Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 4

Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian church, shows that Jung (though Protestant) felt the Roman Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption-into-heaven of Mary, the mother of Jesus, augured a healing of the modern Christian church.

This is installment four in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about this subject.

When, in 1950, Pope Pius XII promulgated the new Catholic dogma of Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary — that the Blessed Mother of God, as Mary is known, has entered heaven bodily as the first and of all humankind to do so — Jung took notice. To him, it signaled the coming true of prophetic if mystical beliefs held by alchemists in the Middle Ages.

Medieval alchemists, in trying (and failing) to conjoin base metals like lead to make higher substances like gold, believed in the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystical conjunction out of which arose everything whole and complete and noble. In their philosophy, there needed to be three stages of coniunctio or conjoining:

• First, a conjunction of the individual human soul with a universal spiritual principle ... in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit. This necessarily involves a preliminary (symbolic or psychological, not actual) dissociation of the soul from the physical matter making up the body.
  
• Second, a rejoining of the body to the unified mind/soul/spirit which the alchemists spoke of as unio mentalis. This stage, Jung said, had finally begun in Christian history with the Assumptio Mariae declaration.
  
• Third, the eventual unification of the mind/soul/spirit/body unit with the still-missing "fourth": the unus mundus, meaning "the inherent unity of the world" (Stein p. 175). This third coniunctio will be the topic of the current discussion and that in the next installment of this series as well.
  

There was in Jung's time (and still exists today) a resistance to integrating into Church belief and practice what Jung called the "missing fourth."

This "missing fourth" referred in medieval times (and still does) to the fact that Church symbolism had, by virtue of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, already proceeded from the primordial unity of the archetypal umber One, through the implicit antithesis implied by the archetypal number Two, to the healing power of the archetypal number Three. Father: Number One --> Son (and potential rival): Number Two --> Holy Ghost (and healer of the implicit rift): Number Three.

But the Christian God-in-Three-Persons outlook still left unbridged the symbolic chasm between Trinitarian Heaven and Fallen Earth, with the Earth seen as presently in the clutches of the Prince of This World, Satan.

Jung had it that the religious images of Satan and the forces of darkness at his command were (still are) ways we Christians have of projecting our internal shadow contents out upon someone or something external to us ... thus allowing us to deny personal responsibility for the evil that might be thought to attach to our bodily desires, first, and secondly to the physical stuff of the world of which our bodies are made.

In the alchemical theory of the mysterium coniunctionis there was yet a third stage of coniunctio, one which followed the unio mentalis and the subsequent rejoining of the mind/soul/spirit with the physical body. It was the conjunction of the mind/soul/spirit/body with the whole earth from which it had sprung. It was this third stage of conjunction by which the "missing fourth" might be joined to the Holy Trinity to form a Four-in-One Quaternity.


Medieval religious doctrine had it that the earth was the devil's playground. Hell was thought to be located in the bowels of the earth — far down below us, since the earth was not yet known to be round. Though God had originally created the earth without physical taint or moral blemish, the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had given the world over to Enemy control.

This myth of the Fall of Man spoke to Jung. He attributed it to the psychic forces of "splitting" by means of which the unwanted aspects of our human nature are repressed into the unconscious mind. From there they are projected out onto our real-world enemies ... or onto one immaterial, imaginary Enemy, writ large.

According to the psychologist Timothy R. O'Neill in the 1979 book The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, the psychic energy source which Jung called "libido" — which for Sigmund Freud was just a sex drive — actually

provides the impetus for all thoughts and intentions, and it operates on the principle of opposites. For every "good" thought there is a corresponding "bad" one. The former may be expressed consciously, the latter triggering an opposite reaction in the unconscious that is repressed (p. 30).

The "bad" promptings, though repressed, still have their intrinsic energy that needs to be expressed somehow. This happens, if at all, through symbols. But the Christian symbol for these "bad" promptings of the human psyche, Satan, encourages continued splitting of the psyche, with splitting's attendant "one-sidedness."

To Jung, one-sidedness sooner or later makes for problems, maladies whose symptoms may "begin as a feeling of nothingness, boredom, malaise, not unlike the 'alienation' of existential neurosis" (p. 32). These symptoms may eventually grow in intensity to the point where they result in "a loss of purpose or evasive tactics, [or] expression of urges in other, sometimes violent, ways" (p. 33). Mass murder can often be traced back to archetypal promptings that lack symbols to connect them into conscious awareness.

The integration of the alchemical symbol of the "missing fourth" can be the antidote to such woe, for only when the archetypal Three turns to Four and Trinity evolves into Quaternity is the Jungian archetype of the "self" finally represented in the Christian symbol system.


Jung had it that the first of the three conjunctive stages, the one in which soul (temporarily and symbolically) is severed from body so that it might cleave to spirit, "brings about a secured ego standpoint on which the integration of unconscious shadow and animus or anima aspects can take place in the second conjunction" (Stein p. 175). The repressed promptings in the unconscious mind — the shadow contents and the animus or anima — will later be integrated with the conscious ego, but before that can happen, the ego must first be "spiritualized," shall we say. It must own up to a power higher than itself.

Next comes the second conjunctive step, which "results in a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness" (p. 175). At this stage, the bodily aspects of our human nature are no longer held apart from mind/soul/spirit. This conjunction corresponds with the inclusion of the shadow contents and also of the animus/anima in the field of consciousness.

The shadow contents are, broadly speaking, the split-off halves of the numerous archetypal pairs in the human repertoire, one of which has been admitted to consciousness and been acknowledged by the outward persona, and the other of which has been kept under wraps in the unconscious mind.

For example, a person may flaunt his or her love for law and order, which has its appropriate archetypal representation in the psyche and which will thus constitute part of the individual's persona or outward façade. But order's opposite idea, chaos, is also an archetype, and it can thrust itself into the person's life situation at the most inopportune times.

Most of the time, however, the archetype for chaos remains dormant in the unconscious shadow of the person's ego-consciousness. Ultimately, the chaos archetype and all the other "bad" promptings of the individual's psyche ought to be, Jung said, integrated into conscious awareness, where they can serve their own legitimate purposes and, along with their paired partners (in this case, the archetype for order), foster "a stable and relatively inclusive state of ego-consciousness that is quite broadly representative of psychic wholeness."

Thus, the integration of the shadow contents. As for the animus/anima, these are structures in the unconscious that represent the archetype for the gender opposite to the ostensible gender of the individual in question. A man has an archetypal woman, so to speak, lurking somewhere within and serving as the nucleus of his unconscious "anima." For a woman, the unconscious "animus" serves as the focal point for her archetypal inner man. These "other-gender" complexes — a "complex" is simply a clustering of ideas and experiences around an archetype — need to be integrated into ego-consciousness at some point, Jung said, en route to psychic wholeness.

So the second of the three conjunctions Jung spoke of has to do with achieving a stable, well-integrated state of ego-consciousness in which the shadow contents and either the animus or the anima (depending on the sex of the individual) have been rescued from their erstwhile unconscious obscurity.

That sets the stage for the third conjunction, more about which is to be found in the next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 5.