Transcendent Function: A Critical Reassessment

Taking as starting point a critical survey of Jung’s texts about the “transcendent function”, an analysis of this key notion is proposed along three axes: 1. This “function” obtruded itself on Jung at a very particular moment of his life; which are the connections between the personal context and the metapsychological abstraction? 2. The transcendent function does not aim at lifting a repression but at overcoming a dissociation; a theoretical elaboration of this structural difference is sketched. 3. Finally the author parallelly examines the genetic aspects of the transcendent function in infancy and its (counter-) transferential phenomenology in analysis.