Hermaphroditism

Hermaphroditism occupies a strategically charged position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as mythological image, archetypal symbol, alchemical motif, and developmental concept. Jung treats it most systematically as the ‘hermaphroditism of the child’—the archetypal condition of pre-differentiated bisexuality that characterizes the divine child and, by extension, the preconscious psyche. In Essays on a Science of Mythology, Jung and Kerényi establish that the cosmogonic prevalence of hermaphroditic deities cannot be dismissed as mere primitive confusion: its persistence into Gnosticism, medieval natural philosophy, and Catholic speculation on Christ’s androgyny indicates an enduring symbolic necessity. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, hermaphroditism reappears as the mark of the alchemical rebis and the androgynous Adam, linking the motif to the coniunctio and to Gnostic Primordial-Man speculation. Adler’s concept of ‘psychic hermaphroditism,’ mediated through Hillman’s Adlerian critique, introduces a clinical-hermeneutic dimension: the ambivalence of bisexual constitution as both inferiority and the undifferentiated ground of all neurotic either/or thinking. Neumann reads the recovery of hermaphroditism as the individuation trajectory’s culmination—the assimilation of anima or animus restoring the original wholeness. López-Pedraza grounds the image in the mythological person of Hermaphroditos and in Priapic ‘freakishness’ as archetypal reality. Together these voices reveal a field where cosmology, alchemy, developmental psychology, and clinical hermeneutics converge around one compelling image of coincidentia oppositorum.

In the library 17 passages

The hermaphrodite means nothing but a Jungian of the strongest and most striking opposites… if the hermaphrodite were only a product of primitive non-differentiation, we would have to expect that it would soon be eliminated with increasing civilization. This is by no means the case.

Jung and Kerényi argue that hermaphroditism is not a relic of primitive undifferentiation but a persistent symbol of the union of opposites operative across the highest levels of culture, including Gnosticism and medieval natural philosophy.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis

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the personality gives up the primacy of its specific sexuality and, by assimilating the anima or animus, regains its original hermaphroditism, so the archetypes lose their unambiguous character in a multiplicity of contradictory meanings.

Neumann frames the assimilation of the contrasexual principle as a recovery of originary hermaphroditism, marking the individuation process’s movement toward wholeness and archetypal complexity.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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The ultimate ground of thinking in opposites is the male/female pair, ‘the only real antithesis’… hermaphroditic ambivalence itself indicates inferiority and is ‘apperceived in a strongly antithetical manner,’ which safeguards us from it.

Hillman, reading Adler, positions hermaphroditic ambivalence as both the ground of oppositional thinking and a site of felt inferiority that society resolves through rigid sexual dichotomy—a move that generates neurosis.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis

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claiming to be a Hermaphroditus and, in the tenth image of the Rosarium, a meeting of this claim with Luna, belong within the archetypal spectrum of Priapus.

López-Pedraza situates Hermaphroditus within the archetypal field of Priapus and the Rosarium coniunctionis imagery, grounding the mythological figure in clinical and alchemical contexts.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting

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she became one with the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, that son who was called Hermaphroditos

Kerényi recounts the mythological origin of Hermaphroditos from the union of Hermes and Aphrodite with the nymph Salmakis, establishing the mythological genealogy of the hermaphrodite figure.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting

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just as the female lies hidden in the male, so the male lies hidden in the female… The tree in the following dream of a Jung woman patient brings out this hermaphroditism.

Jung illustrates the hermaphroditic principle through the bisexual symbolism of the tree, demonstrating how the mutual concealment of masculine and feminine produces hermaphroditic imagery in dreams.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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hermaphrodite, 69n 173, 174, 176, 374 divine, 67 Mercurius as, 158 Platonic, 192 hermaphroditism, of child, 173ff

The index of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious maps the constellation of hermaphroditism across divine figures, Mercurius, the Platonic all-round being, and the child archetype.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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hermaphroditism lived as ‘role-sharing,’ futurity lived as the planning of hopes and fears, and defensive vulnerability.

Hillman identifies ‘hermaphroditism’ as one of the idealizations the child archetype projects onto marriage, recast in the modern idiom of ‘role-sharing.’

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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their two bodies, joined together as they were, were merged in one, with one face and form for both.

López-Pedraza cites Ovid’s account of the merger of Hermaphroditos and Salmakis as a primary mythological text underlying the Hermetic archetypal spectrum he is analyzing.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977aside

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atman, 160, 354; hermaphroditic nature, 160m

An index note in Symbols of Transformation records the hermaphroditic nature attributed to the atman, extending the motif into Vedantic speculation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside

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