The hermaphrodite occupies a distinctive and contested position throughout the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as mythological figure, alchemical symbol, psychological archetype, and therapeutic concept. Jung establishes the hermaphrodite as an archetype of pre-conscious, non-differentiated psychic states — the ‘twilight’ condition prior to the separation of opposites into masculine and feminine — while also locating it within alchemical tradition as the rebis, the culminating coniunctio of Sol and Luna. Yet Jung is careful to distinguish this primordial undifferentiation from mere regression: the hermaphrodite persists through the highest cultural epochs, appearing in Gnostic cosmogony, medieval natural philosophy, and modern theology of Christ’s androgyny, precisely because it images something irreducible about psychic wholeness. López-Pedraza radicalizes this reading by situating hermaphroditic consciousness within the psychotherapy relationship itself, arguing that a bisexual hermetic analytic consciousness is prerequisite for liberating transference from sexual polarities. Kerényi approaches the hermaphrodite as a primary mythologem of Greek household cult and as the androgynous first being underlying both Hermes and Aphrodite. Abraham and Place document the alchemical rebis as the lapis arising from coniunctio. The central tension — whether the hermaphrodite represents archaic undifferentiation to be transcended or a sophisticated ideal of psychic symmetry to be attained — organizes the entire discussion.
If we conceive of the Hermaphrodite as a particular consciousness in itself, then, from its own level of consciousness it apprehends that basic reality of life which makes psyche possible: man and woman.
López-Pedraza argues that hermaphroditic consciousness is not a developmental deficit but an autonomous mode of psychic apprehension that comprehends the male/female polarity as a unity, making it foundational for psychotherapy.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis
The hermaphrodite means nothing but a union of the strongest and most striking opposites. In the first place this union refers back to a primitive state of mind, a twilight where differences and contrasts were either barely separated or completely merged.
Jung and Kerényi identify the hermaphrodite as a symbol of coincidentia oppositorum rooted in pre-conscious psychic twilight, yet insist its cultural persistence across high civilization proves it is not merely a vestige of primitive non-differentiation.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
The hermaphrodite is an important symbol that often occurs at a particular stage of psychological development. It is an archetype… it is the symbol for the infantile not-yet-differentiated state, for as soon as the sexes are differentiated there is consciousness.
Jung characterizes the hermaphrodite as an archetypal marker of the preconscious stage in analytic development, signaling the as-yet-unformed potential of what the individual is to become.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
The androgynous first being, who since Theophrastus has been known as hermaphrodites and as such has been ascribed to Hermes and Aphrodite as their son, appears in the Cyprian cult of the goddess as her masculine aspect, Aphroditos.
Kerényi traces the hermaphrodite to a primordial mythological stratum in which Hermes himself was originally androgynous, possessing Aphrodite as his feminine aspect before masculine and feminine differentiated into separate divinities.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944thesis
I am well aware that the ‘achievement’ of the Hermaphrodite in the pool, the prerequisite for hermaphroditic consciousness, is difficult for psychology to accept and find a place for in psychotherapy.
López-Pedraza contends that hermaphroditic consciousness — achieved through the mythic union in the pool — is a necessary but psychologically resisted precondition for a genuinely mercurial, non-polarizing psychotherapeutic process.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977thesis
The filius or rex in the form of a hermaphrodite… From their union is born the hermaphrodite, the incarnate Primordial Man… to the right is the athanor (furnace) with the vessel in the centre, from which the lapis (hermaphrodite) will arise.
Jung presents the alchemical hermaphrodite as both the product of the coniunctio of Sol and Luna and as the lapis philosophorum itself — the incarnate Primordial Man who is simultaneously the goal and the agent of transformation.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
The hermaphrodite within the house represents so to speak the origin of the source: he represents the primal condition restored in marriage, the one who precede[s all differentiation].
