Psychic Multiplicity and Individuation: Reexamining the Part–Whole
Relationship A
Chapter 1: Introduction
Introduction to the Research Area and Problem
In this study, I explored the topic of psychic multiplicity and individuation’s goal of
wholeness. Specifically, I investigated how individuation functions in light of a careful
exposition of psychic multiplicity in consciousness contrasted against a more singular ego
complex. As born out of Jungian conceptions, psychic multiplicity implies that the psyche hosts
various affective and imagistic perspectives with semiautonomous features (Jung, 1959/1969).
Jungian multiplicity is conspicuous in complexes and archetypes. Jung asserted complexes are
constituents of the personal psyche with a semiautonomous nature and have a way of animating
and or possessing psychic life (Jung, 1960/1975). Archetypes serve as the driving forces behind
complexes. They are multitudinous transpersonal—or perhaps subpersonal—psychic patterns
that are as varied as common life experiences, and they appear in images, myths, and symbols
(Jung, 1959/1969). The Jungian ego represents a complex in its own right, and Jung (1960/1975)
defined it as an enabling factor for consciousness and the center of consciousness.
A variety of established scholarly interpretations existed in the reviewed literature, but in
considering archetypes and complexes together, I surmised that Jung’s research and exposition
portrayed multiplicity as a foundational reality of the personal and transpersonal dimensions of
the psyche. For example, Jung’s personal experience and written works presented a lively
interplay of the part–whole relationship, which if handled with care, could yield the fruits of
individuation. With those premises in hand, my research focus pivoted toward psychic
multiplicity as it appeared in other conceptions, and I asked what those observations might imply
for a reconsideration of the ego complex and the individuation process.
Psychological ideas akin to subpersonalities have existed since psychology’s inception.
James (1987) elaborated on the multiple selves of conflicted persons in his Varieties of Religious
Experience. Additionally, as outlined by Fadiman and Gruber (2020), many notable 19th-century
psychologists focused on multiplicity. These researchers came to study multiplicity in theory as
well as in clinical practice. Importantly, many of these original approaches focused decidedly on
multiplicity as pathology. The origins of the diagnosis of what is now called dissociative identity
disorder appear in these early publications, where psychologists saw significant forms of split
consciousness in their troubled patients (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020). Therefore, much of
psychological history carries assumptions about psychic multiplicity being inherently
problematic.
In this project, I took a different approach and treated subpersonalities as a natural, basic,
and often functional phenomenon for human beings. Of course, many cases exist where multiple
parts of the psyche cause conflict and create dysfunction in an individual’s life. In an important
distinction, however, Fadiman and Gruber (2020) asserted that it is not multiplicity that causes
dysfunction but particular configurations of interrelated parts and internal attitudes that fail to
correspond with life circumstances and intrapsychic needs in a functional manner. The
foundation of the approach explored here shows multiplicity as a psychic baseline for human
beings, irrespective of whether such multiplicity is contextually expressed in a person’s life as
functional or dysfunctional. I emphasized subpersonalities here in a holistic manner, which is to
say that suffering, joy, and every imaginal psychic landscape in between might be viewed from a
psychic multiplicity perspective.
Roger Strachan (2011b) contended an understanding of subpersonalities as embodied
modes of behavior, perception, feeling, thinking, and sensing that are discernable as partially
independent and dynamic forces in the psyche. Researchers can investigate these modes as
differentiable coping styles, traits, creative urges, driving forces, talents, spiritual tendencies,
protective energies, cognitive abilities, intellectual dynamics, aggressive forces, affiliative and
loving tendencies, and other qualitatively discernable modes of being and interacting (Strachan,
2011b). Similarly, psychologist Stephen Larsen (1990) referred to the overall personality as “a
kaleidoscopic overlay and interpenetration of many subpersonalities or inner-characters” (p.
180). Understanding the total self as a composite of many agentic forces, as Larsen does,
suggests the distribution of conscious activities among many centers. As such, this perspective
aligns somewhat with Hillman’s (1975) multi-centered views of consciousness, as I will show
later. Moreover, multiple self theorist David Lester (2010) contended the whole psyche might be
a fluctuating expression of selves in conscious life, with these selves having functional control
over bodily actions and psychic perceptions for varying periods of time and within different life
contexts. Indeed, Fadiman and Gruber (2020) articulated this view in their book Your Symphony
of Selves, in which they suggested multiple selves are always engaging in life-experience,
whether or not they are acknowledged. Considering many sources in the literature, my
interpretation suggested a subpersonality has a dynamism and complexity that allows it to
extrapolate and apply its preferential modes of being and behaving across different contexts.
Therefore, I take subpersonalities as more than roles or Jungian persona expressions (i.e., the
ego’s outward social presentation (Jung, 1971). They may more closely resemble psychic
persons, as portrayed by Hillman (1975).
Contemporary strands of the idea of subpersonalities, given their relative autonomy and
dynamic range of enactment, challenge the notion of a singular conscious self. As adduced by
Lester (2015), “The issues of who I am has long been debated by psychologists interested in the
notion of selfhood. In the present theory, selfhood is perceived by the individual to be whichever
subself has executive power at the time” (p. 14). As such, many parts of the whole self might
partake in lived experience and take control of conscious life without a mediating ego agency. In
contrast to Jung’s (1960/1972) notion of schizophrenia, which he defined as a rare condition
wherein other complexes invade consciousness and deprive the ego complex “of its habitual
supremacy” (p. 240), researchers have suggested multiple personalities in consciousness might
instead be seen as a normal (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020) and natural occurrence (Hillman,
1983/2021). This perspective confronts Jung’s (1959/1969) traditional notion that multiplicity is
mostly housed in a personal and collective unconscious psyche and typically only interacts with
consciousness insofar as it is assimilated by a more singular ego complex. To further situate that
challenge to the ego complex in the following argument, it is necessary to start with the history
of the idea of the ego, especially as it came to be construed by Jung.
The Ego as an Historical Idea
Zimmerman (2015) suggested hermeneutic methodology partly functions to enable
thinkers to interpret the context out of which certain ideas emerge. Such an interpretation of
Jung’s ego-complex can contribute to an understanding of some aspects of Jung’s work and how
it may be subjected to contemporary revision. Washburn (2012) traced the ego in Western
philosophy and psychology back to Descartes’ cogito (i.e., thinking thing), in which Descartes
divided mind from matter and portrayed the ego as a closed-off immaterial entity. Hume
(1739/2011) eventually criticized this view with his famous proclamation that the only thing he
could find in himself at any moment was a bundle of sense impressions. Further, he reported: “I
can never catch myself at any moment of time without a perception, and can never observe
anything but the perception” (p. 222). Given that sense impressions and perceptions always
remain subject to great fluctuations, Hume did not think there was any ego of which to speak, but
Hume asserted there is no cartesian self (Washburn, 2012).
Kant (1781/2007), sensitive to Hume’s criticism but ultimately unsatisfied with it, posited
a transcendental ego, an ego that cannot be directly known. This ego operates as a formal
structure that must be inferred on the basis of the continuity of experienced selfhood, wherein an
individual assimilates the manifold contents of the objective world and the various sense
impressions into something cohesive and understandable to empirical consciousness. Therefore,
the multifarious sense bundles raised by Hume represent only the momentary fluctuations of a
constant unity, which cannot be perceived but are the prior condition of the very possibility of
empirical consciousness and its fluctuations. Kant asserted the self must be a formal unity
(Washburn, 2012) that makes possible a coherence of subjective experience; he referred to this
self as the transcendental unity of apperception (Kant, 1781/2007). Although these developments
created traction for the ego as a serious philosophical position, depth psychologists introduced
radically new provisions.
As recounted by Mitchell and Black (2016), a major transformation in the understanding
of the psyche occurred with Freudian psychology. Given the introduction of the Freudian
unconscious, the ego became a limited part of the self that functioned mostly as a mediator.
Therefore, Freud confounded the idea of an ego representing the whole psychic person. With this
shift, Freud denied a unitary self, instead suggesting “the psyche and the personality are highly
complex, intricately textured layers of instinctual impulses, transformations of those impulses,
and defenses against those impulses” (Mitchell & Black, 2016). Seeing the psyche in such a
diverse and multiperspectival manner shows how the conceptual invention of the Freudian
unconscious allowed the formulation of self as a multiplicity to gain ground. However, Freud
(1949/1989) maintained the ego as the sole entity involved in the experience of conscious
selfhood. As a mediator, Freud asserted the ego should negotiate the impulses of the id (i.e.,
instincts) with the demands of the superego (i.e., conscience/social norms/ego ideal). The id, ego,
and superego represented different agentic driving forces (Mitchell & Black, 2016), once again
showing a multiple model of the psyche taking root. Given this all-too-partial account of the rich
and complex history of the idea of the ego up to the time of Jung, it follows that he would
assume the ego concept in his structure of the psyche.
Jung’s Ego as a Revitalized Kantian Artifact
According to Jungian scholar Paul Bishop (1996), Jung referred to Kant in his
correspondence more than any other philosopher, and in his writing often used Kantian
philosophy as support for his ideas. Kant (1781/2007) offered a foundational concept by stating,
“Understanding can never go beyond the limits of sensibility within which alone objects are
given to us” (p. 256). Therefore, Kant suggested individuals must content themselves with the
limited access to reality conferred upon them through the mechanisms of a formal transcendental
ego, which encounters unknowable objects and converts them into understandable percepts. As
outlined by Copelston (1960), this conversion occurred through a priori categories, which are
faculties of understanding. The act of synthesizing objects into coherent understanding already
presupposes a transcendental unity, an I that can be said to accompany all the understandings.
Jung made much of these Kantian distinctions in his own writing. As explained by Roger Brooke
(2015), Jung tried to adapt Kant’s a priori categories to his archetypal theory as a priori
categories of psychic reality. Moreover, like Kant, Jung (1953/1966, 1959/1978) suggested the
ego still had to assimilate the manifold into itself, but this time in order to be aware of or to
engage other psychic contents.
Shamdasani (2003) purported Jung’s collective unconscious and its archetypes
represented a partial transformation of Kant’s noumenon (i.e., the unknowable thing in itself) into
the intrapsychic sphere. Jung (1959/1969) eventually referred to archetypes as unknowable
patterns that can only be known through the ego’s consciousness of representative images. These
movements hearken back to Kant’s differentiation between the phenomena (i.e., the experience
of the world) and the noumena. He explicitly referenced Kant’s unknowable ding an sich (i.e.,
thing in itself) when explaining his conception of the unconscious and its unknowable contents
(Jung 1958/1969). Kant asserted the external manifold world becomes sensible and coherent to
empirical consciousness through the assimilation to the transcendental ego via the transcendental
unity of apperception.
Contrastingly, Jung argued conscious faculties and the assimilation of unconscious
contents occur within the divides of the interior psyche between the ego complex and the
unconscious rather than simply between the external world of percepts and the human subject
(Brooke, 2015). Strangely enough, archetypes become phenomena and noumena in Jung’s
repurposing of Kant, and thereby, otherness becomes intrapsychic (Brooke, 2015). As expanded
upon in the literature review, Jung defined this otherness of intrapsychic contents typically can
only become conscious insofar as they are assimilated to the ego’s sphere. I found the connection
between Kant and Jung in this area too strong to ignore. As I understand, Jung partly tries to
construct an inverted Kantian psychology where Jung (1959/1969) characterizes objective
collective unconscious as a novel version of Kant’s unknowable external world. However, other
scholars have characterized Jung’s repurposing of Kant’s work as either a misunderstanding of
Kant’s ideas (Bishop, 1996; Brooke, 2015; Shamdasani, 2003) or a deliberate alteration of them
(Shamdasani, 2003).
An Entry Into Criticism
Given these historical observations, I inferred that Jung’s development of the ego
complex was set against the ideological backdrop of his mentors, his philosophical predecessors,
and within the context of the spirit of his time. At minimum, he read Kant veraciously (Bishop,
1996) and worked as an ardent student and junior colleague of Freud’s. Other contributions
notwithstanding, these points alone provide enough evidence to reason that the ego served as a
foundational idea for Jung’s educational development. Therefore, I took the ego’s validity as an
overarching premise as a basic fact and then shaped it to fit Jung’s model. As such, he continued
to reference the ego as a primary structure in his analytical psychology. Moreover, I estimated
Jung’s use of the ego concept to be more psychologically sophisticated than any of those thinkers
previously mentioned. The multiplicity of the psyche expands considerably in Jungian
psychology. He devised a notion of the instincts as more varied than Freud’s id (Jung,
1956/1976), and he considerably expanded archetypes from Kant’s a priori categories
(Shamdasani, 2003). In my view, taken together, the archetypes and complexes bring psychic
multiplicity much further into consideration in contrast to previous models.
