International Journal of Jungian Studies

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Jung’s psychoid concept: an hermeneutic

understanding

Ann Addison

To cite this article: Ann Addison (2016): Jung’s psychoid concept: an hermeneutic
understanding, International Journal of Jungian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/19409052.2016.1267657

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2016.1267657

Jung’s psychoid concept: an hermeneutic understanding

Ann Addison
Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Essex University, Colchester, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Jung’s psychoid concept is not one of his most widely published Received 26 October 2016
ideas but it is one of his most fundamental, and his thinking on Accepted 29 November 2016
the subject occupied him for most of his career. Theoretically, he
KEYWORDS
grounded the concept in the history of vitalism, but his ideas also Active imagination;
had hermeneutic origins, in his self-experimentation and active archetypal images;
imagination, as described in The Red Book. This paper reviews hermeneutic; psychoid; Red
such hermeneutic background, and its value for informing a Book; seven sermons
clinically relevant understanding of the psychoid concept.

1. Introduction
Jung’s thinking about his psychoid concept spans most of his working life, from his early
discussions with Freud in 1907 (McGuire, 1991) to his relatively late publication of his
account of synchronicity (Jung, 1952). It is not one of his most publically acclaimed
ideas, and yet it provides a fundamental underpinning to his entire model of the
psyche, relating as it does to an ultimately unknowable area of the unconscious from
which emerge the archetypes and all that is associated with them.
From a theoretical point of view, the evolution of the psychoid concept may be situated
within the field of vitalism, commencing with the biological ideas of Driesch (1903), neo-
vitalist, and his experiments on sea-urchins. Through these experiments, Driesch demon-
strated a teleological drive of the organism towards goals of wholeness in the future,
which he termed a vitalism. Accordingly, he conceived in man a teleological organising
function governing his motor and instinctual responses to stimuli and providing ultimately
the foundation of his conscious ego. He called this innate faculty Das Psychoid, defined as
an intra-psychic factor that is neither body nor mind but that relates to both. Sub-
sequently, the concept came to embrace the developmental ideas of Bleuler (1925), Direc-
tor of the Burghölzli Clinic, who proposed Die Psychoide to describe a capacity in man to
respond and adapt in the face of stimuli, through the forging of permanent changes in the
brain that shape future reactions. On this basis, he postulated the development of the
human infant, in response to experience, in a direction fostering favourable future orien-
tations, leading to consciousness.
Even as a student at Basel University, Jung (1896, par. 96) was already thinking of a vital
principle or life force associated with the purposeful and organisational activity of the soul,
and this bias led him naturally towards the ideas of Driesch and Bleuler. Building on their

CONTACT Ann Addison [email protected]

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. ADDISON

foundation, he conceived his own notion of the psychoid as a factor providing an arche-
typal base to experience, linking psyche and soma in a monism, and self and other in a
living relation.
Vitalism afforded Jung a matrix of thinking allowing him to develop new ways of seeing
living meaning in a purposive unfolding of the psyche-soma throughout the life cycle, and
thus it offered a vehicle for his notions of a psychoid factor underlying the archetype as
such. Addison (2009) argues that the archetype as such can be seen as a potential in
the psychoid unconscious for organising and shaping elements of an instinctual or imagi-
nal character to engender new and more complex emergent positions depicted as the
instinctual image or the archetypal image, respectively. As a result of the psychoid
nature of the archetype, these images may emerge in embodied form anywhere along
the psyche-soma continuum between instinct and spirit, and thence become conscious.
Acknowledging this theoretical background in the history of vitalism, the present paper
follows a different route, situating the psychoid concept in an hermeneutic field through a
review of Jung’s personal and clinical experience, including his Red Book work. This
approach yields an insight into the psychoid concept as an empirical reality that is clini-
cally oriented. According to such hermeneutic understanding, the psychoid relates to
states of immersion in an undifferentiated unconscious field, commonly known as partici-
pation mystique, and to imaginal processes fostering individual realisation of archetypal
forces through a dialectic between participation mystique, or undifferentation, and ana-
lytic processing, or differentiation. The present paper explores this hermeneutic back-
ground, by first tracing a trajectory from Jung’s experimental researches, in his scientific
study of word association, generating knowledge of autonomous processes in the per-
sonal unconscious, to his self-investigation of the human vision-making function, yielding
understandings of archetypal processes in the collective unconscious and their psychoid
underpinning. This will lead on to Jung’s early theoretical conceptualisations foreshadow-
ing the psychoid concept. Finally, the paper will review how this hermeneutic view com-
pares with the more formal understanding of the psychoid concept derived from the
vitalist matrix of biological thinking advanced by Driesch and Bleuler, and hence how it
affects our contemporaneous clinical view of Jung’s psychoid.

