GUIDE FOR STUDY OF JUNG’S MAGNUM OPUS, Mysterium Coniunctionis

 First some introductory comments.  According to Jung, The psyche is made up of opposites.  Consciousness and the unconscious are a pair of opposites.  For ego consciousness to exist at all, it must differentiate itself from many things.  A newborn just happens to itself; it is a piece of nature.  At birth, it sees the light, and that light is an early dawning of consciousness, an aurora consurgens.   It is critically important, and fortunately also a natural process, that the budding consciousness learn to distinguish and identity with its own isness to avoid being swallowed by the surrounding darkness.

 

For a mature, developed person, there may come a time when the ego house it has “built,” and identified itself with (largely constructed for it by family, religion, institutes of learning, our collective paternal society, and, of course, by self-effort) becomes too small.  Freud’s work was all about this structure—the id, ego, and superego—of the individual.  Many therapeutic approaches are dedicated to updating and reconfiguring the ego’s house, certainly a worthy endeavor and quite sufficient for many.

 

Jung’s lifelong efforts were devoted to understanding not only the ego-structure but also the foundation from which it arises and from which it takes its form.  When his own wonderful “house,” had grown too small, he was forced to face the unconscious.  He gives a vivid description of his “Confrontation with the unconscious” in MDR.  He describes some of his dreams and visions from the period of 1913 – 17, which he undertook as a scientific experiment but came to believe was equally an experiment being conducted on him.  [P. 178]

 

In dealing with “something emotionally vulgar or banal” from one of his experiences, he would say to himself, “It is perfectly true that I have thought and felt this way at some time or other, but I don’t have to think and feel that way now.  I need not accept this banality of mine in perpetuity; that is an unnecessary humiliation.” [p. 186-187]  In this way he was able to strip unconscious urges and energies of their power and take up a conscious position toward them.

 

It was out of this three-four year outpouring of unconscious material that Jung was able to distill, make conscious, and share his revelations and discoveries.  Jung was truly an alchemist.  His laboratories were himself, his own experiences, and his work with others.

 

Now, turning to Jung’s magnum opus, his Mysterium Coniunctionis, what attitude can we adopt?  Mysterium is vexing, difficult, frustrating, even maddening.  I had a professor once say it was the product of Jung’s failing years and should be completely disregarded.  Certainly, a temptation, since our habitual way of learning is to absorb new material, work with it until we make it our own, then move on – a new class, subject, degree, job, profession, dare I say relationship?  With Mysterium there is no moving on.  We have met a new limit.  We are meeting ourselves.  We cannot understand this work because here Jung is writing from, out of, the collective unconscious.  He has entered the minds of the alchemists who adopted not knowing, their experimenting almost as a way of life, quite content to bring forth a gold nugget from time to time, or not.  The work alone seemed to many of them enough.

 

I suggest one take a patient, waiting attitude, knowing we won’t understand much of this work.  But we may come away with some nuggets.  We must bring to our study all the requirements of the alchemist in the laboratory:  patience; courage; continuous regimen; avoidance of haste, despair, or deception; recognition of the sacred nature of our work; and an ability to deal with the prima materia, our own life, feelings, thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and experiences.

 

Who knows?  Perhaps each of us is the subject of an experiment.

 

I’ll end with this quote from Teilhard de Chardin (slightly paraphrased):  If a person is to come up to his full measure, she must become conscious of her infinite capacity for carrying herself still further; she must realize the duties it involves, and she must feel its intoxicating wonder.

 

Rose F. Holt

September 22, 2025

HELPFUL WAYS TO LOOK AT THE ROLE OF THE "I" IN A DREAM

 Paraphrasing Jung:  If you examine your dreams long enough, you will develop an opinion about the unconscious.  More importantly, the unconscious will develop an opinion and you.

