Enantiodromia

Enantiodromia, from the Greek meaning 'running contrariwise,' is Jung's term borrowed from Heraclitus for the tendency of any psychic extreme to transform into its opposite. The builder who has been inflated by the discovery of new capabilities does not gradually deflate — the builder crashes into the opposite state: deflation, worthlessness, the conviction that the capabilities were never real, that the machine did the actual work, that the human contribution was trivial. This oscillation between inflation and deflation is not a personal weakness; it is a structural feature of any encounter with shadow material that lacks the mediating influence of conscious integration. The ego swings between claiming everything and claiming nothing because it has not yet found the middle position from which it can acknowledge new capabilities without identifying with or denying them.