Facing the sea, you see surface but sense depth. What’s visible, what’s reflected, and, an uncertain knowing of what moves beneath. The space where the known and the unknown meet.

Transference works like this. What shows up between therapist and client isn’t something to be avoided – it’s the psyche revealing deeper patterns through relationship.

During this workshop you will:

• Understand psychoanalytic and Jungian theoretical fundamentals about transference and countertransference.
• Learn hands-on skills for working with transference, meaning you can identify, surface and process client projections.
• De-mystify the potentials of transference and countertransference, as they inform the alchemical process.

Overview

Far from being unwelcome or a distraction, transference points us to possibilities of profound transformation. If we think about the content of projection, and work skillfully with the phenomena, a royal road to individuation can emerge.

Transference is not optional – it’s happening in every therapeutic relationship, all the time. Yet it is sometimes misunderstood as a phenomenon to be avoided or resolved in favour of positive relationship. Negative transference can feel dangerous: some therapists avoid triggering it. Or worse, a dynamic can emerge where a strong transference is named by the therapist, but the client feels pathologised, and could be left sitting with shame and helplessness.

This workshop offers an analytically informed, engaged and proactive way of working with transference. An objective but participatory stance is encouraged, where transference and countertransference are seen as helpful, necessary and the building blocks of depth transformation.

From a Jungian perspective, transference is automatic, essential to human functioning, and carries both personal developmental material and archetypal energies. When we learn to stay with transference and invite it into the relationship, we create conditions for profound transformation. Indeed from an analytic standpoint, transference is the royal road to depth work, and countertransference is a primary clinical instrument.

Working at depth with transference requires us to understand complexes – those constellations of thoughts, feelings, affect and memory that organize the unconscious, each with an archetype at its core. Mother, Father, Other, Family, Anima and Animus – these archetypal patterns shape how our clients experience us, and how we experience them. Learning to map these patterns collaboratively can become essential clinical work.

Yet there’s a shadow here. Dated approaches inadvertently teach transference as client pathology. Jung’s contribution was that projection is entirely natural, and the analyst’s personality must be a significant factor in the therapeutic relationship. There’s always a hook, even when we’re the “more self-aware” person in the room. To work ethically at depth, we must constantly examine ourselves and get comfortable being in genuine, reflexive relationship.

Content Structure

• Introduction to principals of transference, countertransference, complexes and archetypes and how they inform projection
• Key transferences: idealisation, erotic, hate, ambivalence, adherence, mother, father, anima, animus
• The rosarium philosophorum: linking transference and spiritual awakening through alchemical processes and operations
• Advanced transferential processes: boundary projections, pre-transference and collusions.
• Working with vs. resolving: considerations and approaches for unpacking and ultimately resolving

Format

Suitability

Open to any registered psychotherapist. This seminar will cover some fundamentals of Jungian psychology, familiarity with that territory will be helpful but is not required. This seminar is compatible with another workshop on erotic transference.