2. Jung’s studies
2.1. Early work
Enrolling at Basel University in the spring of 1895, Jung decided to specialise in medicine,
and therefore his early direction was very much concerned with the medical model of his
day, by which a Cartesian duality presided over body and mind, and symptoms were to be
treated as organic. In 1898, whilst preparing for his final examinations, he opened Kraft-
Ebbing’s textbook on psychiatry and became taken by his description of psychiatry as a
subject in an incomplete state of development, embracing diseases of the personality
(von Krafft-Ebing, 1904, p. iii). Concluding that he had found ‘the empirical field
common to biological and spiritual facts’, including hysteria and dementia praecox,
Jung embarked on his psychiatric career at the Burghölzli Clinic (Jung, 1963, pp. 129–130).
As part of the pioneering research taking place at the Burghölzli Clinic under the aegis
of Eugen Bleuler at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jung (1904-1907, 1910)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 3

produced his major scientific study on the Word Association Tests (WATs) applied both to
normal subjects and to subjects displaying hysteria and other psychopathological con-
ditions, such as dementia praecox. The experimental procedure involved recording the
reactions of individual subjects to a series of stimulus words, including the subject’s spon-
taneous word association and their reaction time. The recorded observations were classi-
fied in a variety of different ways, according to logical-linguistic criteria and temporal
delay, and the resultant categories were scrutinised to ascertain patterns and locate
empirical laws. Jung discovered that characteristic disturbances of association arise in con-
nection with emotionally charged personal events: clusters of associative feeling-toned
ideas constellate in the personal unconscious around these events and produce
delayed reaction times in the subjects undergoing the test (1905/1906, par. 637). He
adopted the term ‘complex’ for such constellation of feeling-toned ideas (Jung & Riklin,
1904/1906, par. 167).
An extension of the original research into the psychophysical domain involved
additionally measuring the skin resistance of the subject in reaction to the stimulus
words, employing a galvanometer whose electrodes were placed on the palms of the
hand or the soles of the feet. The results demonstrated that the same feeling-toned
ideas that generated delayed reaction times also produced physical effects associated
with the sympathetic nervous system (accumulation of sweat and reduction in skin resist-
ance yielding increased current flow) (Jung, 1907/1908, pars. 1046/1049). In an example of
word association in a normal subject, the stimulus word stupid produced the association
am I and a peak in galvanometer reading, and Jung wrote, ‘the subject had a clear ego-
centric complex’ (Jung, 1907/1908, par. 1104). Accordingly, emotion and physical reaction
were seen to be intimately combined in relation to unconscious personal complexes.
A further application of this research was in a study of families, in which Jung and Fürst
administered the WAT to all members of 24 families (Jung, 1909). The findings showed
remarkable similarities in patterns of response amongst certain sub-groupings within
the families, including close correlations of association between mother and daughter
in one family, father and two daughters in another, and respectively (a) two sisters
living together, and (b) a further sister and her husband, in a third. As Papadopoulos
notes, ‘in effect, this research indicated that within families there must be certain for-
mations that are organising structures which are collectively shared’ (1996, p. 130).
These studies, carried out under Jung’s direction in the period from 1902 to 1910, are
described in numerous papers, published in Volume Two of The Collected Works (1973) and
elsewhere, and they provide scientific evidence in support of:

(a) A theory of personal complexes, defined as collections of unconscious ideas bound

together by a common emotional feeling tone;
(b) The fact that activation of unconscious complexes affects individuals concurrently
both on a psychic level and on a physiological level; and
(c) The hypothesis that, in certain categories of people, psychic organising and structural
affinities exist between individuals in their responses when complexes are activated.

Jung’s psychiatric career at the Burghölzli Clinic also involved the clinical treatment of
cases of hysteria, where blocked or repressed affect occasioned by emotional trauma was
converted into symptomatology involving a wide variety of physical characteristics and
4 A. ADDISON

sensory phenomena, and in which he employed Freud’s method, as discussed in Addison

(2009).
Hence, from the outset of his working career, Jung was investigating the unconscious
dynamics in personal complexes and addressing the relationships of psyche to soma and
between different individuals, when psychic facts and physiological facts are combined.
Already, he was demonstrating a monistic view of body and mind, and a profound connec-
tion between certain people, in results consistent with his later understanding of the
psychoid.
Whilst his psychiatric work and his collaboration with Freud form one backdrop to his
early ideas concerning the structure and dynamics of the unconscious, there is another
background element, namely his personal experiment into the process of vision-making,
commencing in the lead-up to First World War. Shamdasani describes this study as herme-
neutic science, by contrast with the traditional view of science as applied in the WATs (Jung,
2009b, p. 32). Through this investigation, published as The Red Book (2009a, 2009b), Jung’s
understandings of the unconscious entered a new phase, with his discovery of the tech-
nique of active imagination. His focus also shifted from the personal unconscious to a
deeper level, which he came to call the collective unconscious.
His self-investigation and his early theoretical conceptualisations proceeded in tandem,
the one providing the platform for the other. Accordingly, the self-investigation will be
described first, and the theoretical deductions elucidated afterwards.1

