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Unio Mentalis

Unio Mentalis

The unio mentalis, in gerhard-dorn‘s schema, is the first stage of the coniunctio: the union of soul with spirit, achieved by their simultaneous separation from the body. It is a labor of separation before it is a labor of union. The mind wins a standpoint over against the turbulent body of affect and appetite; only from that standpoint can it later return.

Jung describes it precisely: “the mind… must be separated from the body — which is equivalent to ‘voluntary death’ — for only separated things can unite” (Jung 1955, §671). The first coniunctio is therefore a mortificatio, a death of the merely natural man, that prepares the ground for embodied wholeness. Edinger renders the phenomenology: “the soul and the spirit gang up against the body and separate from it… It decapitates itself, so to speak” (Edinger 1995, p. 286). The classical image is beheading; the alchemical color is the albedo, the whitening.

Jung marks the unio mentalis as “a clear blend of Stoic philosophy and Christian psychology” (Jung 1955, §672), and identifies it with the ordinary work of modern analysis: “modern psychotherapy makes use of the same procedure when it objectifies the affects and instincts and confronts consciousness with them” (Jung 1955, §672). Every withdrawn projection is a particle of unio mentalis.

Hillman extends the concept: “the unio mentalis — the first goal of the opus — as union of logos and psyche is nothing other than psychology itself, the psychology that has faith in itself… [what] Jung elsewhere describes as esse in anima — being in soul” (Hillman 2010). For Hillman, the first coniunctio is the founding gesture by which psychology constitutes itself as a field distinct from biology and metaphysics.

The unio mentalis is the necessary but insufficient first step. Its incompleteness is what drives the work forward to the unio-corporalis.

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