The Mysterium Lectures

The Mysterium Lectures is Edinger‘s paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on Jung‘s Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), delivered as a lecture series to the C.G. Jung Society of Los Angeles and published in 1995 by Inner City Books. Edinger treats the parent text as “the summa of Jungian psychology” (Edinger 1995) — Jung’s most difficult and most comprehensive work.

The lectures’ distinctive accomplishment is the translation of Jung’s alchemical density into clinically usable material. Edinger’s reading of Dorn’s three stages of the coniunctio — the unio mentalis, the reunion with the body, the unus-mundus — is the clearest statement of the late Jungian arc anywhere in the literature. His treatment of specific alchemical images (the Chelidonia, the red lily, blood, the caelum) shows the full deployment of the operations framework developed in Anatomy of the Psyche.

The book’s pedagogical achievement is to make Jung’s last work teachable. “For those who find Jung himself tough going, Edinger has been the pre-eminent interpreter for more than thirty years … [The Mysterium Lectures] is not only a brilliant scholarly study of Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis and arcane alchemical operations, it is also a practical guide to what is going on in the laboratory of the unconscious” (Sharp, in Edinger 1999).

Concepts introduced or developed

• coniunctio
• unio-mentalis
• unus-mundus
• alchemical-operations

Cited by

• Clinical Jungian literature generally
• edward-edinger‘s later lectures