In Carl Jung’s psychology, the tension of opposites is the conflict between a one-sided conscious attitude and the contrary attitude the unconscious holds in reserve. Jung argued that suppressing either side keeps a person stuck. Tolerating both in awareness, without forcing a verdict, lets the psyche produce a third position, through a process he called the transcendent function. The tension is the engine of change, not a defect to fix.

That is the claim this piece defends: holding the tension, rather than resolving it early, is how a stuck psyche changes. Most people in distress want the opposite. They want the anxious part or the angry part to lose, the doubt to be settled, the grief to be over. Jung bet that change comes when two incompatible states can be felt at the same time and kept in contact, and several lines of therapy research are at least consistent with that bet. In practice it looks less like a sudden insight and more like slow, titrated work with polarized self-states, where the goal is the capacity to hold both rather than a ruling for one.

What Jung meant by the opposites

Jung did not start from good versus evil. He meant pairs of psychological attitudes that compensate each other: thinking and feeling, introversion and extraversion, the persona a person shows and the shadow they disown, the adapted adult and the instinctive child. His 1921 book Psychological Types is largely a study of what happens when a person, or a whole culture, lives out one side of such a pair and leaves the other undeveloped.¹ In “On Psychic Energy” he described psychic life in energic terms, with the tension between opposites supplying its movement.²

One-sidedness is the problem the opposites answer. Jung put it bluntly in his commentary on the Chinese meditation text The Secret of the Golden Flower: “One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”³ A one-sided attitude gets things done. It also builds pressure in whatever it leaves out. Jung borrowed the Greek term enantiodromia, “a running counter to,” which he traced to Heraclitus, for what happens when that pressure wins and an overvalued attitude flips into its opposite.^{1, 4} Think of the relentlessly cheerful person whose depression nobody saw coming, or the strict moralist caught in the very thing he preached against. The flip is not growth. It is the same one-sidedness pointed in a new direction.

Where it started: personality No. 1 and No. 2

The idea has roots in Jung’s account of his own childhood. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the late autobiography he produced with his secretary Aniela Jaffé (German 1962, English 1963), he describes two personalities he lived with as a schoolboy.⁵ No. 1 was the ordinary student who had to do well and fit in. No. 2 was older, solitary and at home with nature and dreams, a figure Jung felt belonged to the eighteenth century. He insisted the play between them was not a split in the medical sense, and he came to treat it as something that runs through every life: an adapted ego that has to function in the world, and a deeper layer that does not care about grades.

The line from that boyhood experience to his later theory is real but not neat. Ego and Self in his mature work map loosely onto No. 1 and No. 2, and individuation, as he described it, is not the victory of either. It is a relationship between them. The book itself should be read with care. Jaffé shaped the text heavily and material was cut before publication; the original interview protocols were published only in 2025.⁶ Our piece on the material censored from Memories, Dreams, Reflections covers what was left out.

The transcendent function: why holding beats resolving

Jung laid out the mechanism in “The Transcendent Function,” an essay he wrote in 1916, in the same years he was recording the fantasies later published as The Red Book. It sat in his files until students at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich found it and circulated an English translation in 1957. When he revised it for publication the following year, he wrote that after forty-two years the problem had “lost nothing of its topicality,” and he stated that problem as a practical question: “How does one come to terms in practice with the unconscious?”²

His answer runs roughly like this. The conscious attitude is always partial, and the unconscious compensates through dreams, moods, symptoms and slips. If the ego simply overrides that material, it goes underground and comes back with more force. If the ego is swamped by it, the person loses their footing. The third option is to give the unconscious material a form, through fantasy, writing, drawing or inner dialogue, and then let the ego answer it as an equal partner. The essay is usually read as the earliest account of the method Jung later called active imagination.² Out of that exchange, if neither side is suppressed, something tends to appear that neither side contained: often a symbol, sometimes a new attitude, sometimes only a different way of standing in the same problem. Jung called the function “transcendent” because it carries a person across from one attitude to another, not because it is supernatural. Jeffrey Miller’s 2004 book is a book-length study of the concept and its place in Jung’s thought.⁷

The most useful sentence Jung wrote about all this is in the Golden Flower commentary. He had noticed that some patients got better not by solving their central problem but by growing past it. The greatest problems of life, he concluded, are in a sense insoluble, because they express the polarity built into any self-regulating system: “They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”³ That is the clinical heart of the tension of opposites. A marriage that is both nourishing and suffocating, a vocation that is both a calling and a trap, a parent who was both loving and frightening: these are not puzzles with an answer. They are tensions a person learns to carry until carrying them changes the person.

