Wholeness stands as one of the most contested and generative terms in the depth-psychological lexicon, functioning simultaneously as a clinical goal, a metaphysical postulate, and a spiritual aspiration. In the Jungian mainstream, wholeness designates the telos of individuation: the integration of conscious and unconscious contents, of shadow and persona, of anima/animus and ego, into a coherent, if never fully achieved, psychological totality organized around the Self. Jung’s own formulations insist that wholeness is approached rather than attained — one moves toward it, as Dennett carefully notes, since complete integration of unconscious content remains impossible. This directional rather than terminal understanding distinguishes analytical psychology sharply from theological notions of salvation or redemption, with which it is frequently confused. Critical voices within the post-Jungian tradition — Hillman most prominently, Guggenbuhl-Craig as well — challenge the monotheistic cast of wholeness-as-unity, arguing that it suppresses the psyche’s irreducible multiplicity and pathologizes legitimate incompleteness. Beyond clinical psychology, the term radiates outward into cosmological speculation (Rudhyar’s holistic astrology, Ponte and Schafer’s quantum background), addiction spirituality (Grof, Peterson, Dennett), and neurophilosophy (McGilchrist’s hemispheric Gestalten). The persistent tension between wholeness as integration of opposites and wholeness as surrender to a transpersonal field remains the animating problematic of the corpus.
one develops a unique personality, and therefore moves towards wholeness rather than achieving wholeness as it is impossible to integrate or become conscious of all unconscious content
Dennett articulates the canonical Jungian qualification that wholeness is an asymptotic orientation rather than an achievable terminus, grounding this in Jung’s own formulation of individuation.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025thesis
wholeness equates to the integration of ‘all of us, good and bad,’ thus diverging from the typical religious notions of salvation or redemption
Peterson defines psychological wholeness as the integration of shadow and light, explicitly contrasting it with theological redemption and locating its nearest analogue in the Twelve Step recovery myth.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
Wholeness is also defined as the unity or totality of complex components. This is what we have been thirsting for — and it is possible to find it in our everyday world.
Grof grounds wholeness etymologically and experientially, presenting it as the true object of spiritual hunger that addiction symptomatically misdirects, achievable through integration of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions.
, The Thirst for Wholeness: Attachment, Addiction, and the Spiritual Path, 1993thesis
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, channeling Guggenbuhl-Craig, mounts a post-Jungian critique that the classical equation of Self with wholeness dangerously excludes pathology, incompleteness, and the genuinely fragmentary dimensions of psychic life.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
7 The Psyche’s Transcendent Center and Wholeness
Stein frames wholeness as the structural correlate of the Self as transcendent center, situating the concept within Jung’s most systematic theoretical exposition in Aion.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis
being conscious of one’s shadow is perhaps a more modest way to achieve a wider consciousness of the wholeness of the personality
Peterson argues that shadow-consciousness, rather than grandiose identification with an archetype, constitutes the practical and psychologically safer route to expanded personality wholeness.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024thesis
The self of psychological wholeness, briefly, more clearly reflects the God of monotheism and the senex archetype. Unity and totalit
Hillman exposes the theological underpinning of Jungian wholeness, identifying the Self’s unity-ideal with monotheism and the senex archetype, thereby framing wholeness as a culturally conditioned rather than universally valid psychological telos.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
two views of completion, a psychological wholeness where individuation shows itself in multiple relations, and a theological wholeness where individuation shows itself in degrees of approximation to an ideal or unity
Samuels distinguishes relational-pluralist from idealist-unitary conceptions of wholeness within the post-Jungian debate, noting that Hillman’s emphasis on elaboration and complication represents a genuine alternative model.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
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 locates the hero archetype as a symbolic prefiguration of wholeness, since the hero uniquely synthesizes unconscious divine power and conscious human nature in a process of approaching — rather than achieving — psychic totality.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
the lack of wholeness in the Western God-image prompted Jung to reimagine the higher power just as Bill Wilson did following his own spiritual trajectory
Peterson traces Jung’s concept of wholeness to his dissatisfaction with the one-sided Western God-image, situating the psychologist’s theoretical innovations within a broader cultural-spiritual critique.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
The wholeness of the celestial pattern at birth and the wholeness of the selfhood and destiny of the native are identical; and both are expressions of the wholeness of the moment.
