Hans Dieckmann on Interpretation

"A complete interpretation...never takes place in a single analytic hour but may often extend over long periods of time.  I would understand this sort of complete and successful interpretation as a conscious, emotionally laden verbal act on the part of the analyst which leads to bringing to consciousness a previously unconscious complex as well as the resistence and the systems of defense that have held this complex fast in the unconscious.  A complete and successful interpretation should embrace the three tenses - past, present, and future - and should describe both the contents and the emotional cathexes.  Likewise, it should give information about the personal contents and the archetypal core of the complex.  In this context, 'past' signifies the genetic component of the complex, that is, answers the questions of when and under what conditions did the complex develop and and why was it absolutely necessary in the development of this particular patient to suppress and repress the contents, feelings, and affects of precisely this complex.  To the present belongs first and foremost the interpretation of the effects that these complex contents evoke within the transference and counter-transference situation between analyst and patient, and beyond that, of course, also those distorted situations that arise through projection of the unconscious complex contents in the current life situation of the patient as well as in interpersonal relationships in general.  'Future' refers to the 'final' element contained in every unconscious complex that presses into consciousness....The final component - i.e. the tendency toward meaning and purpose that arises when drive and image are linked and in which the possibilities of resolution and development are contained - must be brought to consciousness or made conscious, and consciousness must judge it, that is accept it or reject it."

Hans Dieckmann (1991), Methods in Analytical Psychology, Wilmette, IL: Chiron,  p. 166.

Jerome Oremland on Interpretation

"It is important, however, to recognize that interpretation is interactive and that all aspects of psychotherapeutic interaction are just that, various kinds of interactions. Yet, interpretation as an intervention is qualitatively different from other interactions in that its aim is solely to add explicit knowledge, whereas interactive interventions remain largely experiential. Most important, when transferential, interpretation makes the interaction itself the object of analysis." p. 10

Jerome Oremland, "Interpretation and Interaction: Psychoanalysis or Psychotherapy?" Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1991.

Aldo Carotenuto on Suffering

"Psychotherapy is not the construction of models according to which human suffering is channeled and labeled; it is the examination of suffering, the discovery of the dense fabric of correspondence between external and interior events which constitutes every life.  And at the moment the analyst discloses that alarming visage, on which the traces of old pain and never-healed wounds have been impressed, that suffering becomes the 'treatment' for the other." p. vii

Aldo Carotenuto, The Difficult Art: A Critical Discourse on Psychotherapy, Wilmette, IL: Chiron, 1992

Freud on Resistance

"Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger."

Freud, Sigmund (1910). ‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI, p. 225.

Edward Edinger on Consciousness

Jungian Analyst Edward Edinger speaks below about his understanding of C.G. Jung's notion of consciousness:

"These are the chief statements Jung has made concerning the emerging new myth....The essential new idea is that the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness.  The key word is 'consciousness.'  Unfortunately, the experiential meaning of this term is almost impossible to convey abstractly.  As with all fundamental aspects of the psyche it transcends the grasp of the intellect....the experience of consciousness is made up of two factors, 'knowing' and 'withness,' i.e., knowing in the presence of an 'other,' in a setting of twoness.  Symbolically the number two refers to the opposites.  We thus reach the conclusion that consciousness is somehow born out of the experience of opposites." p. 17

The Creation of Consciousness: Jung's Myth for Modern Man, Toronto: Inner-City Books, 1984.