Jung on Transcendence

ABSTRACT

Throughout this essay the author analyzes the concept of transcendence in Jung’s theoretical corpus with a focus on its philosophical parameters and therapeutic efficacy in promoting a category of value. Although Jung did not precisely define the terms transcendence, transcendent, and transcendental, it is necessary to tease out these features in order to illuminate the varieties of transcendence in Jung’s thought. Distinctions are made between the ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological dimensions of transcendence, including the structure, method, form, and process of mediating, transitioning, and transforming inner experience. Jung’s notion of the dialectic operative within the transcendent function is specifically critiqued. Here the author explores the possibility of a synthesis of internal opposition that leads to a greater principle of unity through the sublation of psyche. He further examines the transcendent function in the process of active imagination by drawing on patient material derived through associations in the analysis of the transference.

KEY WORDS:

• active imagination
• coincidentia oppositorum
• dialectics
• numinous
• qualia
• synchronicity
• therapeutic action
• transcendent function
• transcendental
• transference

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Dr. Paul Attinello who provided me passages in German from Jung’s Gesammelte Werke so I could compare the German and English translations.

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph or page number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

^1. Jung (1961/1963) writes: “The images were so tremendous that I found myself concluded that I was close to death. My nurse afterward told me, ‘It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow.’ That was a phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she added” (289).

^2. Übersinnliche may also be translated as supersensory, supernatural, or paranormal.

^3. Recall, for Jung, he was horribly ostracized from the psychoanalytic community, vilified and slandered by Freud’s inner circle, and suffered a series of sustained rumors that he was schizophrenic, which was later infamously reinforced by Winnicott (1964/1992) in his review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (see also Saban 2016, for a review). Given that Jung was concerned at times that he might be going mad, what he candidly confessed in his interview to Eliade (Jung 1952, 232–234), and what Leavy (1964, 571) diagnosed as “prepsychotic” following his break with Freud after the Munich Congress of 1913, we must not underestimate the toll of his suffering. Jung (1961/1963, 162) reports his excommunication cost him friends, acquaintances, students, and patients whom he had lost as a result. I argue that after his rejection from Freud and his followers, due to his own childhood traumas—particularly his reported sexual abuse by a clergyman (McGuire 1974, 95); his tendency toward childhood solitude, if not schizoid withdrawal (1961/1963, MDR 42); social isolation (18); retreat into fantasy (Jaffé 1979, 14–18); and tenuous attachment to his parents, which are more than suggestive in MDR—Jung may be said to have undergone a psychotic depression. This speculation is further evinced by his psychological attraction to enter into the profession of psychiatry specializing in psychosis, his interest in the occult and the alchemical Sol niger, the spontaneous visions he reported and spoke of among intimates, and the private recordings of his active imagination experiments revealed generations later in The Red Book. Such revelations also included pedophilic and necrophilous ritual, which is likely due to the traumatic aftereffects of his childhood sexual abuse (see also Burston 2021, 57–59). Interestingly enough, Jung further attributes the process of the transcendent function to be operative in the initial stages of schizophrenia (see 1917/1943, CW 7, 80).

^4. Both Jung and Hegel have their own unique theory of dialectics: one psychological, the other ontological. Whereas Jung focuses on the tension of opposites, compensatory one-sidedness, and achieving balance within the psyche, Hegel (1807) traces the ontological structure and developmental process of Spirit (Geist) on its ascendance toward actualizing a grand synthesis of soul, nature, and consciousness, having its culmination in the social-ethical life of humanity. Both Jung and Hegel posit an Objective Psyche or Spirit, each emanating from an unconscious ground or origin: for Jung, a collective unconscious; for Hegel (1812/1831, 1817/1827/1830), an eternal Logos (Λόγος), the logic of the interior as pure thought thinking about itself and its operations as a process of becoming through negation. Jung’s dialectic has no determinate agenda, whereas Hegel’s is oriented toward a path of sublation (Aufhebung) as higher phases of spirit negate, subsume, and interiorize, yet surpass or transcend, their previous shapes in cultivating forms of unification in the psychological life of individuals and social collectives (see also Mills 2002, for a discussion). Yet each dialectic has a teleological function and can be characterized through the labor of forging a self-articulated complex totality or holism as a dynamic process of becoming. Both systems also allow for regression, psychopathology, and failed attempts at achieving individuation and wholeness.

^5. Note that the poststructuralist position would not claim that a sign has a fixed meaning; rather a semiotic may contain an infinite deferral of signifiers in a chain of meaning relations to the point that the origin of signification and meaning are occluded if not wholly unknown and fluid. Furthermore, a symbol is a higher manifestation of semiotic relations that blend the imaginary, hence the sensuous world of perception and concept formation, within the image or symbol itself (see Mills 2010, for a review).

^6. In discussing the imitation of Christ, Jung takes it “as the duty to realize one’s deepest conviction with the same courage and the same self-sacrifice shown by Jesus” (1929, CW 13, ¶81, 53).

^7. Recall Jung’s space dream where he was brought back to earth and to consciousness from his ecstasy only to feel he was robbed of acquiring divine knowledge and “not to be allowed to enter the temple, to join the people in whose company I belonged” (1961/1963, MDR, p. 292).

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Jon Mills

JON MILLS, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. He is honorary professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, on the faculty in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy at the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, US, and a supervising analyst at the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, US. Recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship, including five Gradiva Awards, he is the author or editor of over thirty books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, including most recently Archetypal Ontology: New Directions in Analytical Psychology (Routledge, 2023). In 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association. Correspondence: [email protected].