There are few guides for understanding and working with dreams.  Three that I generally subscribe to are:  1.  Every dream is an attempt to heal or help the individual in some way.  2.  Everything in the dream--setting, people, unfolding drama--is just as it must be with the possible exception of the "I" (the dreamer him/herself).  3.  The dream is an attempt to restore some balance between consciousness and unconscious contents so that considering the compensatory nature of any dream can be helpful.

An important dream I had some 30+ years ago might illustrate some of the above.  

The dream:  I am in a waiting room.  Chris comes in and starts creating havoc.

My analyst asked me a few simple questions.  

A:  "Who is this Chris?"  

R:  "A man I worked with for a time.  He was great at making mountains out of molehills to create havoc."

A:  "So, what happens when you get into a "waiting" kind of situation?

Bingo!  I was too embarrassed to tell him that the day of the dream I had taken my car in for service.  The computers were down so there was a long delay.  I was irate and reacted badly, truly making a mountain- out-of-a-molehill scene.   The dream message delivered a stern message, one I would not have accepted had it come from another person: My entitled, "I'm special" attitude was abhorrent.  Until I had the dream, that part of my personality resided in shadow and, no doubt, caused me and others difficulty.  The dream was a powerfully effective way of delivering a necessary correction.  

 

MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS

C.G. Jung (1875-1961)

[This is a revised and updated post from 2018.]

During the spring of 2018, the C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis offered a study group, seminar format, during which two dozen of us read and discussed Jung's MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS in two small groups over eight weeks.

It was a pleasure reading through MDR at a leisurely pace with the benefit of others’ reflections and impressions.  Many memories of my own early life came flooding back as I read the first chapters.  Many of those memories I’ve revisited before in my journals, in conversations with my siblings and friends, in discussion groups like this one, and in many analytic sessions.  This time with our text, from an even more distant perspective, yielded new insights and depth of understanding of my own journey.  I came away with a firmer understanding of the role of my mother in my life and the impact of the death of my father when I was three years old, two areas of intense inner focus now for decades.

Jung’s discussion of his No. 1 and No. 2 personalities was particularly helpful.  I know I, too, suffered a similar split early on.  I, too, left behind my No. 1 to take up the tasks of adaptation—over-adaptation in my case—as a young adult.  Only with the complete failure of my No. 2 to deal with tragedy was I thrown back on myself in a way I came to see as essential, having purpose, and fraught with meaning.  But, oh, was it ever painful!

At age 30 I had a numinous experience in which my No. 1 personality broke through though I didn’t recognize what was happening.  I only registered something foreign but vaguely familiar from very early experiences.  I went to the Louvre and, turning a corner, I saw the Venus de Milo down a long corridor before me.  Suddenly I knew something new, and understood why all the emphasis on and study of art.  I didn’t know the word numinous then, but it was a numinous experience.  Later I learned language that gave this encounter meaning.  It was a moment of in-breaking.  Something from the collective unconscious penetrated my conscious reality.  

In my early 40’s, in the middle of a life crisis, I happened to go with a friend to a week-long program about dreams led by a Jungian Analyst.  The week left me extremely interested in dreams, but mostly I saw something in the analyst, undefinable to be sure, that I wanted for myself.  That week I began a pursuit that is still on-going.  I am somewhat clearer about what it was I glimpsed in that person and can now say that it is a way of being in process—a way of being and becoming that is life giving.  It is a process where the goal paradoxically is death.  It is an arduous path that leads to an understanding that each of us is called to develop ourselves ever further.  To do so is a sacred responsibility, and the reward is an intoxicating wonder in a world of wonder--release from a life of drudgery and inanity, and purposelessness. 

There are many, many ideas and specific sentences in the MDR that grabbed me, particularly the paragraph on p. 325 where Jung talks about embodying the essential “or life is wasted.”  A harsh judgement! 

Jung’s discussion about stumbling onto alchemy and its contributions to his psychological theories was enriching.  I liked, once again, reading about his discovery of a myth that gave meaning to his existence.  The search for meaning may be every bit as critical to one's existence as the discovery of that meaning.  Meaning has provided me dignity and purpose and has made all the difference in my life.

