The Seba library treats Twilight State in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Hillman, James, Bleuler, Eugen, Jung, C.G.).
Consciousness and the unconscious are created into a polarity at the same moment out of original twilight states; and they are continually being created at the same moment.
Hillman argues that twilight states are not pathological deficiencies but the primordial condition from which the polarity of consciousness and unconscious is perpetually generated.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
Like the term ‘twilight state,’ ‘ambivalence’ tends to be reserved only for a faulty ego. But ambivalence is natural, as the necessary concomitant to the ambiguity of psychic wholeness whose light is in a twilight state.
Hillman directly challenges the psychiatric reduction of ‘twilight state’ to ego pathology, reclaiming it as the inherent light of psychic wholeness and pairing it with ambivalence as co-equal modes of non-pathological being.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
The twilight states may be interrupted by periods of lucidity which, in turn, may last anywhere from a few minutes to several days. Schizophrenic twilight states may also take on some characteristics of the Ganser syndrome.
Bleuler provides the clinical taxonomy of schizophrenic twilight states, describing their oscillation with lucidity, their relation to the Ganser syndrome, and their distinctive phenomenological character within the broader schizophrenic spectrum.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911thesis
Twilight states and certain agitated states do not necessarily signify any advance in the disease and therefore usually leave behind them the status quo ante.
Bleuler establishes the prognostic significance of twilight states within schizophrenia, distinguishing them as episodic and non-deteriorative, carrying relatively favorable outcome.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911thesis
Examples are taken from epileptic twilight states. Author discusses the assimilative tendency of the sexual complex in relation to symbol formation.
Jung links epileptic twilight states to the unconscious process of symbol formation, positioning them as evidence of how complexes operate and generate meaning beneath the threshold of directed consciousness.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
To the twilight consciousness of primitive man it seems as if the egg came out of the womb of the wide world and were, accordingly, a cosmic, objective, external occurrence.
Jung employs ‘twilight consciousness’ as a structural descriptor for the pre-differentiated psychic condition of primitive humanity, the epistemic ground in which archetypal images are projected outward as cosmic realities.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
Twilight states which continue for months are probably never hysterical phenomena; neither are those which gradually develop in the course of weeks or months and disappear just as gradually.
Bleuler uses differential duration and onset of twilight states as diagnostic criteria to demarcate schizophrenia from hysteria, conferring on the term precise clinical-discriminatory weight.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
5. Twilight State. The twilight states, li[ke the delusional forms, may give the impression of being merely an exacerbation of hallucinatory state].
Bleuler introduces Twilight State as a formal clinical category within his nosology of schizophrenic acute syndromes, situating it in relation to delusional and hallucinatory excitement.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
Because these figures are in special relation forming, if you will, a two-headed archetype, or a Janus-Gestalt, we shall find it impossible to say good of one without saying bad of the other as long as the two remain in polar opposition.
While not directly treating twilight states, Hillman’s analysis of archetypal polarity provides the structural theoretical context for his later rehabilitation of twilight consciousness as intrinsic to the puer-senex dynamic.
, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967aside