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Homo totus: [Latin origin: the Son of Man, the homo maximus, the vir unus, purusha, etc.]

Analytical Psychology

Says Carl Jung (1971: para. 419), the homo totus is an archetype of the Self, the beginning and the end of psychic process, an exercise of Platonic anamnesis, a memory of wholeness and an apocatastasis that restores an original wholeness that pre-exists the consciousness of the human ego.

Jung speaks of the homo totus in the context of the alchemical process, the chemistry of the Middle ages, or the art of transmuting metals, which was primarily a psychological process expressed in projective form. Jung says that “The moral equivalent of the physical transmutation into gold is self-knowledge, which is a re-remembering of the homo totus” (1968: para. 372).

In Jungian psychology, the notion of individuation indicates the personal journey in which the unconscious is the universal mediator and the all-embracing One (Jung, 1971: para. 419) out of which consciousness discovers...

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Madden, K. (2010). Homo Totus. In: Leeming, D.A., Madden, K., Marlan, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_310

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_310

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