A Glossary of Jungian Terms “““The“The AAlchemistslchemists thought that thethethe OOOpusOpuspuspus demanded not only laboratory work, the reading of books, meditation, and patience, but also lovelove””””.... -- The Practice of Psychotherapy Abaissement du niveau mental: French psychologist Pierre Janet's term, elaborated by Jung, for a weakening of the ego due to an unconscious drainage of its psychological energy. A lowering of attention or consciousness. Often observed just before creative work or during those incubation periods when the unconscious prepares a new stage of growth. Absolute knowledge: the acausal foreknowledge, relatively independent of limitations of time and space, possessed by the unconscious and apparent in constellated archetypes and in synchronicity . Acausal OOrderedness:rderedness: the underlying interconnectedness of psychic and physical processes. Synchronicity is one expression. Time is a concrete continuum possessing basic qualities that can manifest simultaneously in different places, as the ancient Chinese thought. Active IImaginationmagination ::: holding an image in awareness while fantasizing and associating to it to bring it to life and discover its nuances and unconscious roots. Also focuses and unifies the four orienting functions of consciousness. Active imagination is the indispensable second part of any deep analysis and bases itself on the imaginal nature of the psyche . AffectAffect----ego:ego: the modification of the ego or "I" by an emerging strongly toned complex . With painful feelings the modification can bring about a restriction, a withdrawal of many parts of the normal ego . Aion: a lion-headed, snake-encircled Mithraic God-image of time (also called Kronos or Deus Leontocephalus) who for Jung represented death/rebirth and a psychological union of opposites like light and darkness, male and female, creation and destruction. "Eon," a long length of time, also meant for Jung the two-thousand-year Christian eon, which coincided with its astrological sign, Pisces, in which one fish represents Christ and the other its future opposite, the Antichrist. Below all this works the archetype of the hostile brothers; too, the astrological characteristics of the fish contain essential components of the Christian myth: the cross, the moral conflict and its splitting into two figures, the son of a virgin, the classical mother-son tragedy, the danger at birth, and the savior. For the alchemist, the fish also symbolized the Lapis ; for Jung, unconscious wholeness. Some history... Two thousand years ago, the late Roman Empire saw a roar of libido emanating from the collective unconscious , an outpouring we can no longer imagine thanks to the psychological barriers erected by centuries of Christianity. The Roman gods were dying, foreshadowing Nietzsche and our era. Christian ritual and dogma contained and channeled the animal ancestral forces splashing across Europe and symbolized by the Colosseum, thereby exalting the individual, providing a new ethic, forging a new sense of community, giving people for whom the old religions and myths no longer worked a sense of purpose, and splitting spirit and nature so each could develop independently. The result: modern civilization, standing on the ruins of Rome. Starting with the Reformation (which was helped along by an interest in antiquity inspired by the fall of the Byzantine Empire under Islam's onslaught and by the resulting spread of Greek language and literature through Europe) that broke the church's authority, eroded ritual, and splintered Christianity, religious and traditional containers for the instinctual-archetypal forces began to lose their meaning. "The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down" ( Aion ) The Reformation coincided with the point where the ecliptic intersects the meridian at the second fish's tail. The enantiodromia (conversion into an opposite) from Christ to Antichrist falls midway between the two fishes, which was around the Renaissance. At that time Post-Reformation Christianity gave the bipolar Self expression (the Incarnation of God in us) but compensated for the Gothic overemphasis on spirit by further dividing spirit from instinct and matter, faith from knowledge. 