Participation mystique, or mystical participation, refers to the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. This symbolic life precedes or accompanies all mental and intellectual differentiation. The concept is closely tied to that of projection because these contents, which are often mythological motifs, project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons, as readily as we project color into the objects we perceive.

Jung

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

 defines Participation Mystique as one of his basic definitions in Psychological Types

Psychological Types

Psychological Types is the title of the sixth volume in the Princeton / Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. The original German language edition, "Psychologische Typen", was first published by Rascher Verlag, Zurich in 1921....

, crediting it to Lévy-Bruhl.

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE is a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (Jung, [1921] 1971: paragraph 781).

Jung used the term throughout his writings after Lévy-Brühl's work was published in 1912. Jung referred to it consistently with the French terminology rather than using the English "mystical participation" until Man and His Symbols

Man and His Symbols

Man and His Symbols is the last psychological work undertaken by Carl Jung before his death in 1961. First published in 1964, it is divided into five parts, four of which are written by associates of Jung: Joseph L. Henderson, Marie-Louise von Franz, Aniela Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi...

was published after his death.

The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 12).

Jung's concept of concretism

Attitude (psychology)

An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...

, which is the opposite of differentiating abstraction

Abstraction

Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....

, is also closely related to participation mystique.

I am reminded of another mental case who was neither a poet nor anything very outstanding, just a naturally quiet and rather sentimental youth. He had fallen in love with a girl and, as so often happens, had failed to ascertain whether his love was requited. His primitive participation mystique took it for granted that his agitations were plainly the agitations of the other, which on the lower levels of human psychology is naturally very often the case. Thus he built up a sentimental love-fantasy which precipitately collapsed when he discovered that the girl would have none of him (Jung, 1966: par. 231).

This is what the distinguished French ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Brühl called a "mystical participation" (Jung et. al., 1964:24).

However, Lévy-Brühl actually recanted his theory.

He later retracted this term under pressure of adverse criticism, but I believe that his critics were wrong. It is a well-known psychological fact that an individual may have an unconscious identity with some other person or object (Jung et. al., 1964:24).

In Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung, [1955] 1970:250 note 662), Jung had gone into more detail to defend his own theory in light of the recantation.

Elsewhere in Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung summarily dismisses the objections raised by ethnologists

Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...

, attributing their objections to lack of knowledge of the unconscious

Unconscious mind

The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

.

Lévy-Bruhl's view has recently been disputed by ethnologists, not because this phenomenon does not occur among primitives, but because they have not understood it. Like so many other specialists, these critics prefer to know nothing of the psychology of the unconscious. (Jung, [1955] 1970:488 note 106).