Jung’s model of the psyche suggests the ego is structurally necessary because he made
preliminary assumptions about the nature of conscious and unconscious processes. Those
assumptions included that: (a) the manifold psyche must be made coherent to consciousness by a
single ego construct, as opposed to multiple self aspects semiautonomously engaging in
consciousness (Jung, 1960/1975); (b) multiplicity exists in an unconscious psyche that might be
encountered through such an ego complex and thereby affect its conscious experience
(Jung/1960/1675); and (c) encountered psychic counterparts do not represent the ding an sich
(Jung, 1961/1970), but only the ego’s phenomenally translated and inexact access to archetypal
reality through affective imagistic conveyance (Jung, 1960/1975). Therefore, the Jungian ego
becomes the key to all conscious experience and the mediator of all archetypal values insofar as
they are known or knowable.
These assumptions represented a primary target for reevaluation as I explored the
possibility of subpersonalities as figures in and of consciousness. Additionally, in the review of
literature relevant to my research approach, I investigated how the study of phenomenology,
particularly in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the concept of naturalized
phenomenology, encourages readers to adopt a new understanding of psychic multiplicity that is
not constrained by arguably antiquated subject–object divisions. This assertion may support
subpersonalities as a closer approximation to the psyche’s consciously lived world. Having
observed a partial history of the ego and its eventual revisions in Jungian depth psychology, I
made a reasonable argument for its antiquated nature for those willing to challenge its
assumptions. Understanding consciousness as a working Jungian concept represented one of the
first steps on that journey.
On the Importance of the Term “Consciousness” in Jung’s Ego
Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup (2021) interpreted Jung as postulating that contents
qualified for consciousness are attention-oriented, reflective, focused, metacognitive, full of
tightly bound associative contents, and have to do with the re-representation and appraisal of
experiential contents. Metacognitive function entails the capacity to re-represent phenomenal
contents of consciousness at a higher level of abstraction and thinking involved than in
selfreflection. As such, Jung’s consciousness must involve an awareness of the self at a level of
reportability and self-referential cognition via the ego complex and must generally correspond
with Kastrup’s emphasis on metacognition. I further explore and define these Jungian views on
consciousness in the literature review. However, as Kastrup also pointed out, Jung (1960/1975)
sometimes offered other less restrictive views on consciousness. I also explore these in the
literature review.
Jung’s more restricted approach represents one of numerous ways to define
consciousness. Many contemporary psychologists and philosophers view consciousness as
experience itself, wherein consciousness is phenomenal rather than oriented within a particular
higher level awareness or metacognitive function (Kastrup, 2021). Kastrup (2021) articulated
that dreams are conscious in the phenomenal framework because there is something that it is like
to dream; there is experience and subjectivity happening. Sometimes, an individual then
remembers or re-represents the dream metacognitively upon waking the next day; other times,
they never explicitly recall it. Conversely, Jungian psychologists call dreaming the unconscious,
not because it lacks subjective experience, but because nonlucid dreams do not usually represent
a metacognitive consciousness where the individual can say, “It is I that dreams.” Jung only
implied a different and more specific definition of consciousness that excluded dreaming and
archetypal reality from consciousness while still honoring their phenomenal status (Kastrup,
2021).
A more global and experiential definition of consciousness does not need to display a
particularly focused state of attention or a metacognitive process. When I am not referring to
Jung’s or other authors’ versions of consciousness, I think of consciousness phenomenally and
globally. Following psychologist Roger Strachan’s (2011b) self/soul/spirit model, I take
consciousness as an extension of life energy (i.e., anima/soul), wherein subjectively directed
activity occurs and has a qualitative sense. I further broach this view in the section of the
literature review covering naturalized phenomenology.
Metacognition Does Not Ensure a Valid Ego Complex
In my analysis of the relevant literature, I determined that highlighting Jung’s very
specific definition of consciousness does not validate the idea of a single ego complex at the
center of its structure. I found no convincing reason to suppose that focused attention, thinking,
judging, evaluating, re-representing, metacognition, narrativity, and other functions of Jungian
consciousness must be conducted by a singular ego complex. As Lester (2015) maintained, the
sense of I-ness at any given moment depends on which subself has executive control of the
psyche. The self-referential use of I, as well as the term executive, implies subselves can access
metacognition.
Kastrup (2021) defined metacognition as a process; therefore, I concluded it is not
necessarily a singular thing or ego that thinks, nor could I say with confidence that it is a wider
conscious field inhabited by a singular psychic complex. Martinez (2006) described
metacognition as “the monitoring and control of thought” (p. 696), which includes a variety of
manifestations and functions. As an intricate, multidimensional process of self-awareness and
focus, different subpersonalities may very well access metacognition to varying degrees at
different times. The following represent examples of diverse uses for metacognition: some
individuals plan suicides; others map out their next vacation, prepare for teaching a course, play
team sports with complex playbooks, scheme to rob banks, or start new businesses. Each of these
examples involves complex metacognitive functions, but they are animated by very different
perspectives (i.e., depressive self, leisurely self, intellectual self, athletic self, schemer self,
entrepreneur self), which I submit are subpersonalities in their own right. To argue otherwise
would be to say that, generally, subpersonalities cannot refer to themselves as I or have narratives
or metacognitive understandings of their goals and activities. In the current perspective, these
subpersonalities may always be present in the whole organism, and they emerge and cycle out as
prominent conscious dominates and perceptual, affective, and behavioral modes.
Moreover, the idea of subpersonalities suggests that all the abovementioned perspectives
could, in principle, exist in the same person and express themselves through consciousness at
different times (Lester, 2015). Therefore, although Kastrup (2021) assumed the ego complex was
a valid construct in the sphere of metacognition, I determined it did not follow that positing a
divide between metaconsciousness and phenomenal consciousness proved the validity of an ego
complex. However, Kastrup (2021) reserved the notion that psychic fragments dissociated from
the ego may have more limited access to willful control and re-representation, and he said this is
quite visible in Jung’s work as well. Problematically, in this formulation, Kastrup still assumed
that the ego served as the dominant complex in consciousness and thus still granted it a
metacognitive supremacy. In my view, neither Jung nor Kastrup secured this assumption in any
definite sense. Generally, the problem of substantiating a relatively unified ego complex versus
multiple selves in consciousness remained an issue to be solved, whether viewing consciousness
phenomenally or metacognitively.
Readers familiar with Jungian psychology may oppose this perspective insofar as
evolutions of the Jungian persona might explain multiple modes of worldly psychic engagement.
However, I questioned whether the persona could adequately explain multiple phenomenal and
metacognitive modes of engaging with the world. In the literature review, I remark, with the
assistance of archetypal psychology’s James Hillman, that Jung’s persona is presented in a way
that may not do justice to the multiplicity inherent to the authentic personality. As such, in his
persona model, Jung might have regarded the intrapsychic and expressive shifts of worldly
involvement as a problematic inconsistency in the personality to be sorted out by individuation
(Jung, 1971) rather than by a natural and authentic expression of different psychic persons. Given
the foregoing perspectives, critiques, and contexts, I now turn to the present research context as a
whole.
Problematizing the Ego Concept
In the rest of the introduction, I complete the preparations for a solid research direction by
problematizing the ego complex, which I deemed necessary to make this research viable within
the context of psychic multiplicity and individuation. Otherwise, if I accept the ego complex as a
stable fact, I accept that Jung has already established the dynamics of psychic multiplicity and
individuation as a working system. I proposed that the dichotomy between an ego complex and
an unconscious complex becomes very difficult to parse, possibly because it is a contrived
dichotomy. From there, I posited that consciousness probably cannot be said to have a singular
subject at its center that makes experience coherent. I then perceived subpersonalities in
consciousness as a potential solution, thereby creating a new problem for understanding
individuation. In my ensuing arguments, I offer the validity of those propositions, not as definite
truths but as sufficient perspectives for research.
Psychologist and writer John Rowan (2011) claimed that exploring psychic multiplicity
as a network of partially autonomous subjectivities (i.e., I-positions) makes the conscious versus
unconscious dichotomy a superfluous one in psychology. Rowan wrote:
The concept of the unconscious historically emerged from the discovery of persons
within the person (Ellenberger, 1970; Chertok and de Saussure, 1979). It grew and
developed from the middle of the eighteenth century until today, as these authorities have
shown in great detail. But if it were invented to account for the evident multiplicity
within the person, it is not needed today as we have the improved theory of the
Dialogical Self, which states that this multiplicity is not something odd or strange which
needs special explanation to handle, but rather something natural and basic to what
human beings are. All this highly complicated and unusual apparatus (Freud’s system of
the unconscious and so forth) can go into the fire. (p. 162)
I included dialogical self theory (DST) in the literature review. For now, it is sufficient to
say that Rowan’s (2011) claim introduces a major challenge to traditional depth psychology,
suggesting that perhaps psychic multiplicity is consistently found as different agencies within
conscious experience. Multiple parts of the self must then engage in life, not through the
mediation or assimilation of a conscious ego complex; rather, they engage in their own right as
prominent figures with conscious experiences. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this study, I
also grounded subpersonalities in other epistemological approaches, further leveraging criticisms
toward the ego complex.
Some psychobiological perspectives offer another way of looking at psychic multiplicity
and the implausibility of a centralized ego. Arguably, discussing developments in the modern
sciences continues to be relevant to Jungian psychology, given that Jung (1960/1975) established
a firm connection between psyche and matter and continued to include insights from natural
science in his work. As such, contemporary perspectives on psychophysiology may further
enhance a critical view of the ego complex. The following quote from theoretical physicist
Michio Kaku (2014) can aid in this investigation. He wrote:
Mentally we feel that our mind is a single entity, continuously and smoothly processing
information, totally in charge of our decisions. But the picture emerging from brain scans
is quite different from the perception we have of our own mind (p. 34).
As such, the semiautonomous modularity of brain processes also appears to correspond to
a modularity in perspectival consciousness. Kaku (2014) further elaborated on the way in which
the sense of a single unified conscious self is an illusory phenomenon, a constructed post hoc
explanation employed to justify and synthesize perspectival and behavioral diversity.
LeDoux (2003) posited that the whole self is a composite of biosocial factors—although
“it is a unit, it is not unitary” (p. 31.) The whole self necessarily serves as a functional unit to the
extent that its many parts collaborate to perceive and operate in the world, but LeDoux
maintained collaboration does not make it a unified single perspective. He went on to explain the
multiplicity of systems in the brain, characterizing consciousness in a more dynamic manner.
Ledoux exposited that although the self can be viewed as a composite whole, it consists of many
self-aspects that express themselves in independent timeframes and contexts, and these aspects
can even be contradictory to one another. I took LeDoux’s points as support for an argument
against a singular complex of conscious experience and an entry into a riveting inquiry. I asked
which actor (i.e., subpersonality) within the psyche is on the stage of consciousness at a given
moment, much like Hillman (1975).
Gazzaniga (2018) submitted that consciousness operates as an instinct that underlies
neural modules and life processes. He held that the idea of a single unified conscious self is an
illusion created by many modular cortical and subcortical processes that create conscious bubbles
of experience. Gazzaniga explained that these modules are highly autonomous and tend to have
some level of functional circuitry that allows cross-communication. The illusion of unified
consciousness, Gazzaniga asserted, emerges as the bubbles stitch together in a narrative through
the course of time. Notably, no scholar has postulated the ego can explain the notion of conscious
experience.
These neuroscientific critiques of a singular conscious self represent only one scientific
avenue of critiquing the ego complex. Arguably, support of multipart consciousness—as opposed
to a singular ego consciousness—goes further in contemporary psychological sciences. Some of
those approaches include evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and the big five
personality model. I interpreted these as directly and indirectly supporting a psychic multiplicity
consciousness perspective. When the contributions are indirect, I directly state them, as is
appropriate to a hermeneutic methodology.
Notably, I do not suggest that Jung himself was unaware of these notions of fluidity in
conscious experience. He addressed the fluctuations I have pointed out when he stated that “I do
not speak simply of the ego, but of an ego complex, on the proven assumption that the ego,
having a fluctuating composition, is changeable and therefore cannot be simply the ego” (Jung,
1960/1975, p. 324). Jung’s ego complex in no way represents a stagnant entity with a fixed
identity, as the literature review shows. Jung (1960/1975) also wrote, “It is not altogether clear
why the cohesion of a certain part of the sense-functions and a certain part of our
memorymaterial should be consciousness, although the cohesion of other parts of the psyche
should not” (p. 324). Jung articulated that positing an ego complex in a model of psychology that
already accepts psychic multiplicity makes it difficult to delineate how consciousness is more or
less restricted to one complex versus any other. Indeed, this major area of criticism poises
readers to look at consciousness more carefully. As Rowan implied, this research might suggest
the presence of multiple modes of consciousness that cannot be reduced to a singular conscious
ego. Yet, although Jung (1960/1975) perceived conscious fluidity and momentarily questioned
the
viability of a single complex for consciousness, he concluded that the ego complex must serve as
the overruling unity of consciousness that subsumes smaller consciousnesses. This is a process of
synthesizing manifold sense consciousnesses within the official domain of the unified ego. Once
again, Jung showed his quasi-Kantian attitude here.
I present the following questions as primary considerations about the validity of the
construct called the ego complex.
