Transcendent Function

The transcendent function names, in carl-jung‘s technical usage, the psychic operation by which the ego holds the tension of opposites — conscious and unconscious, thesis and antithesis — until a third, a reconciling symbol, emerges. It is the mechanism by which the Jungian individuation proceeds: not by resolving the opposition at the level where it arises but by transcending it through the production of a new image that contains both sides.

The concept stands as analytical psychology’s answer to the problem that Stoic apatheia and Christian puritas cordis each address in their own register: how the ego comes to stand in a non-identified relation to the affects. Where the Stoic extirpates the pathos by correcting its judgment, and the Desert Father dissolves the logismos by purity of prayer, Jung’s ego holds the affect as an image, lets the unconscious produce its compensating figure, and arrives at an integration rather than an elimination. edward-edinger explicitly draws the parallel: psychological analysis “promotes something akin to apatheia, because it deliberately makes the effort to promote disidentification from the affects” — but the analytic move objectifies the affect rather than eradicating it (Edinger 1999, pp. 80–81).

The function is transcendent not in a metaphysical sense but in a structural one: it transcends the opposition by producing a symbol in which both poles are present. active-imagination is the practical technique through which the function operates. The self is the archetype under whose constellating pressure the third term emerges.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• apatheia
• ego-self-axis
• individuation
• active-imagination
• coniunctio

Primary sources

• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (Edinger 1999)
• Jung, C. G., “The Transcendent Function” (CW 8) — extra-library, referenced through Edinger’s treatment