Carl Jung wrote the essay The Transcendent Function in 1916, but it was not published until 1958 when students at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich discovered it. The psychological phenomenon explained by Jung in his essay comes before the most important concepts of his psychology such as archetypes, shadow, anima/animus and Self.
As a result, it is of the utmost importance to understand Jung’s individuation process.
Nevertheless, the transcendent function is probably the most misunderstood notion in the field of Analytical psychology. Jungians generally explain it as a mere product of the integration of unconscious contents in consciousness, but they miss the essence of its description by Jung as the autonomous compensation from the archetype of the Self and the voice of God.
The transcendent function is exactly what Jung implied in the title of his essay: the psychological process to produce a mystical or transcendent experience. To Jung, that phenomenon is an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites entering consciousness for a short moment. Jung’s 1916 essay was his first attempt to explain psychologically his mystical experience of December 1913.
In his multiple descriptions of that function, Jung describes it as a purely natural process but, at the same time, a grace, the will of God and the voice of God, it comes from the conflict of opposites as a creative solution, it is a spontaneous compensation by the unconscious, a living symbol that unites opposites, the experience of an autonomous archetype that change the personality in an indescribable way and leads to the revelation of the essential man, the Self, the original wholeness. That sums up as the description of a mystical experience and its outcome. In fact, all signs lead to the conclusion that the transcendent function produces a transcendent experience, and we should consider that those experiences are at the center of Jung’s Analytical psychology. We must also underline that the expression “mystical experience” is mentioned 673 times in Jung’s collected works and it is certainly one important indicator that the subject is of the utmost importance in his psychology.
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