Psychopomp

1. Etymology

Psychopomp (Greek: soul-guide) names a psychic factor that mediates unconscious contents to consciousness, often personified as wise old man/woman or helpful animal. Related: Hermes; anima / animus; mana-personality; self.

2. Plain summary

Classically Hermes escorts souls between worlds. Jung keeps the mediating sense: a figure or function that ferries material from the unconscious to consciousness. Sharp stresses personification (wise elder, animal helper). Samuels stresses initiation/transition and anima–animus as go-between connecting ego and unconscious toward calling or destiny.

Not every vivid dream figure is a psychopomp; the house test is mediation—bridging, escorting, translating—toward conscious relation with what was sealed off. Related to active imagination as practice that invites such mediation.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common psychopomp motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
soul-guide / Hermes; wise old man or woman; helpful animal; anima–animus as go-between; ego ↔ unconscious mediation; initiation / transition; priest/shaman/doctor analogues; mana personalities; destiny / calling; active imagination as engagement path.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology psychopomp is the mediating function—mythic and clinical—linking conscious ego to unconscious purpose. Lexica (Sharp short head; Samuels pp. 122–123) supply paraphrase Do not invent loci.

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Psychopomp. A psychic factor that mediates unconscious contents to consciousness, often personified in the image of a wise old man or woman, and sometimes as a helpful animal.

(Sharp, 1991)

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — psychopomp pp. 122–123

psychopomp The figure which guides the soul at times of INITIATION and transition; a function traditionally ascribed to Hermes… Jung … used it to describe the function of the ANIMA AND ANIMUS in connecting a person with a sense of his ultimate purpose, calling or destiny… acting as a go-between connecting EGO and UNCONSCIOUS (see SELF).

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986/2013, pp. 122–123)

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

Thus the animus is a psychopomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and a personification of the latter. Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos…
(Jung, 1951/1968, CW 9ii, p. 16, ¶33)

…the figure of the anima, freed from the weight of the earth and the tyranny of the senses, the psychopomp who leads the way to the Elysian fields.
(Jung, 1951/1968, CW 9ii, pp. 29–30, ¶56)

See also: anima; animus; mana-personality; self; unconscious; consciousness; active imagination; psychosis; puer-aeternus.

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). Aion. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 16, 29–30, ¶33, ¶56). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.