Up: [[Jungian Glossary]] Related: [[Compensation]] [[Yin-Yang]] Created: 2025-11-18 Lift a pendulum high, let it go, and it will careen from one extreme to the other. This is a commonly understood image of an enantiodromia, Greek for running to the opposite (*enantios* — opposite and *dromas* — running). Heraclitus described the opposites he observed in the natural world, such as *Cold things warm, and warm things cool.* Day turns into night, winter changes to summer, etcetera. Jung picked up the concept and applied it to our psychology. [[Psyche]] like the natural world, seeks wholeness and strives to stay in balance. See [[Compensation]] So when our conscious attitude becomes extremely one-sided about anything, the opposite position will form in the unconscious and will eventually, over time, make itself known. If the one-sided attitude is repressed, the intensity of the repression is matched by an equally intense push in the direction of expression. Eventually the intensity of this opposite force builds to a point where it breaks through conscious control. Sometimes this can precede a rebirth of the personality. All of the time it is important to avoiding stagnation and moving us along the path of individuation because our wholeness demands integration of opposites. Jung called the enantiodromia *the most marvellous of all psychological laws*. It’s neither good nor bad, but quite simply the way in which psyche restores equilibrium. And it doesn’t apply just to the natural world or to individual psychology. It also applies to societies, making me wonder what the enantiodromia is going to look like in the United States in the future. Jung says we can’t know, that we just have to wait and see. > [!Orbit] [[C. G. Jung]] in *Collected Works 9i* > I must emphasize, however, that the grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil…. (para. 397) Enantiodromia works in cycles. The [[Yin-Yang]] symbol is an example of this. The advantage to knowing this is that we recognize the constancy of change and can take heart in the fact that neither the darkest days nor the brightest ones will be with us forever.