A Note on Heidegger and C.G.

Jung on Wholeness as the Telos of the Human Being

Richard Capobianco, Stonehill College

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

and completeness—whether the conscious ego wants to or not. Something is happening to us

even without us.

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

1
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.”

****

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

consciousness with the unconscious process, a re-collection by consciousness of the

“overpowering,” “numinous” unconscious [CW 11, paras. 8, 982, for example].

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

“numinous,” and Heidegger, especially in his commentary on Hölderlin‟s poetry, often

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

2
physis, aletheia, Logos, Being. In Heidegger’s words—words that also capture the very essence

of Jung’s understanding of the relation of consciousness to the unconscious—

“The original essence of joy is becoming at home in nearness to the Source.”

[“Remembrance of the Poet,” in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry

Regnery, 1968), 261, modified.]