The Analytic Relationship: Integrating Jungian, Attachment Theory and Developmental Perspectives

Abstract

This paper highlights some key features of a Jungian approach to transference and countertransference and suggests that a Jungian model has crucial aspects in common with contemporary views in attachment theory on the nature of the analytic relationship. The analytic relationship is examined in terms of the fundamental processes of psychic development described in attachment theory and affective neuroscience, namely affect regulation and development of reflective function and of self‐agency. The relative value of three analytic techniques, those of interpretation, new relational experience and regression, are discussed in relation to these processes. I suggest that each of the traditional psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic models concentrates on differing aspects of these psychic processes and analytic techniques. I construct a grid to illustrate this and to demonstrate how attachment theory and developmental neuroscience offer a theoretical basis on which we can develop an integrated model of the nature of the analytic relationship and tasks.

Encountering the Internal Persecutor

“…Meanwhile relational theorists like Stern (2010) and Bromberg (1996) questioned the notion of a singular unitary self, and proposed that the "self" consists of innumerable selfstates. Even some contemporary Jungian theorists have moved away from Fordham's archetypal perspective of a primary self (for example, Knox, 2004Knox, , 2009. Whether we adopt a more relational, transpersonal, or more intrapsychically focused conceptualisation of the development of the self, or an integration of the three, all these perspectives recognise the potential for an inner world populated by aspects of self in conflict with each other; that is, intrapsychic encounters with other.…”