In this episode, I reflect on Stanton Marlan’s reading of Jung’s black sun and the Self as a way of challenging the common psychoanalytic caricature of Jung as a thinker of easy wholeness or spiritual closure. Putting Jung into conversation with Hegel, especially the idea of the Absolute as contradiction rather than harmony, I explore whether Jung’s Self might be read not as the place where contradiction disappears, but as the symbolic form contradiction takes in the psyche.

This is an episode on Jung, Hegel, alchemy, psychoanalysis, the black sun, and the possibility of a darker, more dialectical understanding of individuation. Wholeness, in this reading, is not the fantasy of becoming undivided. It is the difficult work of bearing the split.