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The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Jung's concept of the transcendent function derives its philosophical basis from the notion of dialectical change, first expounded by the German Romantic philosopher, Frederick Hegel (1770-1831).
The dialectical model was developed in Europe, in Germany, at the time of the Romantic revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Its author was Hegel, and Marx and his followers applied it to theories of social, political, and economic change. It formed an essential core of important twentieth-century European philosophical traditions, such as phenomenology and its derivatives, as well as the version of psychoanalysis developed by Lacan and his followers in France.
Hegel's dialectical model is essentially about the development of self-consciousness as it unfolds both internally and in what he calls the World Spirit (Geist). As such it can be likened to Jung's theory of how the individual develops a sense of identity or selfhood over time through the interplay between inner and outer, and between collective and personal psychological contents, both located at conscious and unconscious levels. Although he had philosophical antecedents in Plato, Spinoza, and Kant, and parallels in other philosophical traditions, Hegel expounded, in Phenomenology of Mind (1807a), a philosophy which reflects a deep structural view of the world which has had a profound effect on the thinking of those schooled in European culture since the nineteenth century. Hegel's dialectic reflects an understanding of fundamental truths, including psychological truths, concerning reality and how it is perceived, and how the self is brought into being and attains its full actualization through the interaction