•Can one psychic cluster be said to be responsible for performing such an impressive
range of behavioral and psycho-emotional states given over to human consciousness?
•If the ego complex is so versatile that it can assimilate and claim all conscious
experiences, then what purpose does multiplicity have for consciousness?
•Is multiplicity only to be assimilated, filtered, and expressed through consciousness
so that the ego has the capacity to adapt to a variety of life experiences?
•And if the ego needs so much help, then what makes it a substantial and volitional
entity beyond being a mere vessel for complexes?
Maybe the ego complex does operate as a mere vessel. As the literature review showed,
Jung (1963/1970) somewhat contradicted previous assertions when he suggested in Mysterium
Coniunctionis that the ego is simply an expressive vessel: “the relatively constant personification
of the unconscious” (p. 107). With this conceptualization, Jung gave the ego complex a liminal
nature and less structural stagnation. Indeed, Jung (1960/1975) also posited that the ego complex
has a strong connection with physical sensory experiences and, moreover, is full of associations
that create a web of interrelated psychic content. When strong complexes take over, Jung
suggested the effect overwhelms the ego complex to the degree that such complexes appear to
have a relative degree of control over conscious experience. Jung wrote that “the normal ego
loses its attention-tone (or its clarity, or its stimulating and inhibiting influence on other
associations)” (p. 41). As such, Jung portrayed the ego as a liminal bridge to the multiplicity of
the psyche, which includes feeling tones, sensations, complexes, archetypes, and images.
However, I believe the concept of needing such a bridge as the ego complex is unnecessary.
Throughout this dissertation, I argue there are more tenable positions where
subpersonalities, as multiple consciousnesses, interact in consciousness without the intermediary
need for an ego structure. I make this claim because these consciousnesses may have direct
access to organs of perception and action. I make complex arguments for this position in
Chapters 4 and 5, in which I explain how humans manage to functionally adapt to life in this
proposed multiple psyches with no ego complex. I explored whether, given that Jung described
the ego as a continuous personification of a psyche full of multiplicity, that is his true direction of
thinking. At a certain point, I found it reasonable to ask why the ego is even conceptually
necessary for Jungian psychology. I wondered what use there is for an empty vessel that catches
unconscious contents and animates them for consciousness.
The work of Hillman (1962), an important figure in my study, further assisted me as I
prepared the ground for my reconsideration of the validity of the Jungian ego. Hillman
determined that the Jungian ego concept has been framed in a way that inadequately describes
psychic consciousness, and he suggested the cultivation of an imaginal ego. Such an imaginal I
can encounter the depths of the psyche, although the traditional ego complex remains behind a
barred door, limited by a too narrowly perceived capacity of consciousness. Hillman wrote, “The
ego of ‘analytical’ psychology gives insufficient adaptation to archetypal reality” (p. 188).
Implicit in Hillman’s critique of the traditional ego complex is the reality of multiple psychic
persons, which have been there all along and can be encountered dynamically through an
imaginal responsiveness. Hillman and Shamdasani (2013) asserted that “I often say don’t use the
word ‘ego,’ I’ve never seen an ‘ego.’ I don’t know what we’re talking about” (p. 8). To reiterate,
the fluidity of consciousness makes the concept of ego ambiguous and evasive, as Hillman and
Shamdasani implied. I found myself wondering if the term ego had outlived its usefulness and
replaced descriptive understandings of conscious experiences with a vague abstraction.
Individuation and the Ego Complex
Traditional Jungian literature has addressed the question of how individuation occurs in
part by positing ego consciousness as the “conscious personality” (Jung 1959/1978, p. 5),
contrasted against the greater psychic landscape (i.e., the unconscious, complexes, archetypes,
the Self). In that model, the ego performs a conceptually necessary function for individuation. I
have articulated that many other psychic multiplicity views imply that conscious states of human
experience and goal-directed behavior are subject to great fluctuations engendered from different
parts of the self. From this perspective, conscious experiences appear to share a permeable
boundary with the entirety of humans’ psychic and biological processes, thereby drawing out
brand new questions about individuation explored here as a core research theme.
Although Hillman (1975) was staunchly committed to multiplicity, he did not support
traditional Jungian individuation. He critiqued it as a monotheistic fantasy, restricting
phenomenological understanding of the psyche insofar as it claims dominance as a superior
value. Hillman reminded readers to guard against one-sided monocentric supremacy. Yet, this
criticism in and of itself may be one-sided because, in it, Hillman assumed that individuation’s
notion of wholeness is merely another manifestation of an archetypal position. However,
arguments against this view existed in the literature. Individuation may represent a quintessential
wholeness that is ontologically prior to the multiplicity of subpersonalities. As such, I found it
worth exploring whether such an essence can coexist with subpersonalities and no ego complex.
By pursuing that argument, I sought to discover if that ontological distinction was as crucial as I
suspected.
Moreover, the notion of a part implicates a whole. Otherwise, there would be no
referentially consistent context within which the word “part” would have any meaning. A part
receives its status as a part because a whole exists within which it is perceived or deduced as
operating. Therefore, a subpersonality, or any word for a node of psychic multiplicity, necessarily
implies a larger psychic network of which it is a part. These observations led me to believe that
the part–whole dynamic is an unavoidable conceptual exploration when considering psychic
multiplicity.
Within this part–whole complexity resides a deep and enduring question of how the
psyche’s interrelated parts exchange information or energy, how they may compete for energy
and control, how they may work together or tolerate one another, and how they may operate
within consciousness. Further, a question remains of what this means for the whole Self, the
individual, the soul, or the human being. Jung (1959/1978) traditionally handled some of this
complexity by utilizing the ego concept as a mediating factor for part–whole conjunctions in
conscious life. The ego could encounter and relate to the Self (i.e., the whole personality) and
somehow bring conscious life to honor that wholeness in an idealized process of individuation.
Yet, if the ego concept is in question, and multiple psychic subpersonalities or parts
alternate control over subjective selfhood, the conversation about individuation transforms in
important ways, especially given that the ego cannot be claimed as a benefit or detriment to
individuation. I found the complexity of where these observations led, in terms of attempting to
understand individuation, made my research question unique and worth exploring. I sought to
understand how individuation would work if multiplicities of conscious selfhood replaced the
semistable ego complex.
Research Questions and Intention
The following research questions guided this study:
RQ 1. What happens if multiple subpersonalities are viewed as a viable theoretical
replacement for traditional ego consciousness?
RQ 2. What implications does this have for the individuation process, and how would
something like individuation occur within this context?
RQ 3. Is there some other mechanism or process of consciousness that would allow
individuation and multiplicity to coexist?
RQ 4. How might this view of multiplicity affect our view of individuation in the field of
Jungian depth psychology?
In answering these questions, I aimed to reexamine the part–whole relationship by considering
these nuanced views of psychic multiplicity and consciousness.
Importantly, I recognize it is easy to retroactively critique Jung’s ideas. In this project, I
do not aim to ask more of Jung than he already contributed; rather, I aim to continue the
transformative spirit of his work. As seen in Jung’s (2009) The Red Book, part of that spirit
involves facing the psyche without the predictability of previously held structures and ideas to
see what might be discovered. If the reader determines the Jungian approaches being
reconsidered were already robust as previously constituted, then perhaps this study at least
contributes to a useful scholarly dialogue of Jungian ideas through what I hope are strong
counterarguments.
Relevance to the Field of Jungian Depth Psychology
Jung’s (1960/1975) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche spanned a wide range of
territory, including but not limited to physics, bioenergy dynamics, the concept of psychic energy
or Jungian libido, multiple consciousnesses, the nature of consciousness, psychoid and
synchronicity, as well as archetypes and complexes. This publication represents one of many of
his texts that display his wide-ranging interests and commitment to an analytical psychology in
dialogue with other fields of study. In the literature review, reexamining his comments on the
unconscious as a potentially multiple consciousness represented a particularly relevant aspect of
the present work’s foundation. Hillman attempted to reinvigorate some of Jung’s themes of
psychic multiplicity while also adding the notion of a radically multiple psyche for consideration
by scholars in the field of Jungian depth psychology (Hillman, 1975), and he proposed multiple
centers of consciousness rather than one (Hillman, 1983/2021). Jung’s multidisciplinary interests,
in conjunction with Hillman’s major contributions to psychic multiplicity, position this research
project in a favorable manner, as it spans many disciplines while honoring the ultimate primacy
of the psyche.
As the modern importance of psychic multiplicity has been adopted in a wide variety of
psychological areas of study, I found it highly relevant to reexamine psychic multiplicity and its
implications for Jungian individuation. Of course, many Jungians and post-Jungians have and
still make this contribution. However, this dissertation differentiates itself as it represents a
potential ontological challenge and dialogue for the field. I explored newly proposed definitions
of consciousness and new proposed dynamics of multiple consciousness, and I attempted to
interrupt some of Jung’s structural ideas for the sake of a more fluid field of consciousness,
making this text highly relevant to Jungian psychology and its wide-ranging applications.
Whether these challenges are ultimately salient, I aimed for the dialogue with ontologically
different ideas presented in a unique way to prove a useful exercise for the field.
In summation, I determined that hermeneutically reapproaching psychic multiplicity and
individuation represented a project that fit Jungian directions quite well. I hoped that putting
some other perspectives of psychic multiplicity in dialogue with Jungian depth psychology
would invigorate the field with some fresh questions. I aimed to generate new insights into
multiplicity and the individuation process in the field of Jungian depth psychology. Given the
foregoing consideration of the ego as a potentially unviable construct, I hoped this contribution
would bring a relevant critique to the modern tradition of Jung’s work and offer an opportunity
for deeper dialogue between Jungian scholars.
Writer’s Relationship to the Topic
Years ago, I began studying with a lifelong psychologist and therapist named Roger
Strachan, now 89 years of age. He trained me in his model called self/soul/spirit, supervised my
work with clients, and continued to mentor me on a variety of psychological topics. Being
trained as a gestalt therapist and a scientist, Strachan’s (2011b) model revealed an appreciation
for science and phenomenology as sources of psychological information. Purporting monism, the
self/soul/spirit approach relies on the ontological precept that life force is tantamount to soul and
is inherent to nature and being. Soul represents the essence of an individual’s being and the
gestalt that is greater than the sum of their parts. Every human being encompasses a unique life
force, like Jung’s animating principle with psycho-physiological potentials that develop into full
subpersonalities and create a wholeness (i.e., mandala). As a model of therapeutic practice,
self/soul/spirit facilitators help clients identify their various subpersonalities through
phenomenological observation. Facilitators urge clients to use their deeper soul or life force to
mediate psychic conflict, enhance living experiences, and create purposeful interventions for the
subpersonalities and the whole self. Facilitators also encourage subpersonalities to speak for
themselves and to one another. The result tends toward a more aware and intentional lifestyle. I
hope to make explicit throughout my analysis of individuation and multiplicity where these
impactful teachings affect my interpretational style.
Chapter 2: Literature Review
The ensuing literature review is split into four sections. Part 1 centers around Jungian and
archetypal depth psychology; it addresses Jung’s conception of the ego complex and how it
relates to psychic multiplicity, Jung’s work on individuation, how James Hillman’s work
contributes to the dialogue on multiple selves, and Jungian analyst Redfearn’s conception of
subpersonalities. In Part 2, I turn to other theories on psychic multiplicity outside of Jungian and
archetypal depth psychology. I selected a handful of theorists, among many robust options, who I
felt could prepare the ensuing conversation on multiplicity and individuation in an insightful
manner. In Part 3, I evaluate some relevant studies in contemporary psychological science,
including psychobiological approaches that I believe contribute to the discussion of psychic
multiplicity and individuation. Part 4 of the literature review includes a review of the literature
that informed my research approach and methodology.
Literature Review Part 1
Jung’s significant volume of writing about multiplicity ensured a variety of angles could
be applied to this literature review. I focused on the multiplicity of personalities and figures in the
psyche latent in his depiction of archetypes, complexes, and the ego complex. Jungian typology,
a voluminous dissertation-worthy subject in and of itself, includes what Jung (1971) thought
were key forms of psychic apprehension and styles of perception called thinking, feeling,
sensing, and intuition. Although it is certainly plausible that certain subpersonalities might favor
some of these psychic functions over others, I omitted Jung’s typological theory in this
dissertation. I made this decision to facilitate my focus on a multiplicity of characters in the
psyche, which did not include types. I also prioritized other modernized scientific and
phenomenological forms of perception in my argument. When discussing modes of apperception
is relevant, the later reviewed premises of genetics, human uniqueness, and multiple organs of
conscious apperception became more relevant to the structure of the present work. Although
these forms of understanding did not invalidate the importance of thinking, feeling, sensing, and
intuiting, they also did not necessitate splitting them into separate typological categories. With
my focus on human uniqueness as a major theme in this dissertation, I determined typology
would confound my approach. Ultimately, I aimed to engage Jung’s literature on multiplicity in a
coherent way that adequately reviewed his position as it was strictly relevant to the subject
matter I chose.
