Transcendence Function

The ego will be torn between these two opposites of sensuality and spirituality and will try to keep to the middle ground. This middle ground then becomes tremendously important because the combination of spirituality/sensuality which forms is a genuinely new product.

Samuels provides the canonical exposition of the transcendent function as the production of a genuinely new, mediatory element arising from the tension between conscious and unconscious opposites.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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The integration of hemispheric functioning may be analogous or even similar to the transcendent function. Jung described two ways for the transcendent function to express itself — the ‘way of creative formulation’ (undirected thinking, metaphorical language) and the ‘way of understanding’ (science, concepts, words).

Samuels maps the transcendent function’s dual expressive modes onto neurological hemispheric integration, while preserving Jung’s own distinction between imaginal and conceptual pathways.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Such an experience produces a state of introversion in which ‘a withdrawal of the centre of psychic gravity from ego consciousness’ occurs, and the energy thus invested in the unconscious produces a new pattern of psychic functioning which is not centered around ego consciousness.

Spiegelman describes the shift in psychic center of gravity that characterizes the transformative process analogous to the transcendent function, framing it within the confrontation with the archetype of the self.

Spiegelman, J. Marvin, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting

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Winnicott felt that we ought to modify our view to embrace both ideas, and to see (if it is true) that in the earliest theoretical primitive state the self has its own environment, self-created, which is as much the self as the instincts that produce it.

Samuels situates the transcendent function within a broader comparative dialogue between Jungian and Winnicottian accounts of self-formation, noting structural parallels around mediatory and generative psychic products.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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For Jonas, such modification is an expression of the dynamic character of this type of structure, a dynamic character he calls transcendence. Here Jonas draws on his mentor Heidegger’s concept of transcendence as the always-already-surpassing or being-projected-beyond-oneself in the world.

Thompson’s treatment of Jonas’s biological concept of transcendence as self-surpassing provides a phenomenological and bio-philosophical cognate to the dynamic, forward-moving character implicit in the transcendent function.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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Instead of the mind being used to make meaning out of sensate experience, the mind becomes a ‘thing in itself’ — a pathological ‘mind-psyche’ equivalent to our self-care system.

Kalsched’s account of pathological mind-psyche formation under trauma implicitly inverts the transcendent function, describing the condition in which the mediatory capacity of the psyche is foreclosed.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside

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