Chiron, Hermes and the Work of Analysis: A Reflection on Jungian Practice

Analysis, as I have come to understand it, has very little to do with repair. Something else is asked of it — something harder to name, and less comfortable to claim. Accompaniment, perhaps. Translation. The slow restoration of a person’s sense of themselves as the author of their own story.

I didn’t arrive at that view through theory. I arrived at it through having needed it myself.

My own analysis — my own long passage through what I would not have chosen to traverse — is not an adjunct to my clinical work. It is its foundation. I do not observe from a safe distance while my patients move through difficult territory. I accompany them from ground I have already crossed. That is different. The difference is not subtle; it changes the whole texture of what happens in the room.

Chiron: The Wound That Becomes Knowledge

The mythological figure who captures this most precisely, for me, is Chiron. Not Asclepius, the physician, whose healing power is a gift. Not Apollo, whose clarity is solar and sovereign. Chiron — the centaur who taught Achilles and Heracles, the greatest healer of antiquity — was also permanently wounded. An arrow he could not remove. An injury he could not cure, despite being able to cure others.

That is the paradox at the centre of his story, and it is the paradox at the centre of analytical work as I practice it. Chiron heals not because he is untouched by suffering but because he has gone consciously into his own. The wound doesn’t disqualify him. It becomes part of his knowledge. Something he can work from rather than something he must hide.

If I haven’t sat with my own despair — really sat with it, not managed it from a clinical distance — I become dangerous in certain ways. Not deliberately. But the unexamined wound projects. A patient’s hopelessness triggers something in me that I don’t recognise as mine. Their violence, their fragmentation, their wish to disappear — I respond to these from a place that is not entirely theirs. Personal analysis is not self-improvement work. It’s an ethical prerequisite for being present with another person’s story when it starts to fall apart.

Analysis prevents two specific failures. The first is rescuing — the impulse to relieve the patient of their pain before they’ve been able to metabolise it. The second is defending — turning away from what is being brought into the room because it touches something in me I haven’t faced. Both failures feel, in the moment, like good clinical judgment. That’s what makes them dangerous. Without ongoing work on oneself, they are almost impossible to distinguish from genuine care.

Hermes: Building a Bridge Between Worlds

Analysis is not only about meeting darkness. It is also — perhaps primarily — about being in conversation with the psyche. And the psyche speaks in ways that consciousness does not always recognise.

Sensation. Image. Silence. Symptom. The repetition of a particular phrase, week after week, that neither patient nor analyst has yet been able to touch directly. Dreams that arrive fully formed and resist all immediate meaning. These are the languages of what Jung called the unconscious — not a dramatic subterranean force but simply the vast domain of what the person has not yet been able to make their own.

The analyst’s role, in these moments, resembles Hermes more than it resembles any other figure. Hermes was the messenger of the gods — the only one who could move freely between Olympus and the underworld, between the realm of the divine and the realm of the dead. The translator, not the author. The carrier of meanings across thresholds that others cannot cross.

In the consulting room, I work to build something like that bridge — between what can be put into words and what remains just out of reach of language. But I want to be precise about how this happens. The bridge doesn’t appear through interpretation. It arises through listening. Through what I’d call symbolic attention: the willingness to receive everything the patient says as more than it appears to be on the surface. Their speech contains rhythm. What they don’t say. Contradictions that they haven’t noticed yet. Images that appear once and are never returned to. Repetitions — especially repetitions — which always hint at something that cannot yet be integrated.

If meaning is forced, it retracts into the unconscious. The psyche knows when it is being rushed. If all the fragments are left untouched indefinitely, the patient can begin to feel chaotic, uncontained, without any sense that the work is going somewhere. There is a pace to this, and it cannot be predetermined. The analyst has to feel it in real time — which is another reason why the analyst’s own experience of analysis is not optional. You cannot trust a process you’ve never undergone yourself.

As Hermes, I am not the author of what emerges between us. I am a co-storyteller. There is a real distinction there. The patient is the subject of the story. I am with them in the telling of it — asking, listening, reflecting, catching what has been dropped along the way. The moment I become the story’s author, something essential is lost.

Trauma, Witness, and the Story That Breaks

Trauma is a particular kind of disruption. It is not only painful experience — it is experience that overwhelms the psyche’s capacity to metabolise and integrate. What returns from trauma is not a narrative. It is a sensory imprint. A flash of something. A hole where the story should be. “I don’t recognise myself,” people say. “I don’t understand why I react this way.” What has been lost is not only the capacity to regulate affect. It is the capacity to tell the story in a way that retains any sense of self at its centre.

Before anything can be metabolised or transformed, it needs to be witnessed. This is not a therapeutic technique. It is something more fundamental — a precondition for anything else to happen. Witnessing means to see and hear another person without turning away from what they have experienced. When the story breaks, someone must be able to hold the pieces without rushing to fix them.

I sometimes feel, while sitting with a patient, the pull to do something. To interpret. To offer an insight that will move things along. I’ve learned to be suspicious of that pull. It often has more to do with my own discomfort with the patient’s pain than with any genuine clinical need. Storytelling cannot be hurried. What I have come to trust — and this trust was hard-won — is that if we stay with the fragments long enough, they will slowly begin to organise themselves. Not on my schedule. On their own.

Integration doesn’t mean the suffering disappears. It means the person can say: this happened to me. This is part of my story. And I am still here. Still able to recognise myself, despite the weight of it. That is not a small thing. For many people who come to analysis, it is the whole thing.

What Analysis Actually Asks Of the Analyst

Accompanying someone through psychic pain, building bridges between conscious and unconscious material, witnessing trauma — these are not three separate clinical functions. They are one. And what makes them possible is the same thing in each case: having been through something yourself, and having done enough work on it that it is yours rather than a blind spot.

Theory organises my approach. It does not predetermine the direction of the work. Each analysis is its own thing — its own pace, its own particular shape, its own unexpected developments. I make interpretations, and I offer them the way you’d offer anything tentative: to see what resonates. All real meaning, in analysis, must come from within the patient. Anything I impose will be borrowed, not integrated. And borrowed meaning doesn’t hold.

What I am ultimately trying to provide is a space where someone gradually learns to reclaim themselves as the author of their own story. When something in their lives has caused them to lose that authorship — whether through trauma, through a long accumulation of relational damage, through the particular way depression or addiction can strip a person of any sense that they are the protagonist of their own existence — the analytic relationship becomes a place to encounter those disowned parts of themselves without the terror of being annihilated by them.

I don’t promise my patients a narrative without pain. I aim to offer them one they can live in. A story in which they can recognise themselves — flaws, history, wounds and all.

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Philippe Jacquet is a Jungian analyst and integrative psychotherapist based at Harley Street, London, with over 25 years of clinical practice. He trained with the Association of Jungian Analysts and holds a Doctorate of Professional Practice. He works in English and French, and offers analysis in person at Harley Street and online. Enquiries: contact the practice.