2.2. The Red Book

Within Jung’s oeuvre, The Red Book is successor to Symbols of Transformation (1912), where
he contrasted two forms of thinking, namely directed rational attention and undirected
fantasy attention. His researches for Symbols brought him to an awareness of symbolic
thinking, when he realised that he had been projecting his own process onto Flournoy’s
description of the visions of his patient, and hence that he had been ‘analysing [his]
own fantasy function’ (Jung, 2012, p. 29). As Shamdasani notes, this was the start of the
work of The Red Book (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, pp. 39–40), in which it is possible
to see Jung elaborate a dialectic between these two forms of thinking, namely conscious
and unconscious, through symbolisation.
A few years later, in response to intense psychic pressure, Jung began to assess his
entire life, and thus commenced his self-investigation. Observing that the games of his
childhood still had an emotional charge, he set about a form of play, constructing
model buildings, a church and a village (Jung, 1963, p. 198). This brought forth further
psychic material and developed into a self-analysis, through a method of shaping the
unfolding fantasy into creative form, followed by critical observation. It is to be noted
that introspection and self-investigation were respectable methods in psychology at the
time (Casement, 2010, p. 39). Further, Jung was aware of earlier examples of self-exper-
imentation from Herbert Silberer’s investigation of hypnagogic states in 1909, and
Ludwig Staudenmaier’s experimentation with self-induced hallucinations in 1912 (Jung,
2009b, p. 21).
In the autumn of 1913, there arose two dreams of a terrible sea of blood, and a flood of
unconscious fantasy was unleashed (Jung, 2009b, p. 199). From December 1913, he began
his ‘most difficult experiment’ of actively2 engaging with the unconscious, by plunging
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 5

himself into his fantasies, deliberately soliciting them, and then entering into dialogue
with them (2009b, pp. 22/24). He recorded the visions occurring in the short few
months from October/November 1913 to February 1914, seeing those entries as the
records of an experiment, in which the scientific question was ‘to see what happened
when he switched off consciousness’ (2009b, p. 24). Thereafter, he commenced a series
of retrospective reflections, elaborating the original material in a lived method of meta-
phorical evocation, including mythopoeic writing, calligraphy, and painting, which he
later termed active imagination (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, pp. 9/14). The extent and
thoroughness of these reflections is not to be underestimated, since it involved repeated
re-working over many years.
Jung employed no conceptual terminology in his retrospective reflection, preferring
instead to stay with experience-near language evoking the power of the emotional under-
taking, although elsewhere he was already using terms such as ‘complex’ and ‘collective
unconscious’ (1917a, pp. 377, 432). Jung regarded this period as absolutely crucial in his
later conceptualisations:
The years of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most
important of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. […] Everything later was
merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. (Sham-
dasani, 2012, p. 366)

Although, in 1930, he moved on to alchemy, Jung continued his retrospective reflection in

further orders of re-working for the remainder of his life, in himself personally embodying
the lessons that he had learnt, in his analytic work, and in translating the original experi-
ence conceptually into a scientific psychology, including his psychoid concept, as dis-
cussed below. His concept of active imagination is an important aspect of these
developments.

2.3. Active imagination

The Red Book presents Jung’s active imagination as: a polyphonic interweaving of inner
voices from different aspects of his personality; different texts generated at different
times; and different narrative forms. The process was profoundly multi-layer. Visions
recorded directly in his Black Books are supplemented by poetic elaborations from a
year and more later, re-worked repeatedly in the various different drafts of Liber Primus
and Liber Secundus existing amongst the extant manuscripts for The Red Book (2009b,
p. 105). Jung also made a calligraphic transcription, and added his own paintings.
In the published work, the original material from the Black Books is presented as Layer
1. Here, a series of dramatic personifications unfold, commencing with a dialogue between
Jung and his soul, who leads him to a hot desert, where he confronts two principles: the
spirit of this time, and the spirit of the depths. Various key figures appear, amongst them
Siegfried, the hero; Elijah and Salome, the old man and the maiden; the Red One, the devil;
Izdubar, the warrior with bull-horns; the magician; and the prophetic figure, Philemon.
According to Hannah (1997, p. 117), the figure of Philemon was the most important in
all of Jung’s exploration.
The later re-working, involving interrogation of the personified figures of Layer 1, and a
dis-identification with their various voices through the reflective dimension of mythopoeic
6 A. ADDISON

narrative and depiction in plastic form, is presented as Layer 2 (Hillman & Shamdasani,
2013, pp. 19–20). Jung struggles between the spirit of the time, which draws him
towards scientific knowledge and practical value, and the spirit of the depths, which situ-
ates the soul in time immemorial and confers living meaning. Especially, there was a need
to distinguish himself from the prophetic voice of Philemon, and it is through this differ-
entiation that he came to understand that it was not he who created his own visions but
that the figures had an independent existence and represented an objective reality of his
psyche (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 122). Layers 1 and 2 together may respectively be
conceived as: the practice of the image; and the metaphorical way, in an imaginal process
imparting symbolic meaning to life (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, pp. 42–43). In Layer 1,
the spirit of the depths furnishes material presaging Jung’s ideas concerning the psychoid
realm, and his imaginal re-working of that material in Layer 2 led him to his notion of active
imagination as a process for achieving personal meaning out of that realm.
By 1916, Jung (1916/1957) was already beginning to conceptualise the process of active
imagination in his essay The Transcendent Function. He was not as yet employing the
expression, but in a prefatory note, added in 1959, he refers to the essay as a description
of the method of active imagination. In this essay, he discusses his ‘constructive or syn-
thetic method of treatment’ for assisting the patient to gain insight into the meaning of
their disturbance, by seeking a union of conscious and unconscious contents in a new pos-
ition transcending and integrating the content of both (Jung, 1916/1957, par. 145). He pro-
posed starting from the emotional state of the patient:
The emotional disturbance can also be dealt with […] by giving it visible shape. Patients who
possess some talent for drawing or painting can give expression to their mood by means of a
picture. It is not important for the picture to be technically or aesthetically satisfying, but
merely for the fantasy to have free play […] There are others again […] whose hands have
the knack of giving expression to the contents of the unconscious. Such people can profitably
work with plastic materials. Those who are able to express the unconscious by means of bodily
movements are rather rare. (Jung, 1916/1957, par. 168)

