ABSTRACT
This chapter provides to supplement the grander vision of the philosopher or spiritual sage with a practitioner's need to work in the living psyche. Not all the psychological material accessed from the unconscious, be it from the dream world, free associations, visionary experiences, or meditative states, is suitable for integration. The integration—concerning how the practitioner needs to assess the health of the psyche and, in particular, how suitable is the material from the deep psyche—is followed by an assessment of the client's capacity to work with it. A great deal of the material of the deep psyche concerns not outer events but the functioning of the psyche as a whole. The union of consciousness and the unconscious, their collaborative communication, is the great union of opposites, the coniunctio oppositorum. The reformed ego is essential for the full healing process since it is the subjective centre of consciousness and its personality components.
