The coniunctio is made up of the opposites. If there is one thing you can't help but understand from the Mysterium, it's that. The factors that come together in the coniunctio are the opposites and they constitute the most elemental structure of the psyche. The flow of libido is generated by the polarization of opposites in the same way that electricity flows between the positive and negative poles of an electrical circuit. This means that the opposites, and the coniunctio they allude to, are everywhereeverywhere in one's own life-functioning and everywhere in the evidence of the psyche all about us. Whenever one is attracted toward a desired object, or repelled away from a hated object, one is caught up in the drama of the opposites because these are the dynamo of the psyche. Now this happens all the time of courseit is how, by and large, we govern our lives. We go toward what's pleasing to us and away from what's displeasing. So there's no growth of consciousness or promotion of the coniunctio just by that kind of natural functioning. But the more conscious we become of these operations of attraction and repulsion in ourselves, the closer we come to the goal of the coniunctio. In the early stages of ego development the opposites must be separated, and you might say that it is the task of the ego to get out of them. The young ego is obliged to separate from its environment and to define itself in terms of being different; it must establish itself as something definite and that involves saying, "I am this and not that." It involves a great deal of no-saying, and the result of this operation is the creation of the shadow, the unconscious figure that stands over and against the ego. Sooner or later, if psychic development is to proceed, that split-off shadow figure must be encountered as an inner reality; then one is confronted with the problem of bringing the opposites together as opposed to separating them. Separating the opposites is a task for the early part of life, and the union of the opposites is a task for the later part of life.
— Edward F. Edinger
Edinger maps the psyche as a circuit before he maps it as a journey, and that order matters. Attraction and repulsion are not failures of equanimity to be overcome — they are the dynamo itself, the difference in potential that makes any movement possible at all. The spiritual tradition that reads desire as distraction and aversion as impurity is not wrong that these forces bind; it is wrong about what binding means. Something in the soul that says *if I become indifferent enough I will not suffer* has to reckon with the possibility that indifference is not freedom but the death of the current.
The more interesting pressure in this passage is the temporal claim: separation first, then union, and not because union is higher but because the young ego that hasn't yet said *I am this and not that* has nothing to bring into relation. The shadow is not an accident of moral failure; it is the necessary residue of definition itself. Every *yes* casts a *no* into the dark, and that dark figure accumulates over a life until it presents itself as an inner reality the ego cannot continue to overlook. What gets generated in that encounter — the friction between what the ego has claimed and what it has refused — is not synthesis. It is something Edinger keeps calling a goal, which is his careful way of saying the coniunctio is asymptotic: it draws the process forward without arriving as a state.
Edward F. Edinger·The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis·1995