Jung's Hardest Words, and Where He Actually Got Them
Jung gets credit, in casual accounts, for inventing most of his own vocabulary. Look closely at where these words actually came from and a different picture appears: he was one of the great borrowers in the history of psychology, pulling terms from Gnostic scripture, French anthropology, vitalist biology, and a rival psychoanalyst’s own coinage, then building his own system out of the parts.
The terms, and where they actually came from
| Term | Where it actually came from | What Jung did with it |
|---|---|---|
| Individuation | The word is old (from Latin individuum); the systematic psychological use of it is Jung’s own | His master concept: the lifelong process of integrating conscious and unconscious contents into a coherent, more complete self |
| Pleroma | Greek for “fullness” — a term from Gnostic scripture, denoting the totality of the divine | Used in his 1916 “Seven Sermons to the Dead” for an undifferentiated primal unity that precedes the split into psychological opposites |
| Introjection | Coined in 1909 by Sándor Ferenczi, a psychoanalyst in Freud’s circle, as the mirror image of projection | Adopted largely unchanged: unconsciously taking another person’s qualities, attitudes or identity into oneself |
| Hieros gamos | Greek, “sacred marriage” — an ancient ritual and mythological motif of a god and goddess (or their human stand-ins) uniting | An archetypal image of the union of opposites, alongside the alchemical coniunctio |
| Syzygy | Greek, “yoked together” — used both in astronomy (bodies in alignment) and in Gnostic writing (paired divine emanations) | Jung’s term for paired archetypal opposites, most often anima and animus considered as a linked unit |
| Quaternity | An old word for “fourfoldness”; Jung’s systematic emphasis on it is his own | A four-part structuring pattern — the four functions of consciousness, four-part mandala imagery — that Jung treated as a recurring signature of psychological wholeness |
| Transcendent function | Coined by Jung himself, in an essay written in 1916 (not published until 1957) | The psychic process that arises from tension between conscious and unconscious and generates a symbol uniting them into a new, wider attitude |
| Temenos | Greek, the consecrated ground marked out around a temple | The protected psychological space — in analysis, or in an individual’s own inner life — needed to safely encounter unconscious material |
| Psychoid | Borrowed from the neo-vitalist biologist Hans Driesch, whose 1903 Das Psychoid described a factor located in neither body nor mind | The proposed deepest layer of the archetype, where psyche and physical matter become indistinguishable — the concept behind his synchronicity theory, developed partly with physicist Wolfgang Pauli |
| Participation mystique | Coined by the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, from 1910 onward, to describe a state in which a person cannot clearly distinguish themselves from an object or totem | Unconscious identification between two people, or between a person and a symbol, where the ordinary boundary between self and other blurs |
Why “individuation” isn’t the easy win the numbers suggest
Individuation carries more monthly search volume than every other term on this page combined, and the one niche competitor site tracked for this page ranks for it only in the sixties — a gap that can look, on the surface, like an opportunity nobody has taken. It isn’t a simple one: the head of that search result page is occupied by Wikipedia, Britannica and the large mainstream psychology-education sites, not by anyone this site is realistically displacing soon. A weak niche competitor is not the same signal as a weak field.
A note on syzygy specifically
Anyone researching this term will run into its unrelated astronomical meaning — planets or other bodies lined up in a row — constantly. Jung’s psychological usage is a separate, if etymologically related, sense of the word, and the two should not be conflated when reading search results or older texts.
Where to check this for yourself
- Wikipedia’s entries on pleroma, introjection, participation mystique, and the transcendent function, each sourced to its own originating literature.
- The International Association for Analytical Psychology’s short articles on the psychoid and on participation mystique, written for a general audience by working Jungian analysts.
What is still unclear
How much Jung read of Hans Driesch’s own vitalist philosophy directly, versus absorbing “psychoid” secondhand through intermediaries, is not resolved in the sources this page draws on. The same caution applies to several of the ancient Greek and Gnostic terms above: this page traces where the words originate historically, not the full, disputed path by which Jung himself first encountered each one.
Where this site cannot verify something, it says so rather than filling the gap.