things about the therapist that don’t quite belong to the present moment. Maybe it’s admiration, resentment, longing, anger or even love. This is called transference. These are feelings once held about a significant other. And in particular, feelings that weren’t able to be expressed or shared and were buried in the unconscious.

Transference is not a detour. It’s the royal road to healing. As Jung put it in a conversation with Freud during their first meeting- transference is the alpha and the omega of the analytic method.

Transference is where the unconscious begins to constellate, where deeply held patterns and unmet needs project themselves onto the therapist. And when we’re willing to stay with it, rather than brush it away or act it out, something transformational happens.

In the therapy room, it often shows up in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways: the demand to be fixed, the hunger to be rescued, the yearning to be finally seen, loved, or chosen.

These are not flaws in the therapeutic process. They are the process. They are clues to what the psyche is trying to resolve.

As therapists, this is where we must be most awake,attuned, awake and of course, trained. Not to interpret too soon, but to become a vessel, a symbolic bath, to borrow from the Rosarium Philosophorum, the alchemical text I’m currently exploring through Jung’s Psychology of the Transference.

There, the King and Queen first meet at the bath, a powerful image of opposites beginning to unite. Until they are ready to really and fully meet.

In the consulting room, transference is this bath.

It’s uncomfortable. Clients may want to flee. Therapists may want to fix. But staying with the heat of this encounter is how the deeper work begins. It’s how fantasy meets consciousness, and how true transformation becomes possible.

“It is inevitable that the doctor should be influenced to a certain extent and even that his nervous health should suffer. He quite literally takes over the sufferings of his patient and shares them with him. For this reason he runs a risk and must run it in the nature of things.” (C G Jung, The Psychology of the transference”

… a supreme responsibility indeed.

With love,

Aleksandra

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Published by aleksandrastaneva

Aleksandra She, who remembers. I work at the threshold, where psyche speaks in symbols, and the soul remembers. Rooted in Jungian depth psychology and Internal Family Systems, my work invites women and seekers into the quiet, often forgotten places within: the underworlds of grief, the wild terrain of desire, the sacred chambers of the inner child, inner mother, the Shadowlands, and Self. With a background in women’s heath research, in ritual, and in lived experience spaces, I do not offer diagnosis or treatment, I offer devotion to the unfolding Self. On the threshold of becoming- where we always are. Through dreams, parts work, myth, and the body, I walk beside those ready to meet themselves fully, fiercely, and tenderly. This is not fast work. It is sacred work. It is not about fixing, it is about remembering. I do not promise certainty. I promise presence, and a deep trust in the wisdom already within you. My work is rooted in the wild: in the seasons and the body, in the wisdom of the land, and in the deep ecology of the soul. I honour the personal as political, and the psychological as inseparable from the cultural. Feminism, ecopsychology, and embodied awareness are not add-ons here, they are the soil this work grows from. I offer one-on-one soulwork sessions, women’s circles, and immersive psychoeducational experiences that weave together depth psychology, parts work, and embodiment. Some of this work unfolds indoors, some in wild places—always with reverence for the wisdom of nature, the nervous system, and the feminine psyche. Welcome to the HORÓ nest. I think you might just be ready to re-member your Self.

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