Jung on the Ego-Complex and Multiplicities of Consciousness
Jung (1971) described the ego as “a complex of ideas which constitutes the centre of my
field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity” (p. 425).
In this explanation, Jung suggested that the ego is a formation of various proclivities and identity
factors that coalesce within consciousness and have strong and enduring patterns of psychic
subjectivity. Moreover, being affected by life experiences, the ego complex maintains its own
semistable identity through a ground of associations and consolidated sense impressions (Jung,
1960/1975). For Jung (1960/1975), other complexes can impress themselves upon ego
consciousness with varying degrees of intensity. In my view, the Jungian ego complex serves as a
necessary component of the act of reflection, wherein an individual can become aware of other
complexes and their affective landscapes. In other words, an individual’s reflective clarity and
cognitive understanding of their own complexes depends on the degree to which those
complexes have been illuminated by the ego’s refulgence.
However, Jung (1960/1975) explained that a complex foreign to the ego can establish
“itself on the conscious surface; it can no longer be circumvented and proceeds to assimilate the
ego-consciousness step by step, just as, previously, the ego-consciousness tried to assimilate it”
(pp. 99–100). I interpreted this to mean that the identity of the psychically internal subject,
referred to as I, fades into the background, and another complex assumes the qualities of
firstperson subjectivity. This makes who (i.e., which part of the psyche) resides at the center of
consciousness a relative matter, for at any given moment of conscious subjectivity, the qualities
of I-ness might change. Further, as discussed in the introduction, Jung posited the ego complex is
also capable of significant perspectival fluctuations in and of itself, meaning it is not fixed or
completely stable in its self-identity. This raises the important distinction of whether the ego
itself changes or if other parts of the psyche assume the center of consciousness. Jung made room
for both alterations in his ideas on ego consciousness.
Jung (1954/1970) also clarified that the ego complex results from developmental and
adaptive processes. Accordingly, and in alignment with Jung’s (1960/1975) assertion that the
psyche of a newborn child is not a tabula rasa, the ego complex develops as a combination of
dispositional tendencies and life experiences (Jung, 1954/1970). I determined it was appropriate
to characterize Jung’s developmental comments on the ego complex as a theory of identity
formation, where a gradual coagulation of perception, attitude, and behavioral patterns exists.
These developmental trajectories include Jung’s assessment of the child’s psychic differentiation
from or identification with parental figures and their archetypal symbolization.
Jung (1956/1967) partially clarified his position regarding ego development and parental
figures in his analysis of the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth. Although Freud emphasized the sexual
character of the Oedipus myth, Jung (1961/1970) understood it to have more global archetypal
applications and focused on the pre-oedipal Sphinx. I do not recount the Oedipus myth here as I
can decipher Jung’s (1956/1967) comments without a thorough retelling of the tale. By his
account, the riddle the Sphinx put to Oedipus was a trap, leading to an incestual relationship
between Oedipus and his mother and, to some extent, to a developmental failure for the ego.
Jung inferred that had Oedipus seen the danger of overemphasizing his intellect and been
properly frightened by the Sphinx, he would have gone through a more favorable course of
development and been free of the mother complex that ensnared him. This formulation suggests
that the developing ego must learn to become independent from the dual aspect of the mother to
function in a psychically mature manner.
Indeed, Neumann (1954/1970) made this argument more explicitly in his book The
Origins and History of Consciousness, a text that Jung (1954/1970) resoundingly approved of in
his written forward. Neumann emphasized that the ego’s development depends on its recognition
of autonomy and separation from the mother, which involves forgoing the blissful temptation of
merging with the mother and is constellated by a projection of fear toward her as the devouring
mother archetype. This seems to be what Jung (1956/1967) meant when he suggested the
Oedipus myth’s tragic consequences “could have been easily avoided if only Oedipus had been
sufficiently intimidated by the frightening appearance of the ‘terrible’ or ‘devouring’ Mother
whom the Sphinx personified” (p. 181). This reveals the utility of a measure of fear for
developing an ego independence, which allows a child’s proper differentiation from the mother
figure. Jung, in a typically gender-biased fashion for his time, posited that a girl need not worry
as much about differentiation from the mother but that her danger lay with the father. Overall,
Jung’s comments on the Oedipal myth must be considered in his theories on the ego complex and
its development. Namely, it appeared that the course of the relationship with parental figures and
its archetypal antecedents purportedly serve as decisive factors of ego-identity development.
Having addressed the developmental basis of the ego, I turned back to its general
substance and function as it operated once established as an identity cluster. Differentiated from
consciousness in its more global permeations, the ego resides at the center of consciousness,
which makes a broader field of consciousness possible (Jung, 1960/1975). I viewed this center as
a configuration of multiple and partially independent psycho-sensory factors that have been
pressed together in the apparent form of an identity cluster at the center of consciousness
(1960/1975). Jung (1960/1975) put it directly:
For all its appearance of unity, it (the ego) is obviously a highly composite factor. It is
made up of images recorded from the sense-functions that transmit stimuli both from
within and from without, and furthermore of an immense accumulation of images of past
processes. (p. 323)
The features of this identity cluster typically correspond with the common use of the noun I in
everyday speech (Jung, 1954/1970). Therefore, the Jungian ego is inextricably connected to
firstperson narrative experience. Exceptions to this correspondence include what Jung called
archetypal possession or inflation, wherein the ego complex apparently loses its adaptive edge
and becomes subsumed by the unconscious.
To briefly summarize Jung’s remarks on the ego covered thus far, the ego complex in
humans who go through a functional process of adaptation and development includes the
following attributes: it displays a relative continuity of conscious experience; it forms a
consolidated network of associative mental contents, memories, and sense-impressions that
orient one to life circumstances on an ongoing basis; and it provides a sense of first-person
narrative identity.
In the ensuing analysis of psychic multiplicity, as it pertains to conscious experiences, I
show how these definitions of the semistable ego may be too easily collapsible when considering
the psychic phenomenology of subpersonalities. The relative and obscure nature of how Jung
defined the ego complex is crucial to my later arguments on psychic multiplicities in
consciousness, which may inhibit the functionality of the ego concept.
Importantly, more reasons to reevaluate the ego concept within Jungian psychology
appeared in Jung’s writing. Later in his career, Jung (1963/1970) staggered his own previously
laid conceptions of the ego complex in a single passage of Mysterium Coniunctionis:
The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full
of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant
personification of the unconscious itself, or as the Schopenhauerian mirror in which the
unconscious becomes aware of its own face. (p. 107)
Far from displaying a constancy or a semistable identity, here the ego becomes a fluid
agent of the unconscious, persistently carrying images forward into life experiences and willful
activities. In my view, defining the ego complex as an ongoing personification of the
unconscious leaves the impression it is a vessel or mechanism for conscious experience rather
than an entity unto itself. This conceptualization of the ego complex differs entirely from other
more fixed versions Jung provided, which beckons careful attention.
Ego as Liminal
In his writings, Jung characterized the unconscious as an abundance of multiplicity (Jung,
1959/1969). It is granted that rich patterns and archetypal mysteries reveal themselves to humans
in manifold images, perceived by a more singular consciousness (Jung 1959/1969). Therefore, in
response to Jung’s characterization of the ego as a “relatively constant personification of the
unconscious,” I considered the ramifications of this statement in the later stages of my topic, in
which I inquired into consciousness and multiplicity. Also, Jung (1960/1975) portrayed the
archetypes themselves as having a liminal nature. The anima, for example, can take on a wide
range of feeling tones and archetypal positions (Jung 1960/1975). Jung also described the anima
as the personification of the unconscious, suggesting it is highly mercurial, having the ability to
shift and navigate the psyche’s range of images (Jung, 1960/1975). Hillman (1983/2021)
summarized the liminality of the anima and Jungian unconscious using the example of syzygies
and divine pairs of opposites. Hillman claimed that “every archetype always implies another:
child-mother, mother-hero, hero-father, father-son, son-wise old man, wise old man-daughter,
daughter-mother, mother-child, and so on, no matter where we start or how we proceed” (p. 133).
These divine pairs play a crucial role in the interior dimensions of the Jungian psyche, and they
further display the anima’s mercurial nature (Hillman, 1983/2021). The archetypal ambivalence
that Jung displayed, along with his notions of a mercurial ego, allows a more sophisticated
inquiry into the ego’s role in his theory of the psyche.
As his notions of archetypes begin to meld together, suggesting latent potentiality and
meaning, questions arise about how the ego assimilates this abundance of affects and images.
Again, the notion of syzygies is relevant to this question. The anima (i.e., interior feminine soul)
and animus (i.e., masculine rational spirit) represented the ultimate syzygy for Jung (1959/1978).
He posited they are “always tempting the ego to identify itself with them” (Jung, 1954/1966, p.
261). Again, with these lines, Jung portrayed the unconscious and the ego as liminal entities that
are in communication. Moreover, the ego appears to be directly affected by the activities of the
psyche to such an extent that there can sometimes appear to be relative transparency. It seems a
mirror-like effect occurs that allows archetypes and complexes more direct access to conscious
perception and behavior.
In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung (1963/1970) explicitly described ego fluidity as more
closely aligned with an exploration of a multiplicity of selves that alter in their share of life
experiences and designs. Later in this dissertation, I interrupt structural distinctions like
conscious and unconscious. Moreover, I argue subpersonalities can directly interact within
consciousness as a multiple consciousness. Therefore, although Jung’s delicate treatment of the
ego complex suggests possibilities of how the ego can reconcile itself with psychic multiplicity, I
ultimately refute this claim for various reasons (see Chapter 4). Exploring the Jungian definition
of consciousness opens up contradistinctive points in the later stages of my argument.
Jung’s Specific Use of the Term Consciousness
For the sake of theoretical coherence, defining the ego complex as it relates to
consciousness does not propitiate a secure definition without an understanding of what Jung
meant by the word consciousness. Jung tended to employ a highly specific definition of
consciousness. Jung (1971) defined consciousness as those contents of the psyche that are
discerned by the perceptual and interactive capacities of the ego complex. Initially, this appeared
to be circular reasoning because it suggested consciousness is defined by the ego’s activity and
vice versa. Yet, a clearer picture presents itself when considering how Jung characterized the
qualities necessary for consciousness. Jung (1959/1969) conveyed the functions of conscious
subjectivity as being qualified by a particular concentration of psychic attention. He wrote: “It is
in the nature of the conscious mind to concentrate on relatively few contents and to raise them to
the highest pitch of clarity” (p. 162). Jung, therefore, showed that his classification of
consciousness includes a certain focused intensity accessible to explicit thought and cognition
and thus excludes certain contents from the purview of consciousness.
Elsewhere, Jung conflated conscious contents perceived by the ego with the human
capacity for reflection. For example, he wrote that “the ego, as I have said, can be understood as
an image or reflection of all the activities comprehended by it” (Jung, 1960/1975, p. 325). In the
act of reflecting, the ego complex assimilates those contents available within its sphere of
refulgence and configures them as psychically conscious percepts. Within this process, the ego
becomes partially characterized by a subject–object division. Indeed, Jung (1959/1969) described
the collective unconscious as “sheer objectivity” (p. 22). The ego, therefore, operates as the
perceptual nexus through which objects of the unconscious (e.g., archetypes or complexes)
illuminate themselves in an ambivalent and affectively charged half-light; that is to say, the ego
perceives the objects of the unconscious in a transitional dusk-like horizon, where consciousness
and unconsciousness permeate one another.
I wondered if this division represented an antiquated subject–object carryover that has
progressively moved cartesian dualism into psychology, cloaked in the form of conscious ego
and unconscious, rather than as the division of mind and matter. Topics covered later in the
literature review, such as dialogical self theory, push back against those cartesian distinctions in
psychology. However, when read carefully and despite some apparent contradictions, Jung
presented his definitions in a way that his arguments cohere if his stated presuppositions are
accepted. He relativized any dualistic judgments he made when he characterized the objects of
the unconscious also as subjects themselves, the ego being an object of their perception (Jung,
1959/1969). I determined that perhaps it was unfair to accuse Jung of a simplistic and outdated
form of dualism.
The Red Book and the Ego
In The Red Book: Liber Novus, Jung (2009) described a series of imaginal encounters he
had with his own psyche. These encounters contain the germinal antecedents for much of Jung’s
development of analytical psychology (Jung, 1963). As a phenomenological scaffolding for the
later structure of Jungian theory (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013), I thought The Red Book
provided a fresh look at Jung’s personal and theoretical development. For now, I focus mainly on
the text’s relationship to the ego concept. Although, the text also provides a great collection of
multiple selves.
Sections of The Red Book revealed that Jung’s I was not fully differentiated in the text.
For example, at one point, he goes to great lengths to criticize and discipline his I. After rebuking
his I for several pages, he wrote, “After I had spoken these and many more angry words to my I,
I noticed that I began to bear being alone with myself” (Jung, 2009, p. 467). There are, at
minimum, two distinctive Is in this reflection. As mentioned by Shamdasani (2009) in the
footnotes of The Red Book, Jung later conceptualized this confrontation with his I as a dialogical
encounter with the shadow. This matters because it appears in the text as if he is talking to what
would be his ego complex, but it turns out that the I he rebukes is the shadow within him.
