This interview was conducted by Jungian analyst Michaela Pastorekova in the summer of 2025 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of C. G. Jung’s birth. With Mark Winborn we explore what distinguishes Jungian analysis—and what Jungians can learn from other psychoanalytic traditions—focusing on technique, the analytic frame (chair/couch; in-person/online), transference, dreams, and individuation.
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Michaela Pastorekova (MP): From a clinical perspective, what feels most distinctive about working as a Jungian analyst, compared to other psychoanalytical traditions?
Mark Winborn (MW): I think there are several important differences. One important difference is that we have what we refer to as teleological or, the perspective element to the analysis. So, we are not just looking at the history of the patient and trying to understand patients’ personality configuration and their pathologies (if you want to call them that) from a historical standpoint. We are also looking at what is emerging in patients’ life and trying to understand, from the perspective, from where is the psyche attempting to move the patient. The patients conscious waking ego, that is always pointing at something, as well as looking back at something. So that’s one important difference.
The other significant difference for me is that we do have a lot of training in what we refer to as archetypal material, archetypal patterns. So we study a lot about myths, fairytales, legends and alchemy in particular, as well as the contemporary sources, like movies and poetry and literature and things like that. But what this does, and I don’t think it’s present in most other psychoanalytic schools, is that we’re training the mind, or shaping the mind of the analyst, to think in metaphorical terms. So, when we have a patient come in and they’re very weighed down by the ordinariness of their life and the tasks that have to be performed over and over again, we can certainly sympathize and empathize with that, and try to understand the ego’s perspective in all of this, but we would also try to transcend the individual experience into more universal elements of the experience. So, for example, we might bring in the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is punished by being condemned to push a stone up the hill every day. And at the end of the day, it rolls back down the hill, and Sisyphus exhales and trudges back down the hill, knowing he’s going to have to do the exact same thing tomorrow. And this is a way of helping the patient locate their individual struggle within a larger struggle of human existence. So those are two of the most important elements for me as a Jungian.
And then the idea that does cut across all psychoanalytic perspectives is the idea of psychic reality, that was very profound for Jung. And that what happens inside of us is just as real emotionally to us, just as real experientially to us, as what’s happening in our outer lives. We should place internal events, like fantasies and dreams, on the same order of significance as outer events in their lives. And so that’s really the three prominent things that I take away from being a Jungian, and that I don’t think I would get as strongly if I was in any other school of psychoanalysis.
MP: I want to ask, what will be the similar aspects which you see within Jungian psychoanalysis and the other schools and what is missing in the Jungian work. What do you think the Jungians could learn from the other psychoanalytical schools?
MW: Right, so I think the Jungian school is not a separate school, it’s a school of psychoanalysis. Think of psychoanalysis as a larger umbrella and Jungian psychology as one of those schools under the umbrella, along with Freudian, and Kleinian and object relations and relational, intersubjective, Lacanian, all of these schools of thought. And that we all have something slightly different to offer about what’s happening in [the] psyche. But the focus on unconscious process is our commonality. That’s the thing that holds us together and should hold us together. And we should have mutual respect for different approaches to the unconscious. I find shifting into another theoretical model is necessary with different patients. Instead of trying to fit all of my patients into the Jungian model, sometimes I find it helpful to think in an object relations model or Bionian and the post-Bionian model. Well, it’s that unconscious process that I think is the common denominator that allows us to have a dialogue.
Some of the things that I think I get from other schools of psychoanalysis are a focus on technique. How analysis is carried out. You know, setting the frame, making interpretations, analysing the transference and counter-transference, analysing the defences. All of these things are alluded to in the Jungian world, but they’re not really addressed very strongly in the Jungian training. There’s much more emphasis on all of this metaphorical material. I think there’s a perception in the Jungian world that having a theory of technique somehow limits you. I think it allows us to work more creatively by having a wider set of tools available for us. I think that Jungians, by ignoring the technique, limit their functionality in the clinical setting.
One particular area that’s vastly overlooked in the Jungian world is the analysis of defences and resistance in analysis. I’ve just published an article about this in Journal of Analytical Psychology that comes out in print in the September issue, called ‘Stealth Wars’. You know, the idea that’s kind of going on underneath the surface, but it’s there, and we need to learn to look for it and engage in it. Often in supervising Jungians, they seem to think that if they just are gentle enough, or ask questions enough, they’ll somehow get around the defences, and the defences will disappear, but that’s not how it works.
MP: What would you say in terms of analytic frame and the setting, for example, the face-to-face work vs. the use of the couch, how does the Jungian analysis converge or differ with the other schools?
MW: Right, so Jung abandoned the use of the couch, even though he was strongly influenced by Freud early in his career. After 1913, he made a departure from the Freudian school, he began to differentiate his analytical psychology from Freudian psychology. By doing so, he threw some of important elements out, trying to make his model different than Freuds. So, he felt that the idea that the analyst and the patient should be up in chairs facing each other, was positive, and in that it prevented regression, and somehow regression in analysis became something that was seen as a negative, rather than as a necessary process for some patients.
