Renovatio

Renovatio names the one of Jung’s four forms of rebirth that operates “within the span of individual life” — rebirth not as transmigration, not as eschatological resurrection, but as transformation of the living person (Jung 1959, §203). The German Wiedergeburt and the English rebirth are its equivalents; French, Jung observes, has no precise counterpart (§203).

Jung distinguishes four forms of rebirth phenomenology: metempsychosis (transmigration of soul with change of body), reincarnation (transmigration with continuity of personality and memory), resurrection (re-establishment of existence after death, possibly of a corpus glorificationis), and renovatio — the only form that does not require physical death (Jung 1959, §§200–203). Within renovatio Jung further distinguishes subjective transformations: diminution and enlargement of personality, change of internal structure, identification with a group or a cult-hero, magical procedures, technical transformation (yoga, exercitia spiritualia), and natural transformation — which he names individuation (§§204–232).

The taxonomic move is load-bearing. In the vulgar reception of Jung, individuation is taken as the master category under which all transformation falls; in CW 9i, individuation is one species of renovatio and renovatio is one of four forms of rebirth. The other three forms are not reducible to individuation — they belong to religious and metaphysical registers the psychology honors without absorbing. The Assumption of the Virgin, Osiris rising in the green wheat, and the coniunctio of alchemical-operations each name a form of rebirth the psychology describes but does not psychologize away.

Renovatio is where the tradition’s alchemical and Christian registers meet Jung’s phenomenology. The alchemical filius noster, the Christian regeneratio, and the Eleusinian mystery-drama all fall under it (§§208–209). Every transformation the analytical psychology accompanies is a species within this larger genus — which is why the volume’s essay on rebirth, and not the later essays on the self, names the most general framework within which Jung’s psychology operates.

Relationships

• jung-archetypes-collective-unconscious
• individuation
• coniunctio
• mortificatio
• incarnation-as-coagulatio
• rebis

Primary sources

• jung-archetypes-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959), §§200–232 — the whole of “Concerning Rebirth”
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955–56) — the alchemical register of renovatio
• jung-memories-dreams-reflections (Jung 1963)