This considerably opens a dialogue about just what the I means for Jung and how it is
psychically distributed. Moreover, the one who addresses his I also functions as an I; Jung
neither explicitly premised this idea nor differentiated it in the text, but I found it to be
conspicuous. Jung’s own experiential demonstration in The Red Book, therefore, made it
selfevident that a multiplicity of selves exists in consciousness with a dynamic agency. I explore
the question of whether this observation contradicts the purported central constancy of an
overruling ego later in these pages.
Encountering hero images throughout the text can also relate to the discussion on
multiplicity and ego consciousness. Jung (2009) emphasized the importance of the fall of the
hero and a subsequent regeneration of consciousness in the following example:
The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme
meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this
arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It
completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. (p. 121)
Here, Jung (2009) implicitly conflated the spirit of the times with the heroic impulse.
That heroic impulse also has an implicit identity with what Jung considered his ego, which is
then naturally attracted to the spirit of the times, purportedly affecting his conscious aspirations.
Jung made this process visible in a description of his dream where he kills the hero, Siegfried,
who he claims is symbolic of his own heroic ego impulses. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
Jung (1963) recounted his Siegfried dream and stated that he “had a secret identity with
Siegfried” and that he was forced “to sacrifice his ideal and conscious attitudes” because “this
identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s
will, and to these one must bow” (p. 180–181). Here, he uses the hero identity and ego as
synonymous in terms of their will, and it appears the death of the hero ego symbolizes a rebirth
process in consciousness and a renewed relationship to the Self archetype. Therein, the ego no
longer operates as a heroic ego but as a humble servant of the Self. Although this might be
confounding, Jung (1954/1970) also associated the Self archetype with the hero image. This
seeming contradiction (i.e., that the hero might be at once a problematic value of the ego
complex and yet also an image of a person’s individuation) raised questions about how to
interpret these claims.
In Civilization in Transition, Jung (1964/1970) commented that the hero is the
“embodiment of man’s highest and most powerful aspirations” (pp. 47–48). On its face, this
affirms that the hero is an image of the Self archetype. Indeed, Jung made this statement in a
compensatory context, where the hero image plays a role in instilling balancing values into
consciousness. However, when examining the quote in the context of the abovementioned
account of his Siegfried dream, it takes on a different meaning, or at least highlights Jung’s
varied hermeneutic approach to the hero’s archetypal salience. An aspect of Jung exists in which
he called his ego’s will, suggesting it wanted to emulate a heroic life as symbolized by Siegfried.
He eventually realized he had to sacrifice this ambition for his individuation. I concluded he
made this sacrifice because the hero wasn’t really the highest and most powerful, according to
his own account of his individuation process. So perhaps Jung only relatively defined those most
powerful aspirations of the hero image as most powerful from the perspective of what Jung
admitted was his ego’s will. However, I must once again emphasize that the hero, to Jung
(1954/1970), was far more than an ego complex. Instead, it has archetypal salience for
individuation, the self-archetype, and religious symbolism of the collective unconscious.
Jung (1556/1967) solved this apparent contradiction of hero presented as an ego’s
problematic preoccupation and as the redeemer of the psyche when he said, “The ego all too
easily succumbs to the temptation to identify with the hero, thus bringing on a psychic inflation
with all its consequence” (p. 392). Thus, the problem does not involve the hero archetype itself
but how the ego relates to the archetype. If the ego identifies with the hero image, it hinders
individuation. This idea puts Jung’s interpretation of his dream where he murders Siegfried into
greater perspective and resolves the dichotomy I introduced. Of additional importance, the
archetypes can often have many meanings and are not easily pinned down to a single
phenomenon or psychic dynamic (Jung, 1959/1969). Jung (1954/1970) also adumbrated the
terrible difficulty of interpreting hero mythology because it has no single meaning, and all the
characters of such myths are, in a sense, transposable. I go to these lengths to articulate hero–ego
dynamics in Jung’s work because I feel it ensures a greater understanding of the theoretical
ground of the ego complex proposed as a psychically lived dynamic that might seek a fixed or
secure identity but is not fixed in and of itself.
The self-proclaimed collapse of Jung’s heroic identity inflation might offer some clarity
as to why Jung did not fully differentiate his I in The Red Book. He had undergone a rebirth of
conscious selfhood, which necessarily obscured the I’s identity or which I had gained
prominence. Indeed, a psychological transformation necessarily challenges an individual’s
previously felt sense of identity. For Jung (1963/1970), transformative psychic processes
included what he alchemically attributed to the massa confusa, a submersion in the unconscious
psyche. This made differentiation complicated and bewildering, yet still essential for
individuation. I wondered if it would be possible that when Jung’s Is dialogued with each other,
he portrayed a consciousness decentralized into many selves and that instead of the singular I,
many still yet undifferentiated Is were at play. If my interpretation is sensible, Jung’s account
amounts to saying one part of my psyche spoke to another part of my psyche, but no particular I
had the privilege of being the I or the ego.
Jungian Persona and Multiplicity
To adequately address Jung’s theory of the ego complex as it relates to multiplicities in
conscious life, I also turned to Jung’s (1971) idea of the persona. The Jungian persona functions
as an individual’s adaptive mediator for the external world, a persona who plays roles and is
concerned with keeping up with social appearances by presenting an acceptable face to others.
Jung (1971) explained that any moderately acute psychological observer will be able to
demonstrate, without much difficulty, traces of character splitting in normal individuals.
One has only to observe a man rather closely, under varying conditions, to see that a
change from one milieu to another brings about a striking alteration of personality, and
on each occasion a clearly defined character emerges. (p. 465)
Jung asserted that multiplicity is an observable fact of daily living. Yet, he also discussed these
multiplicities spurred by different situations as more or less arbitrary collective masks that people
wear. Jung described the persona as often shallow, insecure, and superficial. If people were
sophisticated individuals, they would display more constancy in their behavior and be the same
person regardless of changing situations. Instead of being true individuals, Jung argued that
persona-driven people are molded by life circumstances.
Jung’s (2009) distinction between the chameleon and the lion in The Red Book directly
related to his comments on the persona-driven person as opposed to a true individual. He
presented the chameleon (i.e., an individual who is most concerned with protection and blending
with the environment) in a very similar fashion to the persona. He also presented the persona as
merely adapting to changing environments. His contrasting remarks on the lion, “who draws his
power from within himself” (p. 266), fit his theoretical emphasis in other writings on the terms
“individual” and “individuation.”
I therefore interpreted the typified persona as something to be overcome, a distraction
from individuation, and a signifier that a person succumbs to the possession of the collective or
the psychology of the masses. Hillman’s address to the Jungian persona suggested the concept
might mistakenly miss the images beyond the categorical term rather than engage those roles in
their essence and psychological dynamism. Hillman (1975) argued that “we sense these other
persons and call them roles . . . but can there be roles without persons to play them?” (p. 32).
This comment suggested there must be a deeper psychic expressiveness beyond shallow role
play. As I later discuss, although sometimes highlighting dynamics that apply to human
psychology, this relegation of expressive social multiplicities to a shallow persona may represent
an oversimplified judgment. In my view, the judgment does not adequately address multiplicities
of social behavior and their various motive forces, many of which are authentic to an individual’s
unique personality.
Jung on the Consciousness of Unconsciousness—A Relativity Quandary
In his essay “On the Nature of the Psyche,” Jung (1960/1975) granted that it is entirely
possible, if not probable, that what he calls the unconscious contains a consciousness of its own.
Indeed, archetypal or instinctual entities appear to him as having the quality of a certain
consciousness, volition, and teleology. Jung acknowledged the problems that this added to his
delineation between conscious and unconscious factors. If consciousness is in unconsciousness,
their meanings as differentiated entities can no longer be preserved. Because of this abstruse and
illusive question of consciousness, Jung presented consciousness in terms of gradients and
qualitative distinctions. He referred to complexes and archetypes as scintillae, or soul sparks,
which are seemingly less determined, dimly lit forms of consciousness. Relative to the ego
complex, Jung (1960/1975) labeled these archetypal luminosities as unconscious to the degree
they are yet unknown to ego consciousness. These unconscious consciousnesses have an archaic
disposition because they do not portray the brighter coherence of the ego complex. By using the
term coherence, I refer to the fact that Jung’s ego complex rests partly on the idea that it is a
center that holds consciousness together in a relatively homeostatic and predictable composition.
In contrast, Jung (1960/1975) maintained that these antiquated forms of consciousness (i.e., little
luminosities) are “as yet uncentered by a firmly knit ego complex” (p. 189). He supposed that
such archetypes and complexes may have sparks of consciousness within them but do not have
the more elaborate capacities of consciousness granted to ego consciousness.
However, Jung readily asserted the relativity of consciousness as such. He, therefore,
scaled a precarious conceptual ridge, providing the reader with gradient principles of
consciousness that are foundational to his psychology. He built problems of obscurity and
relativity into his conceptual model of consciousness by nesting the very issues that might
collapse his argument into his provisional landscape of the psyche. For example, he provided the
rationale for a categorical division between conscious and unconscious, even while maintaining
that these terms are somewhat fluid and cannot be pinned down (i.e., there is consciousness in
unconsciousness and vice versa). I found Jung to be thorough and complete as he mapped out the
meaning of consciousness for analytical psychology. Ultimately, his deliberate exploration of
consciousness led to an uncertainty about where unconsciousness ends and consciousness begins.
This ambiguity, despite Jung’s careful thinking, makes his claims on the ego concept more
readily questionable. The latent obscurities in Jung’s comments on the nature of consciousness
provide the opportunity for more research on subpersonalities and their relationship to conscious
processes.
Jung on Individuation
Jung (1959/1969) defined individuation as “the process by which a person becomes a
psychological ‘in-dividual,’ that is a separate indivisible unity or ‘whole’” (p. 275). This
definition entails tasking a person with the process of channeling diverse impulses inherent to the
psyche and integrating them in a meaningful fashion, thereby moving toward psychic wholeness
and more consciousness. Although the quest for wholeness does entail such a differentiation of
the self, this separating consciousness does not represent an isolating separateness. Rather, it
leads to an intrapsychic wholeness that opens the world to the psyche and the psyche to the world
in ways that facilitate meaningful connection (Jung, 1959/1978, 1960/1975). Therefore, in the
final analysis, individuation becomes an ultimate conscious unity that is partly enabled by the
process of differentiation. Moreover, individuation displays a person’s increasing capacity to
relate to the numinous in a meaningful manner, which makes it a religious quest (Jung,
1958/1969). The ego becomes relativized in the quest for psychic wholeness by humbly relating
to the Self archetype. This process resembles how a religious individual might surrender to their
creator through prayer and practice. Indeed, Jung (1958/1969) took religious matters as psychic
realities that he discovered by analyzing the projections humans make onto myths, dogmas,
rituals, and symbols.
This integrative process of individuation implies an original fragmentation, which
corroborates the previous review of multiplicity. To Jung (1954/1970), nothing guarantees an
individual will become a real personality and thus individuate; rather, this process highly depends
on the individual’s willingness to embrace suffering and carefully foster the seeds of latent
potential within. In a moment in time, the capacity of conscious attention cannot possibly contain
the whole self (Jung, 1954/1970). This may represent a vital reason why Jung theoretically
employed the ego to delineate the opposition between wholeness and the limits of perception,
awareness, and attention in each moment. I assumed this distinction involved an attempt to
reconcile problems of the part–whole relationship in psychology.
As traditionally conceived, Jung (1959/1978) defined the ego as dethroned for the self
through the individuation process, which means the ego complex begins relating to the whole
Self rather than its rather limited sense of identity. Accordingly, Jung explained oppositions
within the psyche are unified and realized in a greater source of being. Affects, images, and
compulsions, which once seemed irreconcilable, become gracefully stitched together in a
mandala-like fabric called wholeness, or the Self. However, Jung continued that the Self
archetype is ever-present, irrespective of conscious participation. Its cultivation into more
consciousness depends on the individual’s capacity to contend with the unknown terrors, trials,
and fruits of the unconscious psyche.
Individuation also demands a differentiation from the collective unconscious and the
psychology of the masses (Jung, 1971). The life of an individual must make the collective
unconscious, as an a priori set of archetypal tendencies and possibilities, unique. The individual
also differentiates themselves from the collective persona by making their own path through life,
irrespective of social pressures. Individuation represents a task for the second half of life (Jung,
1963/1970), after a person has adapted to social norms and standards to a satisfying degree
(Jung, 1971). Only then, Jung argued, can someone enter the interior dimensions of individuation
in a fruitful manner.
