ABSTRACT
Physicists tell us that matter falls apart at a terrifying rate. Do all our cultural notions of primordial or cosmogonic Eros perhaps express our wish to counter nature by holding things together? Certainly, when Freud and Jung decide – in what Jung calls a `moral imperative’ – to align themselves clinically and theoretically with Eros, they commit themselves creatively to oppose this falling apart as it manifests psychologically, to hold the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious together in themselves, in their clients, and in the collective psyche, as much as that is possible. It is in this sense that, taking up alchemy’s erotic language of coniunctio, Jung describes analytical psychology as working contra natura: `Humankind’s task, as Jung conceives it, is to heal the metaphysical divide in the psychic cosmos’ (Bishop, 2002, p. 170).
