Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 1

I continue to pore over Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) aimed to heal the Christian church as Jung found it in his day. As I mentioned in posts in my earlier Jungian Wholeness series, Jung created an elaborate theory of the human psyche. It was this theory and the psychotherapy that went alone with it that Jung applied to the healing of the church.

In Jung's theory, key parts of the mind are necessarily hidden from conscious awareness. Why necessarily? Well, we all have supposedly "bad" tendencies that go against the supposedly "good" traits we would like to have. Those desirable traits are upheld by that facet of the psyche which Jung called the "persona": the personality-mask we consciously or unconsciously assume for others' benefit.

Our more inappropriate tendencies, on the other hand, get locked into the "shadow" of what Jung called our "ego-consciousness," which amounts to the aspects of our mind that we are consciously aware of. We are for the most part unconscious of having what might be considered our more or less antisocial or immoral drives, while we are typically conscious of the impulses we have toward the "good."

There's nothing intrinsically evil about our shadow proclivities, though, Jung held, any more than there's anything intrinsically evil about a cat catching and killing a mouse. But expressing these baser, less-evolved tendencies in ways that do not violate the social adaptations embodied in the mask Jung called the persona is tricky. Most people are never able to — never even try to — integrate their unconscious drives into the Jungian "ego" which is at the center of consciousness.

Yet Jung felt the shadow's contents could be integrated into ego-consciousness, by a process called "individuation," which he deemed the ultimate spiritual goal of a well-lived life ... and of Jungian therapy, for those who need it. People who are neurotic or psychically unstable — and I'm one of them — can benefit from healing the split between the conscious mind and the unconscious shadow. Jung used the technical term "integration" to describe the healing of a rift of any sort between conscious and unconscious portions of the mind.


Integration of the shadow's contents was also, Jung held, a desideratum for Christianity as a whole. As with a typical human individual, the Church as an institution was (Jung said) suffering from an internal split between its conscious doctrines/beliefs and the hidden contents of its "collective unconscious."

By the Christian Church, Jung meant the Roman Catholic faith and the Protestant denominations ... along with the Orthodox churches, for all I know. Jung himself was a Protestant, raised as a member of the Swiss Reformed Church during his boyhood by his minister father, but he had a great interest in developments in the Catholic Church, in particular, as a philosopher and as a clinical psychologist.


By the "collective unconscious" Jung meant something that he himself had discovered: at an unconscious level within every individual human mind there exists a repository of "archetypes." These archetypes consist of images, ideas, and motifs. They are the inborn forms or molds which the unconscious uses to generate "symbols" which present themselves to the conscious mind as key ingredients in our daytime imaginings, our dreams, our myths, and so forth.

Symbols were of primary importance to Jung. He described them as ways the mind has to formulate ideas whose referent cannot be clearly stated in everyday language. They are "tendencies whose goal is as yet unknown," he wrote. Despite their intrinsic ambiguity, however, it is possible to come to a meaningful interpretation of the symbols thrown from the unconscious into the conscious mind.

The collective unconscious is, as it were, a foundry for the symbols that appear in dream and myth. For example, in the classical myth of Leda and the Swan, the swan that impregnates Leda, the human woman who is the queen of Sparta, is the god Zeus in disguise. According to the myth, Zeus came to Leda disguised as a swan, raping her or seducing her. That same night, Leda slept with her husband, Tyndareus. In due course, she gave birth to Helen (of Troy) and Polydeuces, the children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Menelaus (or Tyndareus).

Through interpreting these symbols, we can see that Zeus or the Swan represents (among other archetypes) the father archetype, as does Menelaus, while Leda represents the mother archetype. Jung would also say, I believe, that the scenario by which Leda's offspring have two separate fathers symbolically represents the psyche's innate motif of splitting or bifurcation of the archetypal One into the archetypal Two.


Each of us has the same set of archetypes. For example, each of us has an archetype for "mother," one for "father," and even one for "self." In serving as the mold for symbols which make their way out of unconsciousness and into our dreams and myths, an archetype acts as a seed for a cluster of experiences that we have had in our lifetimes and have stored in our memory bank. Most of these clusters, called "complexes," disappear into the unconscious mind either wholly or partially, but they can be "constellated" by certain triggering events and reappear in consciousness. Who has not seen a movie about a loving mother, somewhat like our own, and felt impelled to call his or her own mom and say "I love you"?

That's what the constellating of an archetypally-based complex feels like. Although the term "complex" as it applies to the human psyche has taken on overtones of being in some way harmful — we sometimes hear things said like, "Poor boy, he has a terrible mother complex" — in reality Jung felt the complexes are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. In fact, we all have mother complexes.


Since we all share the same archetypes and all of us play host to the same complexes — though a given complex will be stronger in one person than in the next — Jung inferred that an organized group of human beings such as the Christian Church or any particular society or culture or civilization will in effect have both a conscious mind and an unconscious one, just as human individuals do.

Just as individuals can benefit from healing the rift between the conscious and unconscious forces of the psyche, so too can an organized group or institution such as the Church gain by integrating the contents of its collective unconscious into its conscious awareness.

The integration of shadow material with conscious content which Jung called upon Christianity to accomplish, Jung said, patterns with any process in the psyche by which archetypal symbols representing seeming opposites — solar/lunar, male/female, spirit/matter, yang/yin, etc. — are reconciled. Typically, one of each pair of opposed archetypes is preferred by the persona, while the other lurks in the shadow. But the shadow half of the archetypal pair can, and should, eventually be integrated into consciousness.

For example, the male principle may be preferred in our social adaptations, with the female principle taking a back seat. A man who acts "womanish" is, after all, thought odd. Yet all men (and all women) have both archetypes. So a man who doesn't want to be thought odd will tend to relegate his feminine side to his unconscious shadow.


In fact, Jung went further than this. He singled out he feminine side of a male human being as a privileged part of a man's unconscious mind, called by Jung the "anima." Women likewise have an "animus," an analogously privileged structure within the female unconscious mind associated with the male archetype. The anima/animus turns out to be, per Jung, the gateway to the conscious integration of the most important archetype of all, the "self."

The archetypal self is the entity in the collective unconscious which is the form or mold for symbols of wholeness. It represents the wholeness of the undivided psyche.

So, en route to the ultimate goal of the integration of the archetypal self into ego-consciousness, the anima (for a man) or the animus (for a woman) must first be conjoined with the conscious ego. Only then can the self finally be united with the conscious ego and the psyche be made completely whole.


In the next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 2, I'll go into what exactly the "mysterium coniunctionis" is. Stay tuned.