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Too much has been written about Heidegger and Freud (especially via Lacan), and too
little has been written on Heidegger and Jung. Yet Heidegger and Jung, and especially the later
Heidegger and Jung, is a far more congenial pairing. I have discussed a number similarities in
their thinking in other places, but what I highlight here—and what I hope will spur further
research and discussion—is how both had in view “wholeness” or completion as the telos (or
aim) of the human being. They both offered what we might call a phenomenology of our
unfolding toward wholeness. Jung named this unfolding path “individuation,” and he found the
evidence in the manifold images of “wholeness” that are spontaneously generated by the human
psyche. He referred to these images as “mandalas,” and their distinguishing feature is the Four
or Quaternity, the square and the circle. The human psyche moves and strives toward wholeness
It is fair to say that the early Heidegger is far from such a view. With his early emphasis
on the mood of Angst, he represented a phenomenology of fracture that, unfortunately, has come
to prevail in most Continental philosophy ever since. But the later Heidegger is very different.
In the later work, as I have illustrated in many places, Heidegger “turned” in his thinking to the
theme of our way back “home” in our relation to Being and of “healing” our alienation from
Being (see especially Chapters 3 and 4 of Engaging Heidegger, University of Toronto Press,
2010). Along this later path of thinking, he brought forth his own distinctive “mandalas” in his
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writings: Being as the Fourfold; Being as “sphere,” “circle,” “ring,” and “center, and indeed the
joyful “ring dance” or “round dance” in which all beings and things participate. For the later
Heidegger, as for Jung, something is happening even without us—and for Heidegger, this is
Being “calling” us “home” to ourselves and to our relation with all things. Both Jung and the
later Heidegger took to heart the message of Homer’s Odyssey—a message almost completely
lost in the present day—that we are making a journey, no matter how arduous, “home.”
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As a psychologist, Jung was chiefly concerned with healing. Yet his understanding of the
essence of therapeia differed fundamentally from Freud’s. In Jung’s view, quite apart from the
resolution of unconscious personal conflicts, which was Freud’s concern, healing, that is, radical
healing, comes with the ego’s re-cognition of the “overpowering,” “numinous” unconscious
which is also “truth.” Jung often insisted that there was a religious dimension to therapy, but by
this he meant principally that therapy was a matter of religion, re + ligare, a re-binding of
Although Heidegger’s concern was not precisely psychological, still, his remarks on
“healing” are in remarkable harmony with Jung’s. Jung named the unconscious process the
meditated upon Being as the Holy. Being as the Holy is the endless temporal unfolding process
which is awesome, but also wholesome; and the human being who dwells in nearness to the Holy
is made whole, is healed. With such healing, Heidegger added, comes joy, yet the joy that he
spoke of is not the joy that is opposed to grief; it is the joy that comes in dwelling in nearness to
the awesome unfolding of opposites—joy and grief, peace and turmoil, life and death—which is
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physis, aletheia, Logos, Being. In Heidegger’s words—words that also capture the very essence
[“Remembrance of the Poet,” in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry