Complexio Oppositorum

The complexio oppositorum is the logical structure of the self as Jung specifies it in Aion: a totality that holds its own opposites rather than excluding them. The term appears in the index of Aion as a cross-reference to coniunctio oppositorum (Jung 1951, index entry “complexio oppositorum, 61n, 225, 267”). It names the reality that the Christ-symbol was prevented from figuring — the unity in which good and evil, light and dark, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine are held together as the archetype of wholeness.

The concept is load-bearing for Jung’s rejection of the privatio-boni-refused doctrine. If evil is merely the absence of good, the Self is light alone; if evil is ontologically real, the Self is the complex that contains both. Aion’s entire argument depends on the second premise. “The parallel I have drawn here between Christ and the self is not to be taken as anything more than a psychological one… The images of God and Christ which man’s religious fantasy projects cannot avoid being anthropomorphic and are admitted to be so” (Jung 1951, §122) — the imago is a symbol of the Self, and the Self must be a complexio, not a purified half.

The concept is the Jungian rendering of the alchemical axiom Jung will elaborate at length in Mysterium Coniunctionis: the great work is the bringing together of what the daylight mind has put asunder. In the Piscean aeon, the church split the opposites; in the coming aeon, the psychological task is to recognize their union as the ground of the Self.

Relationships

• self
• coniunctio
• privatio-boni-refused
• antichrist-as-shadow-of-the-aeon
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis

Primary sources

• jung-aion (Jung 1951, §61n, §122, §225, §267)