Jung (1971) defined individuation as a broadening of consciousness to include more of
the psyche. Jung’s (2009) personal quest for individuation, where he broadened the scope of
consciousness, provides one example of this and can be mildly apprehended in reviewing The
Red Book. Therein, he utilized his imaginal aptitude for exploring psychic multiplicity in a
remarkable series of dialogues and fantasies. Among the most notable qualities of his imaginal
documentation, the sheer dynamism of the autonomous personalities emerged. Each character
explored in The Red Book has their own perspective, feeling tone, and telos. This journey of
encountering multiple perspectives, which led Jung to comprehend individuation on a deeper
level, provides further evidence of the inextricable connectedness of the part–whole relationship
insofar as it pertains to the Jungian sensibility.
James Hillman and Multiple Centers of Consciousness
Archetypal psychology, defined as such by James Hillman, carries forward the spirit of
Jung’s phenomenological approach with less of the structural commitments inherent to Jungian
theory (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013). The psyche becomes much less systematized in
Hillman’s model; conceptual structures such as the unconscious, ego, shadow, anima, animus, or
complex, are less fixed, take on an imaginal fluidity, and are even outright discarded at times
(Hillman, (1962, 1975, Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013). Hillman and Shamdasani (2013)
elaborated: “Maybe the parts of Jung I fell for were those places that had to do with images, not
with the concepts” (p. 8). This statement aligns with Hillman’s phenomenological commitment
to the imaginal psyche and his skepticism toward reified ideas. Hillman (1979) articulated this
style clearly in relation to dream images. Without unnecessary conceptual baggage, he argued,
dream images have a self-inherent language and meaning of their own. Individuals only risk
diluting their potency by trying to tame them with an overly analytic approach. Therefore, his
phenomenological intentions and dispositions reside at the foundation of his approach to the
psyche.
However, Hillman (1975) retained a great deal of Jung’s insights in his work. By his own
admission, he owed the entire basis of archetypal insight, wherein a person might see through
activities and into underlying images or archetypes, to Jung’s foundational work. Still, the
archetypal psychology approach has distinguished itself from its Jungian forbears in many areas.
Regarding these departures, I thought it fair to say Hillman applied skillful elements of how Jung
thought rather than portraying a faithful adherence to what he thought. One example of this
appears in Hillman’s interpretation of Jungian complexes and what he infers they say about
consciousness.
Hillman (1983/2021) recapitulated Jung’s complex theory in stating that it “holds that
every personality is essentially multiple,” and when he asserted that “Multiple personality is
humanity in its natural condition” (p. 61). These statements imply there is something unnatural
about a single-self view of consciousness. Moreover, Hillman’s elaboration suggested a notably
different view of complexes from that within the traditional sphere of analytical psychology. He
further explained:
Consciousness is given with the various “partial” personalities. Rather than being
imagined as split-off fragments of the “I,” they are better reverted to the differentiated
models of earlier psychologies where the complexes would have been called souls,
daimones, genii, and other mythical-imaginal figures. (p. 62)
Here, Hillman differentiated archetypal psychology’s consciousness from the traditional Jungian
view of ego consciousness. Rather than postulating an ego complex that manages, relates to,
assimilates, or struggles with other complexes, consciousness now diffuses to a more global
state, spreading among imagistic faculties. To me, this had the effect of being very useful to a
conversation about subpersonalities as figures in consciousnesses rather than as strictly fringe
forms of sentience or unconscious complexes. Hillman (1975) also suggested that perhaps the
essence of reflective consciousness itself may be rooted in the anima, or soul, rather than the ego.
Thereby, the multiplicity of persons inherent to the psyche is imagined, perceived, and anima-ted
by the processes of soul.
Deeply related to this multicentered consciousness, Hillman (1975) shifted from
monotheistic to polytheistic psychological approaches, another area where he differentiated his
work from Jung’s. Remarking on psychic multiplicity, he stated that “polytheistic psychology
refers to the inherent dissociability of the psyche and the location of consciousness in multiple
figures and centers” (p. 26). Hillman implicitly contrasted these multiple forms of consciousness
with a monotheistic approach that might hold an ego as the prominent center of consciousness.
He rated polytheistic consciousness as a closer approximation to psychic reality. Hillman also
referred to these multiple figures in consciousness as persons or gods and claimed that modern
humans are so blind to the psychic persons that they relegate them to the unconscious rather than
seeing them as vital psychic forces and animating capacities proactively participating in life. I
wondered what the implications might be of this polytheistic consciousness. Accepting that
consciousness can pervade multiple centers clearly contradicts the idea that it contains only one
center, namely the ego complex. This idea suggested Hillman’s archetypal footwork might be a
natural dialogical partner in reassessing psychic multiplicity and individuation.
However, Hillman’s perspective presented challenges of its own, which I realized could
create tension within my topic. Giving the imaginal realm a superior ontological status, Hillman
(1975) warned against literalizing psychic figures and processes into humanistic forms.
Accordingly, the persons of the psyche transcend (or de-scend) contemporary anthropocentric
approaches to psychology, which stress the wellness, growth, or identity of the individual in their
contemporary human form. Therefore, Hillman would likely not see subpersonalities as mere
aspects of a whole human being because doing so would amount to literalizing. Rather, he
emphasized how a less important human consciousness partakes in a greater transcendent
pantheon of gods and goddesses with their own tragic and comedic myths and imaginal gestures.
Hillman did not mean this literally but as an imaginal description of psychic reality. He called
this process dehumanizing. The Hillman of Revisioning Psychology, no doubt, would warn
against humanizing subpersonalities.
Importantly, in his psychologizing sensibility, Hillman (1975) asked the question, Who?
This allowed readers to see into the person or god that drives whatever perspective or behavior
dominates each moment. In my understanding, archetypal psychologists have suggested an
image or series of images always drives experience. It is all too easy to take dominant styles of
consciousness for granted by letting their assumptions consume the foreground of experience
without seeing through to who drives them.
In his essay, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” Hillman (1983/2021) explained:
“polytheistic psychology obliges consciousness to circulate among a field of powers. Each God
has his due as each complex deserves respect in its own right” (p. 198). In addition to reaffirming
consciousness pervading multiple centers, this perspective elevated the stature and respect
conferred onto complexes and tied into Hillman’s criticisms of Jungian individuation.
Individuation resoundingly echoes monotheistic religions that organize complexity under the
authority of a single God. Hillman (1975) argued this is a psychologically misguided move,
defining it as a fantasy pretending to be the one and superior reality. According to archetypal
psychology, the more fruitful approach allows psychic images and persons to stand in their own
fullness without the need to adjust them to a unifying agenda.
I found Hillman’s criticisms of Jungian individuation valuable as well as possibly limited.
The value involved the fact he gave the differentiation of psychic images a priority, suggesting
individuals are less likely to miss nuances for the sake of an abstract ideal, and thereby may be
more psychologically astute. However, in my view, the limitation lies in the previously
mentioned fact that human beings are wholes, in the same way a tree or a dog is its own whole
(even as they have parts and are obviously contingent beings, relying on other factors). A person
would not talk of a tree strictly in terms of its branches, roots, bark, and leaves. Rather, they
would understand the tree as a whole being with those parts. As such, the status of humans as
whole beings represents an important layer of reality, especially in terms of living life and its
corollary functions. Later, I explore how unification or wholeness is likely not arbitrary when
dealing with human lives. Although giving each psychic person its due is a powerful insight, I
believe that humans are complex beings with many needs and self-aspects. Dialogue,
negotiation, and mediation (i.e., some form of individuation) between psychic persons represent
crucial factors for psychology scholars who value human lives.
Redfearn and Jungian Subpersonalities
Redfearn (1985, 1994) put the notion of subpersonalities in dialogue with Jungian
psychology. As it pertains to the Jungian sensibility, Redfearn wrote: “The I can wander around
one's Self in the same way as a traveler can wander around an allegorical or dream landscape” (p.
130). In this sense, the I becomes a mercurial and relational conduit for the expression and
realization of psychic persons. Redfearn elaborated on this by implying that any given
subpersonality might be the specific territory of the whole personality, which conscious attention
and focus inhabit at any given moment. In my view, taking this perspective seriously involves
seeing the larger Jungian Self as occupied by conscious subjectivity in different delimited
positions at different times. In this formulation, I noticed a similarity to Hillman’s work in that
many centers of consciousness exist that are animated through their particular imagistic
proclivity. However, Redfearn affirmed that although conscious attention can only occupy a
limited number of subpersonalities at a time, a greater whole Self exists.
Redfearn (1994) entered nuanced psychological territory in his exploration of what he
called the “I/not-I gateway.” The I/not-I gateway represents the mysterious process by which one
form of subjectivity fades into the background as another subjectivity enters the prominent center
of consciousness. In other words, the I/not-I gateway refers to the place where subpersonalities
switch out; one inhabits the I while the other recedes into the phenomenal psyche. The I at a
particular moment might feel other phenomenal aspects of the self as not-I, creating a fluid
psychic subject–object interchange.
To make sense of this claim, I considered the following example. I imagined a sinking
feeling in the gut that might be viewed from a phenomenal distance as the I of the moment
becomes aware of activities foreign to its own domain. In this scenario, one I is aware of an
object (i.e., a sinking feeling in the gut) impinging on its perceptual field. Yet, the I might more
closely encounter the territory of the not-I (i.e., the sinking feeling), and suddenly the sinking
feeling in the gut becomes a subjective first-person experience of dread. Thereby, dread and all
its subjective qualities now inhabit the I rather than the previous subjective position that was
aware of the sinking feeling. This example illustrates the totality of the Jungian Self as it is
experienced subjectively and objectively, depending on the psyche’s moment-to-moment sense
of I and not-I. Redfearn (1994) elaborated on this phenomenon in the following passage: There
can obviously be all kinds of relationships between the I and not-I (me, thou, other, body,
unconscious, internal world and its contained figures, and so on), depending on which part of
ourselves (subpersonalities) are ‘possessing’ or controlling the I and the not-I respectively. (p.
289)
This elaboration secures an understanding that Redfearn’s model of I/not-I is one of
shifting subpersonalities, and the I is only a formal, mobile, and permeable vessel for conscious
subjectivity. Accordingly, this process aligns closely with the archetypal image of the Greek god
Hermes, who guides movement between worlds. His nature resembles the fluidity at the I/not-I
gateway (Redfearn, 1994). The hermetic god of the gateway affirms the mercurial nature of
subjective experience and presents a fluid I. In my estimation, this position closely corresponds
with Jung’s (1963/1970) comments on the ego being the “relatively constant personification of
the unconscious” (p. 107). Redfearn’s (1994) considerations open up a dialogue about
subpersonalities and the plasticity of consciousness and its contents contrasted with a traditional
ego conception within Jungian psychology. Furthermore, Redfearn’s I/not-I gateway proposition
provides an interesting distinction in the exploration between individuation and multiplicity and
may be relevant to further sections.
Literature Review Part 2—Other Psychological Approaches to Multiplicity
Gestalt Therapy
In the 1950s, seminal gestalt therapists Frederick S. Perls (founder), Ralph Hefferline,
and Paul Goodman began to explore a variegated psychic landscape, paying close attention to
moment-to-moment experience and its multiplicity. Perls et al. (1954/1994) asserted the
experience of being a conscious self represents a shifting attentional capacity that results from
the contact boundary experience. The contact boundary refers to where the organism (i.e.,
person) meets a life experience (i.e., environment), and in this space, the attention demanded by
an environmental context attracts a specific focus and creates an emergent phenomenon of
present-moment selfhood—not to be confused with the Jungian Self.
Naturally, certain qualities of consciousness dominate a given moment. Perls et al.
(1954/1994) claimed that “spontaneous dominances are judgments of what is important in the
occasion. They are not adequate evaluations, but they are basic evidence of a hierarchy of needs
in the present situation” (p. 52). This statement indicated that the mercurial nature of conscious
experience results from an emerging relationship with an individual’s fluctuating circumstances,
born out of the multidimensional capacity to adapt to circumstance. However, this experience
can also create dichotomies. The authors explained that when the psyche brings into attention a
salient figure of experience, there is a tendency for conflict to emerge, for something to feel
incomplete, dull, frustrated, or otherwise dissatisfying. This generates a picture of psychic
multiplicities in experience. For instance, as I bring my focus to writing these words, the relevant
features of this phenomenology of writing become dominant in my conscious experience.
Importantly, should my consciousness involve conflicts in the hierarchy of needs, such as
insecurity that dulls the vibrancy of my writing, the present situation would feel incomplete. One
part of me feels inadequate, and another strives for creative expression. I can satisfy neither urge
as long as they both contradict my ability to complete the present situation and fully engage in
the moment. To address situations such as these, Perls (1969) created distinctions like top-dog–
underdog to help his patients facilitate the inner conflict between the victimized part of them and
the perpetrator or dominating aggressor part of them.
In a typical session with Perls, an individual might exercise these parts by using two
chairs and switching back and forth between them, dialoguing by embodying the two selves. I
found top-dog–underdog to be an important yet rudimentary treatment of multiple selves. The
notion crams complex and nuanced psychic multiplicity into a simple distinction: aggressor and
victim. Still, I found it a useful distinction that encapsulates some psychic processes. Moreover, I
appreciated how this nascent model showed how multiplicity represented a robust feature for
seminal gestalt therapists.
