Coniunctio three stages as analytic process

Edinger’s contribution to the Jungian reading of the coniunctio is the insistence that Dorn’s three stages are not sequential rungs on a ladder but simultaneous aspects of every analytic process. “These three stages, to a greater or lesser degree, are taking place simultaneously in the course of an analysis. Different aspects of the personality can be undergoing different stages of the coniunctio at the same time” (Edinger 1995). The unio-mentalis — the creation of a thinking soul differentiated from the body — is the first operation of any genuine inner work; the unio-corporalis through the caelum is its incarnation in the lived body; the unus-mundus is the rare third in which the individual life is joined to the cosmos it already belongs to.

Jung’s transference reading of the Rosarium makes the analytic relationship the field in which all three stages are practically undergone: the left-handed handshake of first meeting (Stein 1998); the naked encounter; the bath of mutual projection; the massa confusa of dissolved identities; the slow incarnation of what has been mentally grasped. The thread is that the coniunctio is never finished because living always reopens the separations it seemed to have healed. “The final, total translation to unity is consummated only at death — at best, that is, because death doesn’t automatically bring it about either” (Edinger 1995).

Sources

• edward-edinger: three stages are simultaneous, not sequential, within a single analysis.
• carl-jung: the coniunctio is fulfilled only when spirit-soul-body is made one with the unus mundus (CW 14, §664).
• murray-stein: the Rosarium series is the phenomenology of the analytic relationship as coniunctio.
• gerhard-dorn: the original recipe — mind loves body, fount maketh one of two (quoted Jung 1955, §35).