This quote foreshadows Jung’s later account, in which he attributes a role to psychoid pro-
cesses in meaning-making through the embodied elaboration of unconscious imagery,
the practice that he himself developed in The Red Book:
And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or the brush, the foot that executes the
dance-step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the
ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form
[…] Over the whole procedure there seems to reign a dim foreknowledge not only of
pattern but of its meaning. Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape,
so the latter becomes clear. (1947/1954, par. 402)

According to Jung, such amplification elicits and personalises3 the mythological motifs
contained in the original images, and encourages a spontaneous manifestation of a pur-
posive unconscious process (1947/1954, par. 400). No matter what plastic form is selected
for the living embodiment of the original fantasy image, new material drawn from the
unconscious becomes available to the conscious mind for assimilation and integration,
with the form and the process together acting as a container to facilitate and hold this
work. Just as the effects of archetypal processes manifest in embodied images within the
psyche-soma continuum, so also may embodied experience feed back into the archetypal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 7

organising process.4 The result enriches and vitalises the personality, bringing to conscious
realisation the personalised effects of the archetype, and setting in train the coming-to-be
or purposive unfolding of the Self, which Jung called individuation.
Such conceptualisation flows out of Jung’s own active imagination, and is fundamental
in his later conceptualisation of the psychoid. Specific examples of his active imagination,
and of the accompanying theorisation, demonstrate this, and foreshadow his later account
of the psychoid concept.

2.3.1. The seven sermons

One theme that appears repeatedly in different guises in The Red Book is the mystery and
meaning of God. For example, in Mysterium Encounter, Jung’s ‘I’ reflects on the essence
of God in Layer 1, through a vision of Elijah and Salome (Jung, 2009b, pp. 174–177). In
Layer 2, he contemplates the mystery play as a deep place like the crater of a volcano,
pushing out a fiery molten mass of the unformed. He who enters the crater, as
someone formed and determined, melts and the form in him dissolves and becomes
smelted anew in the primordial beginning (Jung, 2009b, pp. 178–183). The Layer 1
vision took place on 21 December 1913, but the date of the Layer 2 reflection is not
mentioned. Already, Jung’s confrontation with the spirit of the depths is bringing him
into play with the deep primordial beginning, or unus mundus, later to be described as
the psychoid unconscious.
This example prefigures the series of visions over the short period, from the end of
January to the beginning of Feburary 1916, that were to become the seven sermons to
the dead (Jung, 2009b, 507–536). Jung published these separately from the rest of The
Red Book, circulating them privately amongst his circle in 1916 as Septem Sermones ad
Mortuos, and ascribing them to Basilides in Alexandria, a Gnostic sage from second
century AD. An English translation by H. G. Baynes was printed in 1925, and is the trans-
lation discussed here, although others have been produced subsequently.
Jung’s reference to Gnosticism was deliberate, since the seven sermons are arguably
derived from the Gnostic mythologem of a demiurge, in the form of Abraxas, who
appears in the second sermon; and the work makes use of a Gnostic style and employs
Gnostic vocabulary. Jung’s debt to the Gnostics is acknowledged, and is the subject of dis-
cussion and disagreement, by a number of scholars, including Hoeller (1982), Quispel
(1992), Ribi (2013), and Segal (1992), as well as being the subject of criticism by Buber
(1952). Ribi notes that gnosticism5 may be thought of as ‘a primordial psychic experience’
(2013, pp. 32/38), and that ‘Jung’s conception of Gnosis permeates the entirety of his sys-
tematic psychology’ (Ribi, 2013, pp. 168–169).
Jung turned to the accounts of the Gnostics seeking support for his own observations of
the mythopoeic depths underlying consciousness. Hannah records that Jung told her
‘more than once that the first parallels he found to his own experience were in the
Gnostic texts, that is in the Elenchos of Hippolytus’ (1997, p. 114). As Jung (1951, par.
169) stated in Aion, ‘for the Gnostics – and this is their real secret – the psyche existed
as a source of knowledge’, and this is precisely how he approached his active imagination.
In the seven sermons, Jung elaborates the themes above from Mysterium Encounter in
terms of Pleroma and Creatura. The Pleroma is described as nothingness or fullness, both
differentiation and undifferentiation, whose qualities are undifferentiated pairs of oppo-
sites, such as living and dead, light and dark, time and space, good and evil. Although
8 A. ADDISON

