ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 presented Jung's conviction that signi®cant therapeutic transformation, ``real therapy'' he called it, always entailed the experience of the numinous generated by archetypal forces endemic to the psyche itself (Jung 1945c: 377). Further, Jung considered religious experience, the symbols which frequently bear the experience, and especially mystical experience, to be archetypally based and so to constitute the height of numinous experience (Jung 1976c: 98). More will be said of Jung's understanding of mystical experience in these ®nal chapters. At this stage in the discussion it need only be stated that the mystics who drew Jung's sustained attention experienced an ``identity'' with the divine through a moment of the ego's dissolution in its source (Jung 1971a: 255). In scholarly quarters this mysticism is termed ``apophatic'' mysticism and culminates in the experience of a dif®cult to describe unquali®ed identity with a power at once devoid of all form and yet the source of all form. Such dissolution, though a ``shattering thought'' (Jung 1968o: 135), would go to and perhaps through the archetypal psyche to rest in a nothingness divested of all urgency to activity or expression and yet be itself the source of the archetypes and their insatiable drive to create human consciousness and to become selfconscious in it.
