Philemon

Philemon is the figure who appears to Jung during the “confrontation with the unconscious” (1913–1930) as the inner wisdom-figure who teaches Jung that the images of the psyche have their own autonomy. In [[jung-red-book|Liber Novus]] and in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung records that Philemon represented “a force which was not myself… a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.” Philemon is the tutelary figure through whom Jung learns that psyche speaks.

Philemon is load-bearing for the Jungian procedure of active-imagination: the figure is the concrete evidence that the imaginal Other is not ego-produced. He is, in the tradition’s reading, the modern daimon — the figure who, like Socrates’s daimonion or the angelic interlocutor of the Sufis, is the face of the autonomous psyche met as a person.

Relationships

• jung-red-book
• active-imagination
• daimon