Marriage Quaternio

The marriage quaternio is Jung‘s technical term for the fourfold structure by which the psychic relation of a man and a woman — and, in introverted register, the relation between a masculine ego and its anima or a feminine ego and its animus — organizes itself across the therapeutic or erotic encounter. The structure is quaternary: the conscious man, the conscious woman, the man’s anima, the woman’s animus, each of which stands in differentiated relation to the others.

Jung introduces the quaternio in [[psychology-of-the-transference|The Psychology of the Transference]] (1946) and elaborates it in jung-aion (1951). The ethnographic prototype — the cross-cousin marriage system with its four kinship terms — supplies the archaic mythic shape of a structure that repeats in the analytic transference, in the alchemical coniunctio, and in every instance where the erotic encounter between consciousness and the contrasexual unconscious image is fully articulated. The quaternio is the developmental stage preparatory to the coniunctio: the joining becomes possible only when the four positions have been differentiated and seen. See psychology-of-the-transference and quaternity.

Relationships

• quaternity
• psychology-of-the-transference
• coniunctio