What Jung drew on, and what he did not

The philosophical lineage of the idea is often told as a list of great names. Some of those claims are wrong, and the real sources are more interesting. Jung named several of his own. From Heraclitus he took enantiodromia.¹ From Nietzsche he took the pairing of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, which gets its own chapter in Psychological Types.¹ The phrase coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites, belongs to the fifteenth-century cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who developed it in De docta ignorantia, his treatise on how all contraries meet in an infinite God that the finite mind cannot grasp.⁸ It is Cusanus’s phrase, not Plotinus’s. Jung used it for the self: the whole personality, which contains the opposites instead of choosing between them.

Alchemy gave him the richest images. Mysterium Coniunctionis, the last of his large alchemical studies, is subtitled An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Its chapter on the opposites says they are so common in the alchemical texts that citing evidence is “superfluous,” then lists them anyway: King and Queen, Sol and Luna as brother and sister, the eagle and the toad, two fish swimming in opposite directions.⁹ Jung read the alchemists’ marriage of these pairs, the coniunctio, as a picture of what the psyche attempts when it stops splitting itself in two.

Hegel is the awkward case. He is regularly presented as a direct source, usually through the formula thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The case for direct influence is weak, and the triad is not how Hegel described his own method; the philosopher Gustav Mueller called the attribution a legend in 1958.¹⁰ The resemblance between Jung and dialectical philosophy is a family resemblance, not a debt. For the wider background, see our overview of the philosophy behind and around Carl Jung and our essay on Nietzsche’s influence on Jung.

The opposites in groups: projection and the enemy

Jung did not keep the idea at the level of the individual. A tension a person refuses to feel inside does not go away; it gets located in someone else. In Aion he wrote that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”¹¹ Groups do this at scale. A nation, party or congregation that cannot admit its own aggression or greed finds both, conveniently concentrated, in its enemy. The disowned half of the pair becomes the other side.

That gives the idea an ethical edge. Withdrawing a projection does not mean deciding the enemy is right. It means noticing which of your own qualities you have handed to them, which usually lowers the temperature without erasing real differences. Jung tried his ideas against the worst political material of his century, and not always well. Our pieces on Jung, the OSS and the fascist mind and on how therapists have understood war follow that thread, and what a Jungian ethics might look like takes up the harder question of how to hold opposites without going morally vague.

What this looks like in therapy

In the consulting room the opposites rarely arrive as concepts. They arrive as states that will not share the same moment. One pattern clinicians see in people who grew up with both neglect and intrusion is a pair of contradictory convictions, each with its own body. One says, in effect, “I don’t matter, and the safest thing is to disappear,” and it shows up as collapse: heaviness, fog, going limp, losing words. The other says, “I have to brace and endure, or someone gets hurt,” and it shows up as armor: a held breath, a set jaw, a scan of the room. Each state is protective. Each treats the other as the problem. Internal Family Systems therapists call this a polarization, two parts locked in opposition, each escalating because the other does.¹²

The temptation, for client and therapist alike, is to pick a winner: build up the strong part and shame the collapsed one, or soothe the braced one into giving up. Depth work goes slower. The aim is to let both states be present and known, at a dose the nervous system can tolerate. Somatic Experiencing supplies two useful words. Titration means working with a small amount of activation at a time, drop by drop, rather than the whole flood. Pendulation is the back-and-forth between activation and settling, often guided by shifting attention from a distressing sensation to a resource that feels steadier, so the person learns they can touch the hard state and come back.¹³ Read through Jung, that rhythm is the tension of opposites translated into physiology. The person is no longer trapped in one state or the other; they are learning to travel between them.

Relational psychoanalysis says something similar in another language. Philip Bromberg argued that the self is a multiplicity of self-states rather than one unified thing, and that the clinical task is less to fuse those states than to help a person stand in the spaces between them without losing any.¹⁴ Leslie Greenberg, who later developed emotion-focused therapy, studied a version of this directly. In his 1982 study with Michael Webster of 31 clients working on a decisional conflict with Gestalt two-chair dialogue, the clients who resolved it showed a specific sequence: an inner critic voiced its criticism, the other side voiced its feelings and wants, and then the critic softened. After treatment the resolvers were significantly less undecided and less anxious, and reported more improvement in their target complaints. It was a small study.¹⁵ Neither side won. The relationship between them changed.

