This volume, number 16 in the series, is the first of the Gesammelte Werke to be published. It contains both early and late writings on questions concerned with the practice of psychotherapy. I am indebted to the Editors not only for their careful revision of the texts, but in particular for their choice of material. This testifies to their appreciation of the fact that my contribution to the knowledge of the psyche is founded on practical experience of human beings. It was, indeed, my endeavours as a medical psychologist to understand the ills of the soul that led me, in more than fifty years of psychotherapeutic practice, to all my later insights and conclusions, and in turn compelled me to re-examine my findings and to modify them in the light of new experience.
The reader will find in these essays not only an outline of my attitude as a practising psychotherapist and of the principles on which it rests. They also contain an historical study of a phenomenon that may be regarded as the crux, or at any rate the crucial experience, in any thorough going analysis—the problem of the transference, whose central importance was recognized long ago by Freud. This question is of such scope, and so difficult to elucidate in all its aspects, that a deeper investigation of its historical antecedents could not be avoided.
Naturally, if an historical study like this is seen in isolation from my later writings, the unprepared reader will have some difficulty in recognizing its connection with his conception of what psychotherapy should be. Psychotherapeutic practice and the historical approach will seem to him to be two incommensurable things. In psychological reality, however, this is not the case at all, for we are constantly coming upon phenomena that reveal their historical character as soon as their causality is examined a little more closely. Psychic modes of behaviour are, indeed, of an eminently historical nature. The psychotherapist has to acquaint himself not only with the personal biography of his patient, but also with the mental and spiritual assumptions prevalent in his milieu, both present and past, where traditional and cultural influences play a part and often a decisive one.
For example, no psychotherapist who seriously endeavours to understand the whole man is spared the task of learning the language of dreams and their symbolism. As with every language, historical knowledge is needed in order to understand it properly. This is particularly so since it is not an everyday language, but a symbolic language that makes frequent use of age-old forms of expression. A knowledge of these enables the analyst to extricate his patient from the oppressive constriction of a purely personalistic understanding of himself, and to release him from the egocentric prison that cuts him off from the wide horizon of his further social, moral, and spiritual development.
In spite or because of its heterogeneous composition, this book may serve to give the reader a good idea of the empirical foundations of psychotherapy and its widely ramifying problems.
C. G. JUNG
August 1957