Kerényi documents the hermaphrodite’s function in Greek domestic cult as a representation of the pre-differentiated primal condition that grounds the family’s origin, linking the mythological figure directly to lived religious practice.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944supporting
‘This, they say, is the human hermaphrodite in all creatures, whom the ignorant call Geryon of the threefold body… flowing from the earth; but the Greeks name it the celestial horn of the moon.’
Jung cites Gnostic sources that identify the hermaphrodite with the cosmogonic Logos and the quaternio, demonstrating how the symbol functions as a cosmological as well as psychological principle in ancient esoteric thought.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
The king and queen combined as one hermaphrodite stand on the dragon. The hermaphrodite is holding a square and a compass, symbols for the squaring of the circle, yet another symbol of the transcending of duality.
Place situates the alchemical hermaphrodite within a cluster of symbols for the transcendence of opposites, showing how it visualizes the philosophical ideal of uniting celestial and terrestrial, masculine and feminine, in a single image.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
For their two bodies, joined together as they were, were merged in one, with one face and form for both.
López-Pedraza quotes Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis to anchor the psychological concept of hermaphroditic consciousness in its originary mythic narrative of enforced bodily union.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting
She became one with the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, that son who was called Hermaphroditos and since then was ind[issolubly joined].
Kerényi recounts the foundational myth of Hermaphroditos as the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, permanently fused with the nymph Salmacis — establishing the figure’s dual parentage and its mythological etiology for sexual ambiguity.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Hermes and Aphrodite could even be fused into the bisexual figure of Hermaphroditos — ancient mythological speculation is transformed into an artistic experiment in Hellenistic sculpture.
Burkert traces the historical and cultic basis for the hermaphrodite’s emergence from the close association between Hermes and Aphrodite, framing it as mythological speculation crystallized into a distinctive form in Hellenistic art.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
anima nature of androgyne; and/as hermaphrodite, 243, 309, 316
Jung’s index entry linking anima to the hermaphrodite confirms the systematic identification in his therapeutic psychology between the anima function and androgynous or hermaphroditic archetypal configurations.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
This would be a more psychological answer to the feminist ‘claim’ that women are the same as men. In a hermaphroditic consciousness, men and women are equal.
López-Pedraza proposes hermaphroditic consciousness as a depth-psychological response to feminist debates about sexual equality, arguing it achieves genuine parity by transcending rather than collapsing gendered difference.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting
It was claimed for him that he was none other than the Hermaphroditos… that characteristic which was not merely phallic, but hermaphroditic.
Kerényi traces Priapus’s mythological identity as potentially equivalent to Hermaphroditos, demonstrating the fluid boundaries among hermaphroditic, phallic, and generative divine types in Greek religious imagination.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
The ultimate ground of thinking in opposites is the male/female pair, ‘the only real antithesis’, which in turn can be pushed back to its early childhood experience in ‘psychic hermaphroditism’ (the title of Adler’s 1910 paper).
Hillman, drawing on Adler, situates psychic hermaphroditism at the root of oppositional thinking and ambivalence, reading it as the earliest psychic condition from which gendered differentiation — and its characteristic anxieties — subsequently emerge.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
Also ‘… it was claimed for him that he was none other than the Hermaphroditus.’ With Aphrodite as his mother, he was said to have various other fathers: ‘Dionysus, or sometimes Adonis, or even Zeus himself.’
López-Pedraza notes the classical tradition identifying Priapus with Hermaphroditos and its multiple paternity traditions, using these mythological fragments as a basis for constructing a psychotherapy of Priapic psychology.
, Hermes and His Children, 1977aside
hermaphrodite, 69n 173, 174, 176, 374 divine, 67; Mercurius as, 158; Platonic, 192; hermaphroditism, of child, 173ff
Jung’s index entries in the Archetypes volume confirm the systematic clustering of the hermaphrodite with Mercurius, divine figures, Platonic cosmology, and child-hermaphroditism as interrelated aspects of a single archetypal complex.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959aside