Completeness occupies a pivotal and contested position in the depth-psychological corpus, serving as both a teleological ideal and a diagnostic criterion for the psyche's developmental condition. Jung establishes the term's conceptual gravity in Aion, where completeness names the voluntary acceptance of individuation's full burden — the recognition that wholeness, unlike mere happiness, demands conscious integration of shadow, inferior function, and opposing principles. Edinger sharpens this further by opposing completeness to perfection: the masculine spirit strives toward perfection, the feminine nature principle toward completeness, and analytical work in the modern era must counterbalance an over-emphasis on the former with the latter — while remaining alert that unconscious, undifferentiated completeness is no achievement at all. Samuels, reporting post-Jungian critiques, notes Guggenbuhl-Craig's dissatisfaction with the corpus's tendency to speak too glowingly of 'roundness, completeness, and wholeness' without accounting for pathology and deficiency inherent in the self. Von Franz grounds the term in typological psychology, arguing that failure to integrate the fourth (inferior) function leaves a trinitarian psychology that perpetually skirts the wholeness completeness would require. The circle as symbol of completeness, the lapis as stone of totality, the self as quaternary rather than trinitarian structure — these are the emblematic vehicles through which the corpus presses the concept across alchemy, mythology, and clinical practice alike.
In the library
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the masculine spirit principle is Striving for perfection and the feminine nature or relatedness principle is Striving for completeness... we encounter a fair number of individuals who are more complete than they are perfect.
Edinger articulates completeness as the feminine counterprinciple to masculine perfection, warning that unconscious, undifferentiated completeness is itself a psychological problem rather than an achievement.
Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992thesis
recognition of our wholeness or completeness, as a binding personal commitment. If he does this consciously and intentionally, he avoids all the unhappy consequences of repressed individuation.
Jung frames completeness as a conscious, voluntary burden the individuating person must accept, distinguishing it from an involuntary fate that 'happens' against one's will in negative form.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
there is too much said about qualities like roundness, completeness, and wholeness. It is high time that we spoke of deficiency, the invalidism of Self.
Samuels documents Guggenbuhl-Craig's post-Jungian critique that classical analytical psychology's valorisation of completeness suppresses the equally constitutive reality of deficiency and pathology in the self.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
any logical system within which arithmetics can be developed is essentially incomplete. In other words, given any consistent set of arithmetical axioms there are
Von Franz invokes Gödel's incompleteness theorem to argue that even mathematical logic cannot achieve the closure completeness implies, contextualising psychological incompleteness within a broader epistemological frame.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Three of the four orienting functions are available to consciousness... His inferior function will be feeling (valuation), which remains in a retarded state and is contaminated with the unconscious.
Jung's account of the inferior function's inaccessibility to consciousness explains structurally why completeness — requiring integration of all four functions — remains so difficult an attainment.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
they remain in the conventional former world of identifying with consciousness. Many people who have undergone a Jungian analysis do not get further than those brief visits into the fourth realm
Von Franz diagnoses the majority of analysands as falling short of genuine completeness because they avoid sustained integration of the inferior function, remaining in a trinitarian rather than quaternary psychology.
Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
It is the ultimate purity and unity, the all-embracing wholeness, the quintessence of Truth. Essence of Mind belongs neither to death nor rebirth, it is uncreated and eternal.
Govinda presents the Mahayana conception of Pure Mind as an all-embracing wholeness that parallels the Jungian self, grounding completeness in a transpersonal, uncreated ground of being.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
for the living creature that was to embrace all living creatures within itself, the fitting shape would be the figure that comprehends in itself all the figures there are... a figure the most perfect and uniform of all
Plato's Timaeus identifies the sphere — equidistant from centre to extremity and containing all figures — as the cosmological archetype of completeness, a classical precedent for depth psychology's mandala symbolism.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the hero's supernaturalness includes human nature and thus represents a synthesis of the 'divine,' i.e., not yet humanized unconscious and human consciousness. Consequently he signifies the potential anticipation of an individuation process which is approaching wholeness.
Jung reads the hero myth as an anticipatory image of the completeness sought in individuation, wherein unconscious and conscious are brought into synthetic union.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
nothing can happen without a pre-existing pattern, not even creation ex nihilo, which must always resort to the treasure-house of eternal images in the fabulous mind of the 'master workman'
Edinger's observation that every process requires a pre-existing pattern implies that completeness, as an archetypal goal, must itself be prefigured in the collective unconscious before it can be consciously realised.
Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992aside
whether the individual is able to preserve his ego-consciousness intact, or whether he succumbs to the immense emotional power with which all archetypes are laden, in which case his consciousness disintegrates partially or completely.
Von Franz frames the risk of archetypal possession as a dissolution of ego-completeness, contrasting the constructive integration of archetypes with their capacity to fragment rather than unify consciousness.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975aside