Generally speaking, these pioneering gestalt therapists encouraged people to bring
psychic situations to completeness through careful awareness and by personifying psychic
content through creative present-moment experimentation (Perls et al., 1954/1994). I suspected
the presence of an individuation impulse here because creatively processing diffuse psychic urges
purportedly leads to a sense of wholeness in the moment. In my view, successors of the original
gestalt therapists have made further contributions to improve on the original approach.
A later gestalt therapist, Polster (1995), adopted a more sophisticated view of multiplicity
when he claimed there are many selves in his book Population of Selves. According to Polster,
the gestalt therapist must bring these selves into brighter awareness by naming them and
proceeding with experimentation and dialogue. I saw how this complimented the early gestalt
work by identifying conflicts and agendas of differing selves and then using that as fertile ground
for therapeutic work. I saw how this idea might move closer to a view of multiplicity that
corresponds with individuation’s goal of wholeness. Given the earlier review on Jung, early
gestalt therapy, and Polster, I now turn to Strachan, who draws from all three sources and others
in his theoretical proposition.
Self/Soul/Spirit
In his self/soul/spirit model, Strachan (2011b) claimed self as the collection of an
individual’s subpersonalities, soul as life force and essence, and spirit as the ineffable mystery
beyond cognition and the spiritual seeking of humankind. Some of the key ideas of this model
played a crucial role in developing the arguments in this dissertation. Importantly, in the
self/soul/spirit model of human development, Strachan focused on nature and nurture rather than
nature or nurture. Stemming from a complex dynamic between genetic proclivities, protein
interactions, and life experience, parts of the self (i.e., subpersonalities) develop and find their
expressive niche in an individual’s life. Strachan elaborated on this multiplicity of self in writing,
“self comprises a complex set of subparts that form a gestalt; it can have many reactions to life
situations, during which one or another part may voice a thought or take action, directing the
individual proactively or reactively” (p. 3). Strachan defined self as a multidimensional entity
with many aspects, all of which are quite capable of individual perspective and driving behavior.
There existed in this literature an interchangeable use of the words “subpersonalities” and
“parts.” I found that the use of subpersonalities lent itself to an emphasis on the semiautonomy
inherent to multiplicity, although the term parts offered the advantage of emphasizing the whole
constitution of a self that has such parts.
Abandoning Pathology
Strachan’s (2011b) therapeutic approach to naming and working with parts of the self is
entirely nonpathological. Faithful to the declared aphorism, “it is what it is, it’s what you do with
it and how you work with it that’s key” (p. 19), Strachan saw no reason to ascribe the disordered
language of a psychopathology model to people’s psychic lives.
Strachan (2011a) traced the history of psychology’s pathological inferences to
unsupported assumptions made near the turn of the 19th century, beginning with the German
psychiatrist Herman Emminghaus. Emminghaus spurred developmental psychopathology.
Thereafter, Freud’s proposition on the developmental origins of pathology came to dominate.
Strachan added that Freudian psychology provided one example of how psychopathology fell
into the hands of environmental determinism. According to Strachan, Freud and his students used
developmental presuppositions and reified the psychiatric classification of certain behaviors as
abnormal, sick, disturbed, disordered, and diseased.
Strachan (2011a) reassessed this history and claimed these pathology labels were largely
based on fallacious environmentally deterministic models of human development. Moreover,
psychopathological models have tended to arbitrarily reify their claims of what constitutes
normal versus abnormal psychology. Mental illness, for the self/soul/spirit/model, represents a
dated construct designed by a power consensus about what constitutes acceptable, normal,
healthy, or valuable behavior that is then presented as unquestioned fact. Strachan revealed the
problem that the concept of normal itself, with all its corollary adjudications, represents a cultural
designation.
The Issue of the APA’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual
The pathological approach to psyche gave birth to the first iteration of the Diagnostic
Statistical Manual (DSM-1) in 1952 (Strachan, 2011a). Strachan (2011a) asserted this publication
only invigorated the issue of assumptive labeling because it lacked empirical validity and
continued to propagate a flawed model of abnormality. As evidence that the DSM reified stated
norms and espoused value judgments about behavior, Strachan invited readers to consider that
homosexuality was a diagnosable mental disorder in the 1970s, only to be removed and then
resubmitted as ego-dystonic homosexuality in 1980. Strachan explained the diagnosis was later
abolished altogether. In another example, Kecmanovic (2021) announced more recently that the
DSM-5 added prolonged grief disorder to its list of mental disorders. In my view, this implies
grieving is only acceptable to a certain degree and under an arbitrarily decided time frame. This
resembles many other DSM labels discussed later that are predesignated by professional
consensus and based purely on symptomatology, which then must fit into a category. This
categorization immediately closes down lines of inquiry and self-discovery for the sake of an
inflexible label. This process of labeling illustrates some of the issues Strachan identified with
the arbitrary judgments that come out of a pathologically oriented model of psychology.
Strachan (2011a) explained pathological models were originally designed through
conjecture about failures or successes in human developmental sequences and their subsequent
symptomatic outcomes. In large part, adhering to an overwrought blank slate version of the
psyche sustains the models, creating a one-sided approach to psychology that genetic research
and comprehensive reasoning do not support. Speculative environmentally determined models of
psychopathology do not correspond with the current scientific knowledge that no two human
beings are genetically alike and that differences in genes do indeed contribute to differences in
personality. Strachan concluded:
There is no such thing as normal and abnormal. Given also that each person is genetically
individualized, nomothetic testing—evaluation for the sake of forming clusters of
behavior that are then converted into diagnostic labels based on the faulty conceptual
framework of psychopathology—only confounds the process of explaining human
behavior. (p. 18)
Essentially, Strachan portrayed normal and abnormal as cultural constructs that are retroactively
applied to explain a person’s personality, life issues, states of being, and behavior.
Robert Plomin (2018), a prominent researcher in behavioral genetics, whose work on
psychic multiplicity I discuss later, echoed some of Strachan’s sentiments in a chapter called
“Abnormal is Normal.” Plomin expressed that because personality traits fall on dimensional
spectrums, the idea of psychiatric disorders is flawed.
Moreover, in 2013, Thomas Insel, who at the time of this statement served as the director
of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), declared:
While DSM has been described as a ‘bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary,
creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM
has been ‘reliability’—each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the
same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. (para. 2)
Insel (2013) explained that a diagnostic criterion based on symptoms does not rigorously
establish an underlying cause in any sense that could be substantiating enough to qualify the
categorical disorders created. Problematically, this gives no real insight into people’s unique
issues. Instead, Insel advocates for a model of diagnostic criteria that adheres to the principles of
scientific inquiry, incorporating genetics and other biomarkers to establish predispositions and
dimensions of functionality or dysfunctionality. Ghaemi (2018) asserted: “In short, the greatest
obstacle to scientific progress is, and has been, the DSM system of diagnosis,” and the “DSM-5
is based on unscientific definitions which the profession’s leadership refuses to change based on
scientific research” (p. 301). This observation that the DSM lacks scientific credibility, even as it
posits categories as if they are valid, has become a well-established observation among many in
the medical research community (Strachan, 2011a). Finally, the NIMH (2024) claimed the
problem of unique individuals being treated with a symptom-based model of diagnosis like the
DSM’s is that such individuals can differ and still receive a diagnosis for the same disorder based
on only a small number of symptomatic correlations.
A New Dimensional Approach to Human Functionality
The subtle issue here involves the idea that criticism of the DSM may leave the
impression that conceptually mapping the territory representing human function or dysfunction
amounts to wasted energy. Contrarily, I do not believe this to be a valid conclusion. Instead, I
believe critics demand a more complex approach, as Strachan (2011a) asserted:
Biology is the key for psychiatry; moving from brain disease to genetic determinants is a
small move, providing psychiatry finds new nomenclature for describing their patients on
a functional, as opposed to psychopathological, level. (p. 21)
This passage revealed the thrust of Strachan’s major point: outmoded versions of pathology
diagnosis based on ideologies about environmental determinants and social consensus do not
meet the demands of human complexity. Genetic and epigenetic research has unveiled a much
more complex model of human psychology that is based on the adaptive capacity to function in
life. Where psychologists determine a client lacks functionality, they may have a more complex
understanding that dysfunctional psychological set by understanding principles of genetics,
epigenetics, and conscious experiences.
Although Insel’s (2013) comments reinforced the notion that the DSM lacks validity, that
does not invalidate the enterprise of finding working models for understanding human behavior
and life issues. Indeed, he concluded that more data must be collected to establish a wide array of
biomarkers that include genetics and physio-circuitry. Perhaps Strachan (2011a) intended this
when he called for a new nomenclature.
Since Insel’s (2013) groundbreaking commentary, NIMH (2024) has continued to
develop what they call the research domain criteria (RDoC). The RDoC model includes genetics,
development, environment, and impactful cognitive and conscious experiences that affect
psychology. Whereas the DSM relies on distinct labeling categories based on symptomatic
phenomenology, the RDoC outlines a new research approach that supports an understanding of
“varying degrees of dysfunction in psychological/biological systems” (NIMH, 2024, para. 2.).
This criterion emphasized the importance of a dimensional approach to human psychology and
diagnosis. However, the NIMH has problematically failed to incorporate its work into clinical
settings and has instead focused on psychobiological research (Ghaemi, 2018). The NIMH
(2024) openly acknowledged and embraced this limitation on its website. Although the
acknowledgment does not invalidate the NIMH’s criticisms of the DSM, it leaves many
clinicians without well-established alternatives.
For those committed to the DSM model, new research has shown that a symptom-based
approach that reverts to stagnant categories cannot be substantiated and leads to contrived
diagnoses. Health scientists, neuroscientists, and psychologists Hakak-Zargar et al. (2022)
explained the benefits of the RDoC model over the DSM, writing “that the DSM is categorical in
its approach to psychiatric disorders to the point of understating the intersectionality between
concomitant disorders, and that the DSM focuses mainly on clinical features” (p. 1). A
dimensional approach confers a fluid dynamic to human functioning that behooves researchers
and clinicians as it honors the complex interplay between genes, neurocircuits, consciousness,
and environmental factors (Hakak-Zargar et al., 2022). This approach corresponds well with
Plomin’s (2018) observation that what is commonly referred to as a distinct disorder is not really
contained within a stark category; rather, it is always on a spectrum.
This observation lent itself well to some of Jung’s earlier reviewed ideas about liminality
and psychic dispositions. The psyche has the hermetic ability to shift perspectives and connect
with other corresponding proclivities and cannot be easily captured in fixed categories. The
psyche is dynamic. In my view, some people who struggle with severe intrapsychic issues
plausibly do so in part because they already impose categorical limitations on themselves and are
too identified with certain subpersonalities (e.g., I am always so depressed; I am just a depressed
person). Therefore, the issue of giving such a person a fixed categorical diagnosis based on
symptoms may only validate their presuppositions. Jung’s (1971) comments on the issue of
psychic one-sidedness may prove helpful here, as he emphasized the importance of developing
the hermetic capacity to traverse the psyche more fluidly without coagulating into fixed psychic
value positions. Moreover, because every individual has unique genetic predispositions and
developmental processes, every individual resides somewhere on every psychodynamic spectrum
imaginable. Plomin (2018) conveyed his argument as follows: “This genetic research leads to a
momentous conclusion,” which is,
There is no disorder—just the extremes of quantitative dimensions. People differ in how
depressed they are, how much alcohol they consume and how well they read, but these
problems are part of the normal distribution. A shift in vocabulary is needed so that we
talk about “dimensions” rather than “disorders.” (p. 61)
If all psychological traits fall on a continuum, then categories of normal and abnormal
have no meaning. Given the unique individual and their interactions with a corresponding
environment, they are idiosyncratic and may be functional or dysfunctional depending on the
layered context within which they are embedded. Plomin’s (2018) comments, in conjunction with
the proposed RDoC nature versus nurture research commitments, fit well within the thematic
research direction of this dissertation. I prefer the term “functionality,” which spans the ability to
adapt to an individual’s intrapsychic situation and biopsychosocial environment. Moreover,
functionality can be claimed relative to the distinct epistemic valences of subpersonalities.
Chapters 4 and 5 traverse this concept more explicitly, and in Chapter 5, I discuss a proposed
working model of functionality that fits within this dissertation’s theoretical postulates on
psychic multiplicity.
Although the RDoC approach still sometimes reverts to the language of disorders, the
approach implies a reliance on a biopsychosocial spectrum and not on fixed categories such as
those of the DSM. Although I much prefer to think of human psychology as a multilayered
spectrum of functionality absent terminology such as “disorder,” the choice of the term disorder
or mental illness does not invalidate underlying research designs. I understand those designs are
indeed dimensional and based on functionality. The NIMH (2024) attested that clinical
definitions of a disorder are relatively superficial, adding that “To understand the full spectrum of
mental health and illness, it is important to adopt dimensional conceptualizations” (para. 10). As
mentioned, such dimensional conceptualizations span across genetics, neuroscience,
developmental processes, and environmental factors. Therefore, for the reader who is sensitive to
the importance of continuing to apply functionally diagnostic approaches to the psyche in clinical
and research settings, the dimensional approach—even while not fully clinically incorporated yet
—appears to maintain that intention with more scientific rigor and honoring of individual
uniqueness.