1750: Enlightenment - tail of second fish - reason replaces faith. Alchemy and astrology arose by way of further compensation and set the stage for scientific materialism, which could now oppose and control nature by reeling in our identification with/projections onto it. The result of all this: the vertical development of spirituality gave way to the horizontal development of materialism. Jung speculated that the polarity of the God-image was behind the Reformation and the split of modern society into two armed camps. Compensating for this: psychology, a symbol system potentially useful for containing and channeling the instinctual-archetypal forces and reuniting the God-image . Around and because of the French Revolution: an explosion of nonpersonal stuff piled up since the Enlightenment. The pagan in us got much stronger. The decay of traditional symbol systems increased. Ideally, the autonomous activity of the unconscious is zero; today it's higher than ever before. The freed surplus of libido also has caused inflation (because attributing things to the gods at least jibed with their nonego status and because an archetype that loses its container becomes identified with the conscious mind) and activated various isms , utopian fantasies, psychic infections, and a longing for herdism and the State (as opposed to the earlier traditions and heirarchical orders). Too, collective ideals compensate the rise of individuality that began with the Reformation. Meanwhile the rise of exogamous libidinal tendencies (stranger-love) prompted a counterreaction of endogamous (relative-love) libido that powers religions, sects, nations, and isms . Ultimately, however, only individuation can fuse the two tendencies and prevent the endogamous reaction from growing dangerously powerful. See cross-cousin marriage . "A civilization does not decay, it regenerates." ( Civilization in Transition ). Albedo: "whitening," the second of four alchemical stages. In it the alchemist cooks, washes, recirculates, and pulverizes the prima materia into a silvery ash ready to be reinfused with soul and spirit. This corresponds roughly to the anima/animus stage of individuation . Alchemy: the ancient attempt to create the Philosopher's Stone and mutable gold. In the West, mainly of Egyptian origin and Arabic elaboration, but also with Gnostic roots, especially in the idea that the world soul was trapped in matter. Beginning with the prima materia , the alchemist heated, cooked, and washed the substance until it passed through the four stages of nigredo, albedo, cinitritas, andrubedo and became the Stone. In most texts, the basic idea was to divide up the four elements mixed up in the prime matter, refine and circulate them, and rejoin them in a heirosgamos or "chymical wedding" of opposites. Jung saw the opus alchymicum , the work of alchemy, as an unconscious projection of the process of individuation , which starts with an unconscious content ( prima materia ) and end with the realization of the Self symbol ( Philosopher's Stone ). The alchemical process, which began in the spring and ended in the fall, was an extended act of active imagination (meditatio) fired by awareness and libido. (See my "Cooking For The Collective Unconscious" for a summary of the parallel of alchemy with Jungian psychology.) Alchemy also bridged Gnosticism and psychology. Jung saw in it a historical counterpart to his psychology of the collective unconscious . Alchemy finally died out in the eighteenth century. Note: for Dorn, producing the Lapis constituted only the second stage (for Jung the representation of the idea of the Self in visible form). The third: the union of the whole man with the unus mundus . Union with the Ground of all being. Identity or relation of the personal with the suprapersonal atman, or individual with universal tao. A perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious Ambitendency (or ambivalence): Bleuler's concept that every tendency is balanced by an opposite one. Applies particularly to all "feeling-tones" and the bipolar nature of libido , which flows forward and backward. AmplificatAmplification:ion:ion:ion: using imagery to create a meaningful context around a symbol needing examination. Also known as elaboration of the symbol . In subjective amplification, a dreamer, for example, uses active imagination to associate to a dream symbol in order to grasp it better. In objective amplification, the analyst collects themes from mythology, alchemy , religion , and other sources to illuminate, or amplify, archetypal symbols produced in dreams or fantasy . Anima: the feminine component of the unconscious male psyche and inner counterpart to the persona . Possibly she reflects a man's smaller number of female genes. Ultimately an archetype of Eros and of life itself, this "woman within" functions as a filter, bridge, guide, and mediator between the ego and the deeper layers of the unconscious . As long as she's not differentiated she stands for the unconscious ; later, she stands apart, a daughter to the Wise Old Man who compensates her and sometimes mate of the shadow . Because she carries a man's "soul" and his "relatedness," she can be fully realized only with a female partner. "If a man cannot project his anima, then he is cut off from women" (