Dialectical behavior therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan, rests on a pair of opposites, acceptance and change, and asks the therapist to hold both rather than choose.¹⁶ A 2020 Cochrane review of 75 trials found DBT the most studied therapy for borderline personality disorder, the subject of about a third of the trials, though it rated the evidence for its benefits over usual treatment as low in quality.¹⁷ And one small longitudinal study of 47 adults in psychotherapy found that feeling happiness and sadness together, as coded from their written narratives, came before improvements in well-being.¹⁸ One study does not prove Jung’s theory, but it fits it: the mixed state that feels like confusion may be what change feels like from the inside.

At Taproot this work draws on Jungian dream and image work, parts work and somatic tracking, depending on the person. Our page on parts-based therapy in Alabama explains how we approach parts work, and our essay on how post-Jungian therapy became experiential traces how Jung’s method moved from interpretation toward this kind of embodied practice.

Where the idea goes wrong

The tension of opposites is a theory of inner conflict, and it can be misapplied. Not every tension should be held. If someone is being abused, “leave” and “stay” are not two equal poles, and a therapist who frames safety as one side of a creative paradox is doing harm. The same goes for moral questions that have answers. Holding both sides of your own ambivalence is different from treating every outside conflict as two equally valid views.

It can also become a spiritual alibi. “Holding the tension” sometimes means avoiding a decision that needs making, or using the language of paradox to stay comfortable in a situation that is hurting you. Jung’s word was outgrown, and outgrowing implies movement. A tension that has been held for ten years without anything changing is usually being avoided, not held.

Finally, the transcendent function is a clinical theory, not an experimental finding. The studies above support neighboring ideas: that a polarized conflict can soften, and that tolerating mixed feelings goes along with improvement. None of them tests Jung’s model directly. It is best read as a careful description of how people change, not as a mechanism the laboratory has confirmed.

If you recognize yourself in a conflict that will not resolve, whether between two parts of yourself or two lives you could be living, that is the kind of problem depth therapy works with. Our page on Jungian depth therapy in Hoover explains how we work, and you can contact Taproot Therapy Collective to ask whether it fits what you are carrying.

References

1. Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (Collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)
2. Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (2nd ed.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press. Includes “On psychic energy” and “The transcendent function.”
3. Jung, C. G. (1967). Alchemical studies (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 13). Princeton University Press. Includes “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower.”
4. Rivera-Clonch, M. (2023). Enantiodromia. In A depth psychological study of the peace symbol (pp. 32–51). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/b23325-3
5. Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
6. Jung, C. G., & Jaffé, A. (2025). Jung’s life and work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé (S. Shamdasani, Ed.). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691266343
7. Miller, J. (2004). The transcendent function: Jung’s model of psychological growth through dialogue with the unconscious. State University of New York Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book4769
8. Costigliolo, M. (2014). The interreligious dialogue in De docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa. Medieval Encounters, 20(3), 217–237. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12342170
9. Jung, C. G. (2014). Mysterium coniunctionis: An inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy (Collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 14). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315725338
10. Mueller, G. E. (1958). The Hegel legend of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 19(3), 411. https://doi.org/10.2307/2708045
11. Jung, C. G. (1968). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (2nd ed.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Pt. 2). Princeton University Press.
12. Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal family systems therapy. Guilford Press.
13. Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093
14. Bromberg, P. M. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32(4), 509–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.1996.10746334
15. Greenberg, L. S., & Webster, M. C. (1982). Resolving decisional conflict by Gestalt two-chair dialogue: Relating process to outcome. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 29(5), 468–477. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.29.5.468
16. Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
17. Storebø, O. J., Stoffers-Winterling, J. M., Völlm, B. A., Kongerslev, M. T., Mattivi, J. T., Jørgensen, M. S., Faltinsen, E., Todorovac, A., Sales, C. P., Callesen, H. E., Lieb, K., & Simonsen, E. (2020). Psychological therapies for people with borderline personality disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020(5), CD012955. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012955.pub2
18. Adler, J. M., & Hershfield, H. E. (2012). Mixed emotional experience is associated with and precedes improvements in psychological well-being. PLoS ONE, 7(4), e35633. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035633