Glosary: Participation mystique

A term used by anthropologists when talking about primitive, or archaic, psychology; a form of consciousness in which the subjective and objective are unconsciously united. Jung specifically used it to refer to the tendency to project personal contents of one’s unconscious out into the world (e.g. a tree that talks). An inability to separate oneself and other people or outer objects. Associated with concretistic thinking, compulsiveness, and the fusion of psychological functions (thinking with feeling, feeling with sensation). Everyone, even a person with the most differentiated thinking is, at their base, archaic. See also projection.