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Introducing the present article gives me the opportunity to reacquaint readers of the Journal of Analytical Psychology with Hubert Hermans’ work, which has been the subject of many conferences and publications over the past quarter century. Hermans offers a master key to the analysis of self-experience that too few Jungian therapists have had a chance to try out. The Journal’s first opportunity to offer this analytic method to its readers was provided by Hermans himself in an article titled ‘Moving opposites in the self: a Heraclitean approach’ (1993). It offered an extraordinary combination of new theory and new research, and a radically new way to think about Jung’s emphasis on opposites as basic to the dynamics of the psyche. For me, Hermans’ idea that the opposites move and transform, rather than simply enduring in their tension, opened up a way to think about self experience as we meet it in analysis: as a phenomenological, rather than theoretical reality.
Addressing the Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences in 1936, Jung said,
It is my belief that the problem of opposites, here merely hinted at, should be made the basis for a critical psychology. A critique of this sort would be of the utmost value not only in the narrower field of psychology, but also in the wider field of the cultural sciences in general. (, para. 260).
At the time I first read this, I regarded Jung’s as a dead-end, Aristotelian idea, that would force psychology to create for itself a set of double ladders called ‘the pairs of opposites’ only to mount the scaffold of a restrictive view of the mind’s possibilities that would hang thought itself up. You can imagine how refreshing it was, fifty-seven years later, to have Hermans finally explain that only if one refuses to accept Aristotle’s belief ‘that the opposite poles of a certain polarity are in essence mutually exclusive’ does Jung’s heavy emphasis on attending to intrapsychic opposites make sense as, what Jung himself claimed