Letting go of rational control
The question arrives already carrying a logic: if I release enough, if I stop gripping, I will finally be free of what troubles me. That is the pneumatic ratio running — the soul's oldest bypass, the one Plato institutionalized when he moved away from thūmos and toward the governing intellect. Letting go of rational control, in most of the traditions that recommend it, is a path upward and out. Depth psychology recommends something stranger and more difficult.
Jung's formulation of the transcendent function is the place to begin, because it refuses both horns of the usual dilemma. The ego does not maintain sovereign control, but neither does it simply dissolve. In the 1916 paper that became the theoretical spine of active imagination, Jung insists that the ego's position must be maintained as being of equal value to the counter-position of the unconscious:
"The position of the ego must be maintained as being of equal value to the counter-position of the unconscious, and vice versa. This amounts to a very necessary warning: for just as the conscious mind of civilized man has a restrictive effect on the unconscious, so the rediscovered unconscious often has a really dangerous effect on the ego."
This is not a call to surrender rational consciousness. It is a call to hold tension — to let the unconscious speak without letting it overwhelm the ego that must receive what it says. The transcendent function does not operate by the ego stepping aside; it operates by the ego staying present while something larger moves through it. Samuels (1985) captures the structural point: the ego holds the tension of the opposites so that a mediatory symbol can emerge — not by choosing one side, but by refusing to collapse the tension prematurely.
Von Franz (1993) sharpens this further in her account of active imagination and the inferior function. The soul's least-developed capacity — the one most foreign to the ego's habitual style — cannot be reached by directed thinking. But it is not reached by abandoning thinking either. The ego must engage imaginatively, give the inferior function a form it can inhabit (clay, dance, color, stone), and then stay present to what emerges. The alchemical image she invokes is the quinta essentia: not the dissolution of the four functions but their integration into a fifth thing that is none of them and all of them. That fifth thing is not achieved by letting go of the ego; it is achieved when the ego stops being identical with any single function while remaining the witness of all four.
The alchemical tradition is even more explicit about what "letting go" actually costs. Edinger (1985) reads the mortificatio — the alchemical killing of the prima materia — as the psychological experience of defeat and failure that the ego does not choose but undergoes:
"Encounter with the unconscious is almost by definition a wounding defeat. In Mysterium Coniunctionis we find one of the most important sentences that Jung ever wrote: 'The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.'"
This is not the graceful release that spiritual traditions tend to recommend. It is not the Stoic apatheia — the achieved freedom from passion through rational governance — nor is it the Eastern dissolution of the ego-sense into a larger unity. It is defeat: something the ego suffers rather than accomplishes. The nigredo, in Hillman's reading (2010), is precisely the blackening that dissolves whatever the soul has been relying on as real — meaning, certainty, the hope for meaning itself. That dissolution is not a technique. It is what happens when the logics of not-suffering finally fail.
Jung's own account of the process in the Red Book period is instructive. He describes the cardinal lesson as "letting things happen" — Geschehenlassen — but immediately distinguishes this from passive fantasy. The ego must take its standpoint; active imagination is fantasizing with ego-consciousness present, not fantasizing in the ego's absence. The difference is between being the site of events and being annihilated by them. The middle voice of Homeric Greek named this precisely: the self as the place where something happens that the self does not fully author. Depth psychology recovers that grammar without pretending the middle voice is available to us as grammar. What it offers instead is the practice of holding — staying present to what moves through without either suppressing it or being swept away.
The soul that asks about letting go of rational control is usually asking because rational control has failed to deliver what it promised. That failure is the disclosure. The question is not how to release the grip but what the grip was protecting against — and whether the soul is willing to find out.
- transcendent function — Jung's term for the symbol-producing capacity that emerges when ego and unconscious are held in tension
- active imagination — the practice of engaging unconscious contents with ego-consciousness present
- mortificatio — the alchemical operation of killing the old form; the psychological experience of ego-defeat
- James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who read the nigredo as necessary dissolution
Sources Cited
- Jung, C.G., 1916, The Transcendent Function
- Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
- von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy
- Edinger, Edward F., 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche
- Hillman, James, 2010, Alchemical Psychology