Enantiodromia

Enantiodromia — the running (-dromia) of a thing toward its opposite (enantio-) — names the regulative principle by which any psychic position, pressed far enough, generates its contrary. The term is Jung’s adoption of what Heraclitus writes implicitly across the fragments: “by cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change” (fr. 36, Haxton); “god is day, night, winter, summer, war, peace, satiety and famine” (B67, cited in Sullivan 1995, p. 217); “immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of the other and dying the life of the other” (B62).

The doctrine’s Heraclitean root is the doctrine of the balanced opposites. Each opposite is the condition of the other’s recognition: “if these things did not exist, people would not even know the name of justice” (B23, Sullivan 1995, p. 220). In Jung’s hands this becomes a psychological law. A conscious attitude extended without regard to its opposite generates its opposite in the unconscious, which eventually breaks through and reverses the conscious position. Individuation requires the conscious holding of the tension rather than its collapse into either pole.

No chunk from Jung’s Collected Works grounded this recon directly; the doctrine’s Heraclitean source, however, is thoroughly attested in the fragments and their scholarly apparatus (Sullivan 1995, Seaford 2004). The concept’s full Jungian elaboration — in Psychological Types (CW 6) and Two Essays (CW 7) — is noted as a library silence for this recon, to be addressed by a concept-mode follow-up on Jung.

Relationships

• unity-of-opposites
• coniunctio
• transcendent-function
• individuation

Primary sources

• fragments-heraclitus (Heraclitus, c. 500 BCE)
• Sullivan, Psychological and Ethical Ideas (1995)