not specifically mentioned, the Pleroma must thus also include the undifferentiated oppo-
sites of subject and object, as well as body and mind. As Ribi (2013, pp. 188–189) observes,
Jung has borrowed a well-known Gnostic term, which he later designates the unus mundus
or unknowable psychoid substratum of the collective unconscious. Creatura on the other
hand is not in the Pleroma but in itself and confined within time and space; Creatura is
distinct, and its function is to differentiate or discriminate. In Creatura, the Pleroma is
rent and the opposites are separate. Creatura is distinguished, here, from created
beings, or man, and is changeable or capable of transformation.
Man’s nature is distinctiveness, and the danger for man is to fall into the Pleroma or
undifferentiated state and become submerged in nothingness. His fight to achieve differ-
entiation leads to the ‘Principium individuationis’. Ribi (2013, pp. 196–197) thus considers
that Creatura should be regarded as the universal principle of individuation, which
emerges from the Self and is the cause of individual consciousness, stating that something
can only become conscious when it is separated out of the Pleroma. He notes that the
Gnostics see the Pleroma as the origin of the individual (2013, 180). In the seven
sermons, therefore, Jung is describing the emergence of the individual human being
out of the unknowable and undifferentiated psychoid depths of the unconscious
through a process of differentiation and personalisation. Indeed, he subsequently wrote
of individuation that, ‘in general, it is the process of forming and specialising the individual
nature; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a differen-
tiated being from the general, collective psychology’ (1923, p. 561).

2.3.2. Systema Munditotius

Around the same time that he was writing seven sermons, Jung was also drawing his first
mandala, which he termed Systema Munditotius, shown surrounded by ‘Pleroma’ and
including Abraxas at its base (Jaffe, 1979, pp. 75–76). Later, in 1955, Jung wrote:
It portrays the antimonies of the microcosm within the macrocosmic world and its antimo-
nies. … Abraxas … represents the dominus mundi, the lord of the physical world, and is a
world-creator of an ambivalent nature. (2009b, p. 560)

Jeromson (2005/2006, p. 10) indicates that there is evidence that the first sketches pre-
date the seven sermons in 1916, and sees the seven sermons and Systema Munditotius
as mirroring one another, joint symbolic products of Jung’s self-exploration, leading
towards the Self. Jung himself later interpreted mandala as symbols of individuation
and the Self.

2.4. Concurrent theorisation

These imaginal or symbolic accounts may be compared with Jung’s conceptual papers The
Conception of the Unconscious (1917b) and The Relation between the Ego and the Uncon-
scious (1928), as well as with various later statements made by Jung about psychoid pro-
cesses. The former essay is the text of a lecture, given in 1916 to the Zurich School of
Analytical Psychology, on the effects of assimilating the unconscious in the service of indi-
viduation. It makes sense to read this essay and the seven sermons in tandem, not only
because of their coincidence of timing but also because of their complementary
content, the one employing only mythopoeic language, the other only conceptual
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 9

terminology. Although this difference means that no definitions exist for the mythopoeic
expressions, it is possible to deduce counterparts in the conceptual terminology, as dis-
cussed below.
In this essay, Jung designates two layers in the unconscious, a personal unconscious
and a collective or universal psyche inhabited by primordial images, the latter referring
to what he later came to call the collective unconscious with its archetypal images.6 Assim-
ilation of the collective unconscious tends to produce a certain quality of ‘god-almighti-
ness’, an ‘all-compelling binding to and identification with the collective psyche’ that
disregards the different psychology of the other (Jung, 1917b, pp. 450/454). ‘A dissolution
of the pairs of opposites sets in’, often accompanied by peculiar symptoms, such as phys-
ical sensations of being too large for one’s skin, or hypnagogic feelings of endless sinking
or rising, or of enlargement of the body or dizziness (Jung, 1917b, pp. 452/458). A release
of fantasy, including audio-visual and physical hallucinations is common. Jung describes
the freeing of the individual from the collective unconscious, through processing fantasies
hermeneutically as symbols, leading increasingly to a differentiation (separating out) of
psychological function and individual corporeity (Jung, 1917b, p. 465). We may assume,
from this description that he is equating the individual and his personal corporeity with
the created beings or man of the first sermon, and is linking the collective unconscious
and its dissolved opposites with the Pleroma and hence with the psychoid substratum,
as noted by Ribi (2013, pp. 188–189).7
The 1916 text thus complements Jung’s seven sermons, with its account of Pleroma and
Creatura, and of undifferentiation and differentiation, and its early reference to individua-
tion. It effectively conceptualises Jung’s own process of self-experimentation in The Red
Book, and provides a context for his 1916 account of the transcendent function. More
importantly, however, this essay effectively describes the clinical process of regression,
as mentioned above, to a state in which the physical fact and the psychic fact coincide,
and self and other are not separate, and progression, as differentiation occurs in the indi-
viduation process, corresponding respectively with the process, set down in Mysterium
Encounter and the seven sermons, first of dissolving in the undifferentiated state of the
primordial beginning or psychoid unconscious, and then of being ‘smelted anew’ (Jung,
2009b, p. 183).
The later paper constitutes an updated version of the 1916 text with a fuller account of
the collective unconscious. Jung (1928, p. 150) warns of the attractive power of the arche-
typal image, and of the consequent dangers of inflation, wherein the whole personality is
dissolved and splitting of the mind ensues. Strict separation from the collective uncon-
scious is needed for the development of the personality, since a partial or blurred differ-
entiation can result in the individual imposing their views on their fellows, and even
obliteration of difference in the entire community (Jung, 1928, p. 158).
Jung’s (1928) essay also describes the process of individuation as ‘a gradual differen-
tiation of functions which in themselves are universal’ and further develops the idea of
symbolic representation of such process (Jung, 1928, p. 184). He gives an example here
of a transforming vision experienced by woman patient after a long period of active
ego participation8 in her fantasy life:
I climbed the mountain and came to a place where I saw seven red stones in front of me, seven
on either side, and seven behind me. […] I tried to lift the four stones that were nearest to me.
10 A. ADDISON

