You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The quintessence is an important but under-theorised theme in analytical psychology. Christine Driver has done us the service of unearthing the references to the quintessence in Jung's Collected Works and of contextualizing the use of the concept in analytical psychology and beyond. The notion ‘comes from an ancient historic view of the world which considered that the essential spark of creation was hidden in matter and that this spirit in matter was the imago Dei (God)’ (p. 3). Like the idea of the transcendent function, it is a concept that appears marginal in Jung's texts but which upon closer investigation turns out to be ubiquitous in his theory. Driver describes her book as ‘a journey into the unknowable but also the known, as we experience an emergent understanding of what the quintessence represents’ (p. 13).
The first section of the book (‘Orientation, themes, and the symbolic significance of number’) discusses the role of number in philosophy, science, alchemy and psychoanalysis. ‘Numbers enable the identification of relational patterns and the patterns formed by one (unity), two (duality), three (triangularity), four (quaternity), five (quinity), etc., are symbolically significant’ (p. 4). Jung considered the quaternity to be an important image of wholeness and the self. However, it was also incomplete and needed be ‘united with the quinta essentia at the end’ (p. 17). The fifth represents both the beginning and end of a process.
Section two (‘Number as a symbol of psychological development’) has chapters on duality, triadicity and quaternity. Jung discusses the dynamics of the opposites extensively throughout his work. The tension of opposites is responsible for producing psychic energy. The play of opposites, or the lack of it, within the psyche accounts for aliveness and/or psychopathology. Driver alludes to binary dynamics in the thought of Klein, Fairbairn and Balint. She describes the importance of symmetry and asymmetry in the work of Matte-Blanco an