Greater Solutio

Within solutio Edinger distinguishes a lesser form — the ordinary affective dissolution of the ego in regressive pull or emotional flood — from a greater form, in which the dissolving agent is not the personal unconscious but the Self. “The greater solutio is an encounter with the Numinosum, which both tests and establishes the ego’s relation to the Self. As the flood myths tell us explicitly, the flood comes from God; that is, solutio comes from the Self. What is worth saving in the ego is saved. What is not worth saving is dissolved and melted down in order to be recast in new life-forms. Thus, the ongoing life process renews itself. The ego that is committed to this transpersonal process will cooperate with it and will experience its own diminishment as a prelude to the coming of the larger personality, the wholeness of the Self” (Edinger 1985).

The distinction is the form the ego-Self axis takes inside each operation. The lesser solutio is an ego-event; the greater is a Self-event, recognizable by the numinous register of the encounter, by the paradoxical sense that what is being lost is also what is being served. The same bi-level structure Edinger finds in sublimatio: “The lesser sublimatio must always be followed by a descent, whereas the greater sublimatio is a culminating process, the final translation into eternity of that which has been created in time” (Edinger 1985). Every operation carries its personal and its transpersonal face; the operation’s pathos is read from which face is present. The greater solutio’s characteristic follow-on is mortificatio — “solutio thus may become a mortificatio” (Edinger 1985) — because the ego experiences its dissolution, at the transpersonal scale, as annihilation before it is recast.

Relationships

• solutio
• self
• ego-self-axis
• mortificatio
• sublimatio

Primary sources

• edinger-anatomy-of-the-psyche (Edinger 1985)