In doing so I discovered that these stones were the pedestals of four statues of gods which
were buried down in the earth. I dug them up and so arranged them around me that I
stood in the middle of them. Suddenly they leaned towards one another so that their
heads touched […] I fell to the ground. […] Then I saw that beyond, encircling the four
gods, a ring of flame had formed. After a time I arose from the ground and overthrew the
statues of the gods. Where they fell to earth four trees began to grow. And now from the
circle of fire blue flames shot up which began to burn the foliage of the trees. […] I
stepped into the fire. The trees disappeared and the ring of fire contracted to one immense
blue flame that carried me up from the earth. (Jung, 1928, pp. 246–247)

Jung described this dream as the symbolic expression of the process of individuation. As
he says, ‘our individual conscious psychology develops out of an original state of uncon-
sciousness, or in other words, a non-differentiated condition (termed by Levy-Bruhl, “par-
ticipation mystique”). […] Discrimination is the essence, the condition sine qua non of
consciousness’ (Jung, 1928, p. 226).
The effect of this is described by Boechat (2017, p. 19) as the human need to reach our
basic instinctive roots and overcome dissociation through aesthetic configuration, by reco-
vering and personifying the archetypal images instantiated in the psychoid unconscious
through a dialectic between the ego and these inner figures. Such process grounds the
ego in organising symbols and their meaning.
Subsequently, in The Philosophical Tree, Jung (1945/1954) employs the symbol of ‘the
tree’ to represent the process of individuation symbolically, observing that, ‘in so far as
the tree symbolises the opus and the transformation process ‘tam ethice quam physice’
(both mentally and physically) it also symbolises the life process in general’ (Jung, 1945/
1954, par. 459). Being an archetypal image of universal character, its full range of
meaning for a particular individual may be difficult to establish, since ‘the psychoid
form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development,
though empirically it is capable of endless variations’ (Jung, 1945/1954, par. 350). Ribi
(2013, pp. 41–42) brings this back to Gnosticism, describing the psychoid nature of the
archetype as a mystical concept that provides ‘the interface in the psyche where the
mental and the physical meet’ and that ‘manifests itself precisely in human relationships’.
In On the Nature of the Psyche, Jung (1947/1954, par. 367) brings in the analogy of a
scale, contemplating the psyche extending at one end into the physiological sphere of
instinct and at the other into a spiritual form, so that psychoid processes underpinning
the collective unconscious therefore relate both to instinct and spirit, and to body and
mind. He asserts, the ‘psychoid nature of the archetype contains very much more than
can be included in a psychological explanation. It points to the sphere of the unus
mundus, the unitary world’ (Jung, 1958, par. 852). Emancipation or differentiation of
psychic function from the psychoid realm through the organising and integrative
process of individuation leads increasingly to consciousness and true individuality. All of
this is foreshadowed in the seven sermons and the associated conceptual texts from
1916 and 1928 onwards.
Jung’s own process, and the examples given above, each contemplate a dialectic
between the individual ego and figures in the imaginal material emerging into conscious-
ness out of the unknowable depths of the psychoid unconscious, in order to foster per-
sonal development. Both of these two conceptual essays also bring in the notion of
transference as an important aspect of this process.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 11

In the 1916 text, Jung discusses the case of a young woman experiencing attacks of
night terror, and nervous asthma. Investigation uncovered a history involving an
unhappy parental marriage, with a mother subject to hysteria; a series of incidents sur-
rounding first her father and then a young Italian man, in whose eyes she could see a ter-
rifying animal lust; and, finally, following the birth of her own second child, a discovery that
her husband was entangled with another woman. Jung noted that her libido was uncon-
sciously fastened in unadapted form on the young Italian, but that her fantasies trans-
ferred in the course of treatment to the physician himself (Jung, 1916, pp. 385/408). He
wrote that, if the Doctor accepts the situation, a natural channel for overcoming the neu-
rosis is created, but that, if he fails to understand the phenomenon, the patient is liable to
break off the relationship with the Doctor (Jung, 1916, p. 408).
There follows a description of the normal progression of the transference from a pro-
jection onto the physician of personal material, in this instance relating to the young
Italian and the father, to the projection of more fantastic material based on mythological
themes, such as magician, demoniacal criminal, and saviour, none of which relate to the
actual person of the physician. This later phase involves the projection of archetypal
images based on inherited links to the potentialities of the human imagination:
We have therewith now found the object selected by the libido when it was freed from the
personal-infantile form of transference. Namely, that it sinks down into the depths of the
unconscious, reviving what has been dormant there from immemorial ages. It has discovered
the buried treasure out of which mankind from time to time has drawn, raising thence its gods
and demons. (Jung, 1917b, p. 411)

