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This article is a reprint of Dr Adler's lecture, delivered in 1946 to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology; it appears here in an issue of Psychological Perspectives devoted to nuclear questions. He wrote with the realisation that the bomb had brought with it a unique degree of insecurity that was bound to have profound effects at the level of the unconscious and eventually on the conscious situation of mankind. It is a wideranging
discourse drawing material from the fields of history, literature, science and art; but its central theme derives from the Jungian concept of enantiodromia.
Adler recalls how, from the fourth century onwards, science had faded into the background. Platonic idealism, absorbed into Christianity together with Augustinian theology, and the assurances of Ecclesia Mater represented domination and containment by the mother archetype. Feminine and inward-looking features prevailed on the surface, but at the level of the unconscious an enantiodromic process was taking place which eventually led to the irruption at the conscious level of active masculine outward looking impulses which comprised the psychological background of the Renaissance. At the same time there was a dissolution of the synthesising spiritual principle and of the Christian concept of immortality which had been characteristic of earlier times. Mankind took refuge in a philosophy of materialism and the belief in the continuing beneficient progress of science, now shattered by the emergence of the bomb and its threat of holocaust.
From a study of the inward-looking feminine wisdom of modern art, Adler felt that an alchemical situation had arisen, calling for a coniunctio of the masculine logos of science with the feminine eros of art. He thought that the tool to heal this split situation of Western man was psychology with its affirmation of both the scientific instinct and the unconscious world of inner images.
He concludes by asking, ‘Could the split atom and its ambiguous child the at