Rudhyar extends wholeness into an astrological and holistic metaphysics, arguing that the birth-chart, the self, and the creative moment are isomorphic expressions of a single ontological wholeness.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
when the ego is truly in service of that wholeness, ‘manifest is the spirit of the ancient master.’ One might say that at this point the original spirit of the process of Enlightenment shows itself: ego and Self are one.
Spiegelman draws a parallel between Buddhist enlightenment and Jungian wholeness, arguing that genuine service of the Self — not ego-dissolution — is the point at which Eastern and Western paths converge.
, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985supporting
The whole is creative; wherever parts conspire to form a whole, there something arises which is more than the parts.
Rudhyar, drawing on General Smuts’s holism, articulates the ontological principle underlying psychological wholeness: the whole is emergent and irreducible to its component parts.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
images and symbols of operative wholeness, viz., of healing and salvation. Trouble begins when the symbol is taken as a material reality
Rudhyar warns that symbols of wholeness — including the personal God and the guru — become pathological when literalized, insisting that their operative power is inherently symbolic and interior.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
the nature of reality is that of an indivisible wholeness. The wholeness of the cosmic background is also suggested by the following consideration: If the ETs in the realm of potentiality wouldn’t form a coherent whole, the empirical world that is emanating out of the cosmic potentiality would be chaotic.
Ponte and Schafer transpose the depth-psychological notion of wholeness onto a quantum-cosmological framework, arguing that the non-empirical background of reality must itself be a coherent whole for the manifest world to display order.
, Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century, 2013supporting
To see the eddy as a separate entity from the river, or the wave as something ‘additional to’ the sea, causes the self to become unstable: either wholly localisable or lost in the whole, not part and whole together.
McGilchrist reformulates wholeness as a paradoxical participation in which individual consciousness is simultaneously distinct from and inseparable from a larger whole, neither dissolved nor isolated.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Geometrical structures, such as the circle, the square, and the star, are ubiquitous and frequent. These may appear in dreams without drawing special attention to themselves
Stein catalogs the symbolic imagery — mandalas, quaternity structures, geometric forms — through which the psyche represents wholeness, grounding the concept in Jung’s phenomenology of the Self.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
synthesis see transcendent function and wholeness
Chodorow’s index entry links wholeness to the transcendent function and to synthesis, identifying it as the outcome of the mediating process that reconciles opposing psychic contents through active imagination.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting
The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation. Opposites genuinely coincide while remaining opposites.
McGilchrist argues that genuine wholeness entails the coincidentia oppositorum — a third reconciling reality — rather than the collapse of polarity into monism or their mere juxtaposition in dualism.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
see with him the wholeness of the whole as identical with self or soul (depending on these words’ definitions)
Rudhyar identifies Smuts’s holistic concept of the whole’s wholeness with the psychological notion of self or soul, building a philosophical bridge between organismic biology and depth-psychological individuation.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
and personal wholeness, 54-56, 63-66; in relationship, 97; and Jung psyche, 49-50
Stein’s index signals that personal wholeness is treated in relation to archetypal images, midlife psychology, and relational contexts, confirming its centrality to his broader Jungian mapping of transformation.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998aside
the archetype of the Alcoholic has autonomy over all of the psychic functions, which is why alcoholics tend to ‘do everything alcoholically’
Peterson frames the archetype of the Alcoholic as a paradoxical image of wholeness, whose totalizing grip on the psyche inverts — and thereby reveals — the integrative aspiration that wholeness properly represents.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024aside