Through the relationship with the Doctor, this transference may hopefully lead to a differ-
entiation in the unconscious of the personal and the impersonal (i.e. collective) uncon-
scious, something which is necessary to avoid pathology.
In order to differentiate the psychological ego from the psychological non-ego, man must
stand upon firm feet in his ego function, that is, he must fulfil his duty towards life completely,
so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of human society. (Jung, 1917b,
pp. 416–417)

Such a transference and its evolution would later be seen as an aspect of the organising
function of the psychoid unconscious.
The 1928 paper contains a shift in emphasis over the 1916 version. Jung (1928, p. 131)
brings in another example of a woman with a father complex, writing that they had
reached an impasse, and he found himself unable to dissolve the transference. Accord-
ingly, he turned to her dreams, ‘since the psyche is a vital process … a purposive
process with a final orientation, so that we might expect the dream’ to provide indications
as to what is going on (Jung, 1928, p. 131). In these dreams, the active figures were unmis-
takably herself and himself, so that he knew she had transferred onto him a father imago.
But, in each case, he was misrepresented, having a body of supernatural size or being
extremely old, while she was tiny or very young. The contrast was quite fantastic. He
understood that she could distinguish the actual reality from the unconscious position,
and concluded that ‘the energy of the transference is so strong that it gives one the
impression of a vital instinct’ (Jung, 1928, p. 133). He asked himself whether this was
the ‘most real meaning of this purposeless love that we call transference?’ (Jung, 1928,
p. 133). Gradually, the patient evolved an unconscious super-personal guiding point,
12 A. ADDISON

and was eventually freed of her father complex sufficiently to form a new personal attach-
ment. Through the dreams, her unconscious was able to achieve a widening and a dee-
pening of her psychic position that produced a living effect. Jung described this as the
function of a reactivated archetype in the collective unconscious. It might also be
thought of as the result of a re-connection with the ultimately unknowable psychoid
realm and its life enhancing organising possibilities.
In this way, Jung describes an important clinical aspect of the analytic process. He
makes a connection between the archetypal base of experience, or psychoid unconscious,
and the relationship with the analyst, contemplating how the evolution of the transference
in analysis leads to living meaning and individuation.

2.5. The collective experiment

Throughout the period when Jung was conducting and conceptualising his own active
imagination, he also continued his private practice, and, according to Shamdasani, he
extended his self-investigation of the vision-making process into a wider empirical
research study, based on his practice:
Jung’s self-experimentation was in part a collective experiment, involving his patients. Jung
encouraged his patients to engage in active imagination and attempted to see to what
extent the process of development he had undergone could be replicated and had typical
phases. (Casement, 2010, p. 41)

This is corroborated by an observation made by Tina Keller, one of Jung’s analysands, to

the effect that Jung ‘was after all experimenting just like a surgeon who is trying out new
methods’ (Swan, 2000, p. 100). Swan (2000, 2011) gives accounts of Keller’s two analyses,
with Jung and Toni Wolff, indicating that she used automatic writing and painting to elab-
orate her fantasies in her initial analysis with Jung, and embodied them through dance
and movement in her subsequent analysis with Wolff. Keller described a session with
the latter in the following terms:
Following my body tensions, I formed a crude dance. I, or rather a young fantasy-woman in
me, felt imprisoned in stone. […] The contours of her body were clear, yet she must with
great exertion free herself from the stone walls. It took a good part of the session until at
last I stood upright and free. This session seemed to me much more satisfying than sessions
where we merely talked. (Swan, 2011, p. 31)

It is also corroborated by the fact that Jung encouraged his patients to make copies of the
pictures created in their own active imaginations, and to donate them to him for his
private collection. The collection is now housed in The Picture Archive at the Jung Institute
in Zurich, which contains approximately 4000 pictures produced by Jung’s analysands and
approximately 6000 pictures produced by those of Jolande Jacobi. Both Jung and Jacobi
presented and published extensive examples of such active imaginations, see for example,
Jung’s A Study in the Process of Individuation (1934/1950) and Visions: Notes of the Seminar
Given in 1930–1934 by Jung (1997),9 and Jacobi’s Symbols in an Individual Analysis (1964).
Thus, Jung was not only employing his own experience of his vision-making study in
elaborating his theoretical conceptualisations, but he was able to verify his conclusions
by reference to the analytic work conducted by himself and by Jacobi. He therefore had
a substantial empirical base for developing his hermeneutic understanding of his
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 13

collective unconscious and his subsequent formulation of his ideas concerning his psy-
choid unconscious.