I think that there’s a qualitative positive difference for patients I see that are on the couch, and that it leaves more space for them to connect with their interior processes, their feelings, their somatic sensations, their fantasies, their affects. And it leaves more space for me to enter into states of reverie about the patient and our process together. And so, when we’re sitting up facing each other, we’re both focusing a lot on particularly facial cues. And patients are looking to our faces, in particular, for signals about whether we disapprove or approve of what they’re saying, and then they subtly shape what they’re saying, in a sense, to please us. And the couch allows us to move away from that.
Similarly, there’s a difference between being in the same room and seeing somebody online. It’s not that we can’t do good analytic work, working online. But it’s very different when the body is removed from the analysis, and the screen removes the body. Both visually, but also there’s a felt sense. Our body is processing the presence of another in thousands of different implicit subcortical ways that we don’t even know how to measure. For example, the mirror neurons are activated when we’re sitting face-to-face. Biochemical reactions, like the release of oxytocin, are going on while we’re sitting with another person, and all of those things may get triggered sometimes online, but the cues that trigger those processes are muted in online settings.
There’s [a] big difference in frequency. I think there’s a qualitative deepening of the process if we meet with somebody even twice a week, as opposed to once a week. And diminishment of depth when we move from once a week to every other week.
MP: How many Jungians are working with the couch? Because I think you are one of the only ones that I heard of that is working in this way. Or is it rather usual?
MW: I don’t think it’s a large percentage, probably less than 10%. There are three or four primary large schools of analytical psychology.
MP: Can you describe them?
Firstly, there’s the people that follow Jung closely to what Jung, von Franz, Neumann, Eddinger — these are prominent figures in the Jungian world — to what they did. That’s referred to as the classical school (1).The next school to emerge after that was what’s originally referred to as the London School (2). It’s now referred to as the developmental school, and these are people that have a strong psychoanalytic influence, both from theory and technique, including the use of the couch. So, a lot of people that were trained in London through the SAP (Society of analytical psychology) u[1] se the couch. A lot of people who do child play therapy often use the couch with their adult patients, because play therapy is actually the child’s way of re-associating, and that’s a part of what the couch does. It helps people move out of their ordinary narration of their life, into a more free-flowing orientation to their life, where they can muse about feelings and thoughts and fantasies that they’re having, with less scrutiny and with less shame about what’s happening internally.
And the third school, [which] James Hillman founded [is] the School of Archetypal Psychology (3). He didn’t feel like there was this overarching thing, that classical Jungians call ‘the Self’, this large orienting body within the psyche that structures everything. He said it’s just one of many centers of energy in the psyche. And that the goal isn’t to translate these images into psychological language. In a book called ‘Dreams and the Underworld’, he differentiates between day-world interpretations, which translate dream images into psychological language, and night world image – interpretations which seek to deepen the patient’s experience and connection with the dream, which he called ‘soulmaking’. And so, for Hillman, this phrase — ‘soulmaking’ — was the goal of analysis rather than individuation, which he saw as kind of linear and hierarchical process that he was trying to move away from. So, his primary thing is to keep that the soul is offering us images, and that deepening our connection to these interior images that emerge in dreams and fantasies is really the main activity of analysis.
And then there’s a fourth school around a man named Wolfgang Giegerich (4), which continued to gain emphasis over the past probably 40 years. Now that he’s been writing, and now they have their own conferences. And they focus around — it’s a technical term for them — ‘the process of interiority’[i]. Which means a little bit more than the surface word interior. It’s really a state of mind and attitude towards our interior life and what he calls ‘the logic of the soul’. So, that’s a fourth school. For me, it seems like a very intellectualized approach to analysis — that I find it hard to connect, in an affective way, to the patients that are being discussed. It’s hard to find the patient in the Giegerich’s work, and it often seems like he’s analysing [the] culture as much as [the] individual. He is also offering a very critical interpretation of Jung’s work, and offering reinterpretations of his concepts.
MP: How would you place yourself within those four groups?
MW: I’m certainly within the developmental camp. My primary supervisor was an American woman, who lived in London for 40 years. Her name was Mel Marshak[ii], and she was a brilliant clinician, incredibly well-read. An amazing lecturer, and she was the only analyst who would bring her own personal process notes to the lecture, and she would read to us directly out of her process notes to illustrate the theoretical concept she was talking about.
I think that’s a big void in the Jungian world — we don’t get much experience actually hearing other analysts do the work. They give some very broad summaries, or they give interpretations of dreams of their patients, but they don’t show the give and take of the actual analytical session. And so many Jungian candidates come out of training feeling like they know a lot of information about, dreams, myths, fairy tales, religions, and alchemy, but they don’t know how to put it all together into a package that we call analysis.
