Mapmakers of the Jungian Psyche

A distinctive labor in the Jungian-core generation after Jung has been systematization — the attempt to render Jung’s vast and sometimes unruly opus legible as a single coherent topography. Three figures dominate this labor, and their differences illuminate the tradition’s options.

marie-louise-von-franz elaborates outward — from the fairy tale, from the alchemical text, from the dream — extending the Jungian method into ever more territory without imposing a single schema. Her work is amplificatory: Jung’s method continued by other materials.

edward-edinger systematizes vertically. In Ego and Archetype and Anatomy of the Psyche, he extracts what he calls the ego-Self axis and the alchemical operations as a developmental spine, presenting the Jungian psyche as a dramatic sequence with identifiable stages.

murray-stein systematizes horizontally. In Jung’s Map of the Soul, he lays out the whole terrain — ego, complexes, libido, archetypes, persona, shadow, anima/animus, Self, individuation, synchronicity — as a single three-dimensional map, insisting on the coherence of Jung’s vision against critics who find Jung inconsistent. Stein’s wager is that “there is a more profound underlying unity of vision that far outweighs the occasional lapses from logical precision” (Stein 1998, Jung’s Map, Introduction).

The three are complementary. A reader arriving to the Lineage is best served by Stein’s map first, Edinger’s dramatic spine second, and von Franz’s amplifications as continuing education.

Sources

• murray-stein: Jung’s Collected Works constitute “a coherent psychological theory… a three-dimensional map” with “overarching coherence” and a “sublime vision of the soul.”
• edward-edinger: the ego-Self axis and the alchemical operations as the developmental spine of individuation.
• marie-louise-von-franz: extension of the Jungian method into fairy tale, alchemy, divination, and the problem of the puer aeternus.