ABSTRACT
In a seminar given in 1925, Jung described the psychotherapeutic experience as a regenerative encounter with the numinous energies of the collective unconscious. This idea, of course, was by no means new. As early as his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, Jung had discussed the prospective meaning and rejuvenating impact of the incest fantasy. Regression, he had argued in that early work, if followed back far enough, immersed the subject in deeper, mythological layers of the unconscious. Like the re-orienting descent into the underworld braved by the hero in numerous myths, the patient’s regression could be understood as potentiating a rebirth, or renewal, of his or her conscious attitude. On this occasion, however, Jung drew upon another analogy in connection with the same dynamic, that of the miraculous conception of Christ, via the power of the Holy Ghost. “Analysis,” he told his audience,
should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things [that] occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation.3