MP: Right, you are actually changing this, at least at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Another thing you mentioned very briefly was transference and counter-transference. So, I was curious, how is the handling of those different in a Jungian approach?
MW: Transference gets often interpreted in the Jungian world through an archetypal lens. Jung has a famous paper called ‘The Psychology of the Transference’(CW16)[iii], that is all dealt with through alchemical metaphors. And the problem is that it does give us metaphors for thinking about transference and counter-transference; for example, he uses the image of the alchemical bath, in which a king and queen are depicted as being in a bathtub, or a fountain together. And he depicts this as an image of what’s happening in the analytic relationship. We are in the bath together — as a metaphor it works, but as a teaching tool it doesn’t really teach you how to analyze the transference. It doesn’t help you recognize what’s called transference derivatives, where the patient is speaking about one thing and it sounds like another person, but they’re really also telling you something about how they feel about you, the analyst.
These kind of ideas from a Jungian perspective — it’s often dealt with on an archetypal level, rather than a personal level. And in doing that, we wash out some of the, or minimize some of the personal aspects of the transference that are often the most essential, because often we’re wounded in relationships. Those wounds come into the analytic relationship and need to be analyzed in the context with somebody (the analyst), who can see them, feel them, and then offer those observations back to the patient in a way that allows this complex or this internal object relation to be transformed through understanding.
So, I would say in the psychoanalytic world, the transference and countertransference is almost always dealt with on a personalistic[2] [3] level, the subject of the individual, and their individual experience. And then, in the Jungian world, we add this element of the archetypal patterns or universal elements of experience to this perspective.
MP: And from your perspective, how do transference and countertransference differ when a patient is on the couch versus face-to-face? Do you experience these dynamics differently?
MW: I think it’s very different. Because they’re not looking directly at me, to see my reaction to things they’re saying, they often are much more direct about telling me their feelings about me and our work together if they’re on the couch. When we’re in the chairs setting each other, a lot of that gets suppressed by the patient. That doesn’t mean it can’t get analysed if the analyst is sensitive to it, and we can see the small affective and somatic changes that are occurring in the session. But the patient is much less likely to tell us about their experience of us sitting up. There’s often a fear of intimacy and dependency that comes up in analysis. And to tell us about that directly while they’re looking at us often makes them more resistant to telling us about those feelings.
MP: Okay, and how does the Jungian analysis understand and work with the dreams differently from — let’s say — Freudian or other psychoanalytical schools?
MW: From a classical Freudian perspective, and I do not think this is the way most psychoanalysts from other schools practice any longer, is the idea of the manifest and the latent content of the dream. So, the manifest content of the dream is what’s remembered and the latent content of the dream is what’s disguised by the dream to protect the sleep of the dreamer. Jung says: no, there’s no hiding going on. The dream’s not trying to hide a meaning, so the manifest content, surface content, is the meaning of the dream. The problem is that the dream speaks in symbolic language rather than ordinary, rational, conscious language. And so, if it needs to portray something, like a deer, the animal. It’s not disguising something; it’s trying to convey something through using the deer as a metaphor. A deer as a symbolic figure that tells us something about the dream. So, the approach would be very different, that we’re not trying to decode the dream as we might in a classical Freudian perspective. We are trying to understand the language of symbols that the dream is speaking in.
And most of them are trying to read the surface level of the dream, for meaningful, affective, relational cues to the patient’s life. What it is about their experience that is attempting to be digested through the dream. So that’s the perspective I’ve moved back and forth, depending on who the dreamer is and what the dream is, and I’ll use both perspectives in my work as an analyst. Both the classical perspective — here’s the dream, asks the patients for their day residue and their associations to the dream. As a Jungian, we might offer an amplification, which is simply taking one of these archetypal patterns, like the Sisyphus thing that I mentioned earlier, and linking it to the dream to help the dreamer see this larger pattern within the dream. Or I might offer something from a movie, or from current events, or from a piece of literature, or a poem. That would also serve the same purpose, and in many ways those more contemporary elements, they still have these universal aspects of them, but they are more accessible to the patient who doesn’t have an exposure to classical Greek mythology or to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example. Most of Jung’s patients were exposed to those, either as children or in school. So, it’s a very different clientele that we see in a contemporary world than the one Jung was seeing.
MP: Another thing I was curious [about]: individuation is often described as a central thing to Jungian work, so how would you describe that it compares with the therapeutic aims of other psychoanalytic traditions?