My main takeaway from these weeks of reading and discussion is the vital importance Jung assigned to his inner life.  His emphasis on the interior process put me, more than ever, in touch with my own.  Reading about his experiences, his insights, his reflections made me more keenly appreciative of my own. 

Somewhere Jung argues that one must fall in love with one’s own life.  How does one do that in a world increasingly fraught with anxiety and woe?  I like to remember that Jung found a way in spite of living through two horrific world wars.  His lasting legacy is his roadmap for that way.

July 12, 2025

 

TEILHARD DE CHARDIN QUOTE

"If one is to come up to his/her full measure, he/she must become conscious of his/her infinite capacity for carrying him/herself still further; he/she must realize the duties it involves, and he/she must feel its intoxicating wonder. " 

Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/cosmic-life

 

Consciousness, Projections, and the Unconscious 

Jung speaks often of a consciousness "contaminated with unconscious contents."  I think he means that we have unconscious scripts, ideas, images, that affect our vision. What we see is often distorted by what we are looking through. It is as if we all wear eyeglasses that alter our perceptions—for better or worse. Is there something like an objective reality? Is it possible to view people and events with a measure of clarity? Who can say that his/her vision is the correct one? Often, it is in this realm that might does indeed make right. The ones who write the history books tell us how it was, but do they know how it was?

I think there is a way that every dream takes some piece of heretofore contamination out of our field of consciousness and shows it to us. Before the dream, the contamination was simply part of our way of perceiving the world. After the dream, has something changed? 

In the myth retold in the slender volume, DESCENT TO THE GODDESS, Inanna has to abandon her queenly garments and descend to the underworld for the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband. I think we can do a translation of that drama into some Jungian theory. Jung’s notion is that as long as the ego is identified with the persona (Inanna in her finery), then the shadow and the animus are bound together in the unconscious (Ereshkigal married to Gugalanna). Being unconscious, shadow and animus are then seen only in projection. The shadow is some hated, envied, or otherwise powerful person who draws the ego’s projection. The animus is a male figure who carries the projections of a woman's unrealized masculine potentiality. Often the animus is an idealized figure, but he can just as easily be seen as demonic or oppressive. The common denominator for both shadow and animus projections is energy; the projection carriers for each carry a lot of energy for the ego. Often, once the projections are withdrawn, the ego is left in wonderment when she relates with the real human being who was previously the projection carrier. What was the big deal?

I think it is often the case that when shadow and animus get together (as, say, might be dramatized in a dream), the ego is left in a bereft feeling place. The parental complexes play a huge role in the overall psychic setup because the way the budding ego develops a really fine persona (and often identifies with it) is by pleasing the parents, the primary authorities for consciousness. Of course, the finer the persona, the more outer worldly success is guaranteed. At midlife when the inner world makes itself felt, as it often does, the battle is engaged. You can see how devastating it is for one to have to sacrifice one's identity with the persona (and often how costly!). 

You can also see how difficult it is to own for oneself the qualities one has projected. The distasteful, hateful ones that we have to accept with the attendant humbling. And the positive, attractive ones that we have to accept and take responsibility for. I am the one who does these terrible things that I find so unacceptable. I am the one with these potentialities that I have to work like crazy to develop and put to use. Much easier that I let someone be my bad guy and someone do all those marvelous things I so admire.

 LECTURE

Why is Alchemy so Important to Jungian Psychology and to us Today?

Rose F. Holt, M.A., Jungian Analyst

The video of this lecture is available for purchase on the Jung Society of St. Louis website, jungstlouis.org

Date:  March 28, 2025    Time:  7:00 - 9:00 pm CDT

Place:  In person at First Congregational Church, 6501 Wydown Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63105

            Also available on Zoom            CEU's available

For additional information or to register visit Jung Society of St. Louis