3. Conclusion
The above discussion demonstrates a complete change of direction between Jung’s earlier
psychiatric, science-based WATs, applied to the relationship of body and mind and to
structural affinities between certain individuals, and his subsequent hermeneutic under-
standing and approach, although he employs the latter to build on knowledge derived
from the former. He is now deriving his theoretical ideas firstly from self-experimentation,
and secondly from the empirical base of his own analytic practice and patients. He has
arrived at a hermeneutic method of symbolic elaboration by means of active imagination,
a technique uniquely combining body and mind in a creative process, which as early as
1916 he had linked with the transcendent function, defined here as a meeting of opposites
to create a living third or new situation. This gives a lived symbolic dimension to the psy-
choid concept.
Such discussion also shows how, in the period from 1913 to 1930, Jung was grappling
with notions of individual and collective, and differentiation and undifferentiation having
regard to self and other, as well as body and mind, and he was doing so both in an empiri-
cal sense, within his own self-experimentation and his collective experiment, and in a con-
ceptual sense, in his evolving theoretical accounts. He has discovered a notion of
individuation, starting from an undifferentiated state, a participation mystique, peopled
by typical forms or archetypal images. He has conceived the need for the individual to dis-
criminate his psychological function and his individual corporeity increasingly from the
collective, through personalisation of these archetypal images, and he has proposed a
process of symbolic reflection or active imagination, involving both body and mind, in
order to achieve this progression. Further, not only has he worked out his notion of
regression to, and progression from, undifferentiated states and, in his 1928 essay, con-
ceived the view that consciousness proceeds from a participation mystique, he has also
demonstrated the application of these specific ideas to an early notion of the transference
developing in analysis from a personal to an archetypal process.
This empirical base and its conceptual working out pre-figure and confirm Jung’s later
accounts of the psychoid unconscious and psychoid processes, offering an hermeneutic
insight into the psychoid concept that sits alongside vitalist understandings derived
from the biological thinking of Driesch and Bleuler.10 Further, Jung’s vitalist interests
and his earlier foundation in his scientific work, in which the WATs provided evidence
not only of the connection between psyche and soma, but also, in the family studies, of
the existence of collectively shared organising structures, also enabled Jung to be open
to the emergence of ideas of a monistic body-mind and the existence of ‘participation
mystique’ from his hermeneutic investigations.
Jung’s hermeneutic investigations yield two related strands to incorporate in an under-
standing of the psychoid concept. Firstly, this research proposed ways in which psychoid
processes link individual man to the unus mundus, and in which the individual develops in
the process of individuation from an undifferentiated state towards increasing differen-
tiation from the collective through the personalisation of archetypal images. This serves
to distinguish the individual personally in terms both of his psychological function and
14 A. ADDISON

his corporeity. Jung conceived the method of active imagination for this personalisation,
demonstrated by his own example and by those of his analysands, as conceptualised in
various theoretical papers. Such approach is heavily weighted towards metaphorical reflec-
tion, and psychophysical forms of symbolic functioning, implying that working with imagery
in all areas of the body-mind continuum is an important aspect of the analytic process.
Secondly, another key theme, implied but not fully described in Jung’s early conceptu-
alisations, is the manifestation of psychoid processes in the transference in an undifferen-
tiated or symmetrical unconscious field, in which analyst and patient are mutually
immersed. The psychoid processes then have an effect in generating an arena where
archetypal images may arise and in ordering the material emerging into consciousness,
so that it may be personally mediated through active imagination.
This leads to a clinically meaningful understanding of the psychoid both as a deeply
unknowable realm, thereby limiting what can be said about it, and as an area of undiffer-
entiation, where psyche and soma are monistic, and self and other are in a participation
mystique, from which the individual differentiates himself in analysis through the transfer-
ence relationship between analysand and analyst.
The present paper has endeavoured to trace the hermeneutic background to Jung’s
psychoid concept, in order to highlight his search for living meaning in the unknown
depths of the psyche, and the conceptualisations that arose out of this search. The advan-
tage of uncovering this history is the demonstration, by example, of a dialectical method
of engaging with archetypal material through the symbolic, in a manner engendering a
series of transformations from undifferentiated and universal states to increasingly differ-
entiated and personalised states in the process of individuation and in analysis.

Notes
1. His vocabulary evolved as his ideas matured, and the original or early term will be sup-
plemented by the more well-known, later term, which thereafter will be employed exclusively.
2. Author’s italics.
3. Author’s italics.
4. Author’s italics.
5. In second and third centuries AD, Gnosticism assimilated itself to emerging Christianity (Ribi,
2013, 29/40).
6. In his 1928 essay, he describes primordial images as archetypal images.
7. See also Hoeller (1982) and Segal (1992).
8. Jung is not yet employing the expression ‘active imagination’, see page 9.
9. Based on the visions of Christiana Morgan.
10. Addison (2009).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Ann Addison, Ph.D., is a training analyst of the SAP, and has a private practice in central London for
the treatment of adult patients. She has recently completed a Ph.D. at Essex University on the
subject, ‘A Study of Transference Phenomena in the Light of Jung’s Psychoid Concept’, and has
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 15

taught students at Birkbeck College, Essex University and Central School of Speech and Drama, as
well as trainees at the Society of Analytical Psychology and at the British Psychotherapy Foundation.

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