Well, I think that there are other psychoanalytic traditions that have similar ideas. It’s not as explicit in, for example, self-psychology — Heinz Kohut’s model of psychoanalysis. But they do have the idea that the patient comes into analysis with deficits or holes in their self-structure. And he uses self a slightly different way than Jung uses self. But self as an overall organizing structure of the psyche. And that there’s deficits in the self-structure, and the goal of analysis is to fill in those deficits, so that the patient functions in as whole a manner as possible. So that has a little bit of — not just repairing the past — but moving towards future wholeness. Even though Kohut doesn’t use the term wholeness, but it’s implied in this model. Wilfred Bion is the one who is closest to Jung in this. He has this idea of what he calls ‘coming into being’. And he doesn’t have a formal definition for coming into being, but the idea that we’re all in the process of coming into being, and each time we dream, we’re trying to dream ourselves into existence. So, there is very much this teleological perspective element, that we find in Jung through the concept of individuation, that’s also present in Bion.
MP: The last, I would call it, free association question. In the end, what question you would like me to ask you? What other thing maybe you would like to add to all of those things we discussed?
MW: Well, I think this cross theoretical dialogue is extremely important to the survival of depth psychology in general. We need to stop seeing other schools of thought as some kind of competitor or enemy, and begin seeing all schools of psychoanalysis as mutual allies. And that we all have things to learn from each other, and that contributes to our capabilities as analysts and therapists working in this field.
So recently, I’ve been surprised to find an interest from the Bionians in having me come to some of their conferences, and to talk about Jung to Bionians. And so that’s been, I think, a very rich experience, and sometimes we bring Bionians into the Jungian world. A colleague of mine, Joe Aguayo, who’s a Bionian analyst, just recently published an article[iv] in Journal of Analytical Psychology on Bion’s reading of Jung’s book, his autobiography, ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’. And Bion actually read about two-thirds of the book, at least from his underlining and margin writing. And so, Aguayo provides his interpretation. He’s also a trained historian, as well as a psychoanalyst and a psychologist. And beyond reading of ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ Bion was doing seminars around at the same time. And many may not be aware that Bion actually attended 3 out of 5 of Jung’s lectures at the Tavistock Clinic in London, prior to his certification as a psychoanalyst. This was when he was still a practicing psychiatrist.
So that’s my hope: not that we have to lose all of our individual identities and our allegiances and affections for the model that we trained from. I don’t think we need to become homogenized and that nobody is different than anybody else. But that we can learn from each other, and in doing so, we’ll all become capable of greater depths with our patients. That’s my goal, and that’s what almost all of my writing has moved towards over the past 25 years, is trying to bridge this gap between analytical psychology and other schools of psychoanalysis, so everything I write draws from both sets of literature.
There was a man named Robert Wallerstein who was the past president of The International Association of Psychoanalysis and the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he wrote a book called ‘The Common Ground of Psychoanalysis’. And he said, we’re never going to agree from a theoretical, conceptual perspective of what’s happening within psyche, but we can agree on many of the clinical elements that we are doing, even if we talk about them in different language. You know, these things like interpretation, the content of the interpretation may differ, but the act of interpretation serves the same function.
MP: Right, that’s great. Thank you.
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Mark Winborn, PhD, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He is a training analyst and lecturer with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, the C. G. Jung Institute–Küsnacht, the Romanian Society for Analytical Psychology, and serves on the adjunct faculty of the Russian Society for Analytical Psychology and the Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology. His work focuses on analytic technique and the integration of Jungian and contemporary psychoanalytic traditions. He is the author and editor of five books, including Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey (2011), Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond (2014), Interpretation in Jungian Analysis: Art and Technique (2018), Beyond Persona (2023), and Jungian Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction (2024). His writings—over fifty articles and chapters—have been translated into numerous languages and explore themes of analytic process, participation mystique, and the dialogue between Jungian and contemporary psychoanalysis. At the heart of his work lies a talent for connecting traditions, disciplines, and human experiences – what might be called a life of intersecting vertices.
Books and articles mentioned:
Aguayo, J. (2025, February). Conjoining Bion’s Reading of C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections with his Clinical Seminars in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, Volume70, Issue1, pp. 93-113.
Hillman, J. (1975). The dream and the Underworld.
Jung, C. G., & Jaffé, A. (1963). Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Psychology of Transference. (1950).
Wallerstein, R. (1988). One Psychoanalysis or Many? . The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (69), s. 5-21.
Wallerstein, R. (1992). The common ground of psychoanalysis.
Will psychoanalytic pluralism be an enduring state of our discipline? . (2005). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86, s. 623-626.
Winborn, M. (2025, September). Stealth War: Defences, Individuation, and the Analytic Process. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, Volume70, Issue4, pp. 640-662.
[i] Correct term is ´Discipline of Interiority´ (ed.note) https://www.ispdi.org/
[ii] https://psychoanalyticmuse.blogspot.com/2011/10/commemorating-mel-marshak-1926-2010.html
[iii] https://iaap.org/resources/academic-resources/collected-works-abstracts/volume-16-practice-psychotherapy/
[iv] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.13070
