Auseinandersetzung

Auseinandersetzung — literally “a setting apart from one another” — is Jung’s name for the ego’s proper procedure with the contents of the objective-psyche. Murray Stein’s gloss is precise: the word “refers to the process that takes place when two people strongly engage one another in dialogue or negotiation, neither one fleeing the conflict. As they stand head to head and have it out physically or verbally, the differences between them that were at first gross and barely articulate become more differentiated” (Stein 1998, p. 143).

The archetypes “cannot be integrated simply by rational means, but require a dialectical procedure, a real coming to terms with them” (Jung, CW 9i §85). The italics belong to the method. Integration is not absorption; the ego does not swallow the archetype. Nor is it submission; the ego does not dissolve into the archetype. It is the sustained maintenance of two, such that what was inarticulate becomes clear.

The method assumes the objective-psyche is genuinely an Other. Against the neurotic temptation to “succumb to a mood,” Jung instructs: “keep your objectivity despite the temptations of the mood, and make the mood your object, instead of allowing it to become in you the dominating subject” (Jung 1953, CW 7 §349). The patient “must try to get his mood to speak to him; his mood must tell him all about itself and show him through what kind of fantastic analogies it is expressing itself.”

This dialectic is the operational form of the ego-Self axis and the procedural ground of individuation. The [[jung-red-book|Red Book]] is Jung’s own extended demonstration of the method: a sustained written confrontation with the figures of the objective psyche, refusing both capitulation and dismissal.

Relationships

Primary sources

jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953, CW 7 §§348–349)
the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung, CW 9i §85)
jungs-map-of-the-soul (Stein 1998, p. 143)