Self/Soul/Spirit as a Phenomenological and Scientific Psychology
Strachan’s (2011a) approach to psychology involved a nuanced method in which he
incorporated nature and nurture interactions to understand human experience as based on
self/soul-defined functionality and personally meaningful choices. Like the proposed RDoC
research approach, self/soul/spirit represents a descriptive and phenomenological psychology
with a foundational understanding of genetic predispositions, neurology, and phenotypic
expressions (i.e., manifested characteristics). A descriptive and phenomenological approach to
the psyche allows an individual to discover the parts of who they are (e.g., depressed, creative,
aroused, inquisitive, hostile) and to explore them for who and what they are rather than view
them from a preordained categorical cluster. The scientific rigor adds a deeper understanding of
how certain predispositions lend themselves to client issues and uniqueness, as well as their
relative plasticity in terms of the ability to change and become. The individual then pursues any
changes to behavior, goals for personal growth, or healing processes on that individualized basis.
For self/soul/spirit, sound therapy cannot hinge on the values of the culture or the category of a
diagnosis; rather, the individual’s personal uniqueness and orientation to their own values must
be taken up afresh (Strachan, 2011b). Depending on what cultural context an individual lives in,
they may implicitly accept or reject collective values or institutionalized norms through action or
explicitly accept or reject them through enthusiasm or repudiation. Furthermore, they may even
choose to reinvent their personal values through the process of therapy and self-discovery.
Therefore, although human beings often encounter various intrapsychic and interpersonal life
issues, they can process and work through them in a powerful way without undignified labels
that designate something as a disorder (Strachan, 2011a). Finally, given the importance of
consciousness and soul that I will review in a later section, Strachan (2011b) posited that
individuals need not be at the mercy of their predispositions but may direct them proactively.
This excursion into self/soul/spirit’s relationship to the system and language of mental
disorders matters to this discussion because I adhere to its reasoning when discussing psychic
multiplicity. I also adhere to the notion that the psyche is always speaking from a perspective and
that a given perspective does not denote universal truth, nor does it imply a lack of meaningful
validity just because it is not universal. Moreover, I honor the biopsychosocial notion that unique
individuals do not fit into a nomothetic approach to self-understanding and must start with an
understanding of that very uniqueness. Having contrasted this approach with others, I turn back
to the thrust of the model.
In principle and in practice, Strachan (2011b) based his therapeutic process on being
authentic to who a person is; that is to say, authentic to what they brought into the world
genetically; how they have personally lived thus far, including major events, relationships,
transitions, life-issues, and general lifestyle; and how they want to proceed in a creative,
selfresponsible, and personal manner as an individuating soul. Strachan summarized his views on
the therapeutic process as follows:
Psychologists must offer their clients ways to understand who they are, and facilitate
therapeutic processes in a manner that increases their clients’ choices and personal power
to direct their lives in ways that bring about a sense of purpose and meaning. As
psychologists, we must get a grip! We don’t cure or even make our clients better. The
growth/healing process is an inside job. (p. 23)
This passage outlines the process of personal transformation as one that relies deeply on
the unique individual and their innate capacity to heal, grow, and become. This unique capacity
evolves from the complex subpersonalities that make up who a person is and their soul, which is
encouraged to make choices about what to do with those facts. Jung (2009) showed that he
shared this commitment to the power within when he said, “The way is within us, but not in
Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life” (p. 125). Jung
wrote these words in the context of his personal transformations explored in The Red Book,
portraying his deep belief in the power of the Self archetype and his devotion to individuation.
Positing the self as a collection of parts that form a gestalt, Strachan (2011b) cited Jung
and drew a comparison to his exploration of mandalas. The self/soul/spirit model charges the
human soul with the task of living a soul-directed life, where the soul directs the subpersonalities
to become intentional manifestations rather than unreflective impulses and default psychological
states. Individuals perform this work by naming the subpersonalities, utilizing gestalt exercises,
facilitating creative dialogue between subpersonalities themselves and between subpersonalities
and soul, and continuing to seek the most meaningful expression of the individual’s unique
multiplicity. Individuals can access the soul (i.e., the life force or pure energy of being) through
introspective techniques, spontaneous epiphanies, and a continually developed sense of
connection to their innermost being. Strachan saw the life force as also inextricably connected to
consciousness, which makes the soul the basis of conscious experience.
According to Strachan (2011b), the scientific method cannot prove or disprove the soul,
but many ways exist to consider its reality. Phenomenologically speaking, individuals encounter
the soul through lived experience, where they feel an inexplicable sense of connection to their
core or essence. Furthermore, in biological terms, Strachan said the soul might be considered the
“sum total of our chemical and electrical activities, a gestalt of all neurophysiological and
biological components” (p. 5). However, soul is not reducible to sensory functions, and it evades
simple measurements. Perhaps it is more appropriate to understand it as a consummate life-force
that transcends modern capacities for a thorough intellectual grasp (Strachan, 2011b). Jung
(1960/1969) regarded the soul and its implicit union with the body as an “unknowable living
being, concerning the ultimate nature of which nothing can be said except that it vaguely
expresses the quintessence of ‘life’” (p. 326). As a life essence that cannot be grasped in its
fullness but is nevertheless persistent in its reality, Jung’s views on the soul resemble those
espoused by Strachan (2011b) in the self/soul/spirit model.
As Strachan (2011b) made apparent, soul does not necessarily only apply to an
immaterial, metaphysical substrate through which reincarnation, eternal life, or other spiritual
phenomena may occur. Rather, it comes with the package of life in all its biological
manifestations. Where life exists, so does the soul or life force (i.e., the dynamic energy of
being). Strachan openly considered whether the soul energy could detach itself from a body and
move in the universe as an independent energy field but offered no definitive answer to the
question. However, the soul enables a connection to the universe and, thereby, spiritual seeking
and meaning. Ultimately, the self/soul/spirit model addresses the question of how individuation
occurs by postulating the soul as a mediator and intentional agent that must learn to meaningfully
reconcile the persistent experience of multiplicity. Thereby, the soul increases the conscious and
intentional manifestation of the whole self.
John Rowan and I-positions
Although Strachan (2011b) viewed subpersonalities as parts of the self that have an
ongoing process and identity of their own, Rowan (1990) offered a slightly different view.
Rowan originally preferred subpersonalities as an expression to describe psychic multiplicity, but
he shifted to the term “I-positions” in his book Personification (2010). Rowan argued against
making the mistake of reifying psychic processes as things, which is why he abandoned the term
subpersonalities. Declaring that “the meaning is in the movement” (p. 120), Rowan cultivated a
sense of flexible and dynamic pragmatism in the process of using multiplicity in counseling. For
Rowan, I-positions allow therapeutically useful processes to emerge, but he warned against
taking them literally. As such, he did not convey the psyche as a thing or series of things but as a
process of moment-to-moment dynamics best described by fluctuating I-positions, which he
defined as differing perspectives, feelings, and voices within the psyche. Rowan further
explained: “These ‘I-positions’ are not things we invent or choose. Rather do we discover and
work with them as a result of following the normal process of psycho-therapy, where we take
current incidents and uncover the hidden meanings behind them” (p. 48). Rowan’s assertion that
individuals cannot choose their I-positions resembles Jung’s explication of the autonomous
nature of archetypes and complexes, as well as his thinking on the unconscious.
Rowan (2010) left me with the impression that I-positions serve as a lens through which
to view the psyche and a useful tool to apply in therapy, but not as a construct that is necessarily
real or enduring. From my perspective, he may excessively purport the amorphous fluidity of the
psyche. He wrote as if I-positions encompass a moment-to-moment flavor and hold no
underlying structure or essence. Insofar as one can identify unique temperamental and
characterological inclinations in their biographically observed experience, I believe it is safe to
allow for a term like subpersonalities and name those tendencies. Human beings do not exhibit
the propensity of being all together unpredictable and erratic as personalities, but instead, as Jung
(1960/1969) argued, portray definite characteristics from birth onward. To know that creative
people tend toward creativity or that athletes tend toward athletics suggests nothing more than
that people have a unique nature, however it may be nurtured. I review more evidence for rooting
psychic multiplicity in nature in further pages.
Rowan’s (2010) focus on fluidity might lack consideration of the selves that individuals
carry with them through life. All this does not suggest that subpersonalities cannot change
behavioral expression or perceptive assimilation, but I do contend that they have a dispositional
leaning. However, I do not disregard Rowan’s insight. His focus on processes rather than things
represents a therapeutic invention of the utmost significance. After all, I believe many people can
say they became so attached to a label or category that they forgot to pay attention to the
presentmoment phenomenon of actual experience.
Dialogical Self Theory
Rowan’s (2011a) movement toward I-positions and away from subpersonalities largely
grew from his encounter with DST. Psychologist Hubert Hermans founded DST, in which he
defined the self as a dialogical entity with a fluctuating composition that extended into space and
time. The self can implicitly or explicitly enter dialogue with itself by taking up differing
Ipositions outlined by Rowan. However, Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010) pointed out that
sometimes the self is also monological, which means one I-position might overpower the others
and stifle dialogical processes. The dialogical self can also run into the issues of being in an
Iprison where one I-position consumes experience, and the self feels stuck in that perspective.
Depression provides an example of this conundrum. In order to resolve this issue, another
Iposition must enter into dialogue to move psychic energy. This concept contributes to the
discussion of working through life struggles from a multiple-self perspective.
The dialogical interplay of the self simultaneously represents a reality of the psyche and
an ideal to strive toward. I-positions function intrinsically in the diverse landscape of human
experience, if only individuals realized this phenomenon. Moreover, the dialogical self partakes
in two primary movements: centering and decentering. According to Hermans and Thorsten
Gieser (2012),
The I, subjected to changes in time and space, is intrinsically involved in a process of
positioning and is distributed by a wide variety of existing, new and possible positions
(decentring movements). I -positions have their relative autonomy in the self, have their
own specific history, and show different developmental pathways. At the same time, the I
appropriates or owns some of them and rejects or disowns others (centring movements).
Those that are appropriated are experienced as “mine” and as “belonging to myself” and,
as a consequence, they add to the coherence and continuity in the self. (p. 25)
The dialogical self then constantly positions, coagulates, repositions, and counterpositions
as it moves through time. It has the character of using dialogue to answer the questions of living
that the self always poses itself, lived experience, and the world (Hermans & Hermans-
Konopka, 2011).
Unity and Multiplicity
Hermans and Hermans-Kenopka (2010) asserted that DST theorists take up the
potentially tricky dichotomy of unity and multiplicity and claim to have solved it in part by the
very use of the term I-positions. The I serves as the constant unity that occupies diverse positions
so that the individual can say such things as “I as father,” “I as dog lover,” “I as worker,” or “I as
athlete.” The constant across these images involves the I that the speaker purportedly occupies,
which arguably nests multiplicity within unity and consistency because the I-position and the
whole self are always somewhat present together. However, I think a distinction worth parsing is
whether a nebulous I runs around taking different perspectives, or if different positions are
themselves Is. I believe the latter view is viable, which will be relevant to later discussion.
Another way DST theorists have addressed multiplicity and unity can be seen in the
statement, “dialogical self theory is focused on the self as an agentic and original source of
meaning production” (Hermans & Hermans-Kenopka, 2010, p. 11). In this way, Hermans and
Hermans-Kenopka (2010) proposed dialogical intrapsychic engagement between I-positions as
an agentic process of meaning-making that allows the self to transcend previous dichotomies at
higher levels of complexity. The possibility also exists for a third position, where two I-positions
reach a conflict resolution that creates a new perspective. Yet, another option involves becoming
aware of I-positions, enabling metapositions to become available, where the dialogical self sees
its I-positions through the process of self-reflection. Furthermore, promoter positions take up the
task of helping the I-positions in the dialogical self develop and actualize through the course of
time. In my estimation, these developments imply a desire for some level of individuation, at
least in the sense of unifying opposites and finding meaning and holism.
However, in an essay discussing the works of Jung in comparison to DST, psychologist
Jones et al. (2011a) pointed out that contrary to Jungian individuation, DST offers a more
interpersonal approach. Jones et al. saw the dialogical self not as an individualistic entity but as a
sociospatially extended network of I-positions. DST theorists have asserted that Jung’s approach
is far too individualistic and, therefore, overemphasizes projection as the mechanism of an
enclosed self rather than beholding the dialogical emergence of psychic phenomena in the social
world. This social aspect of DST “refers to the increasing multiplicity of collective voices that
create interfaces, not only in society at large, but also in the micro-society of the self” (Jones et
al., 2011, p. 14). Because collective multiplicity morphs into personal multiplicity society and
self then are not distinct entities in which something like Jungian individuation is available.
A Sociospatially Extended Self
Hermans and Hermans-Kenopka (2010) contrasted their view of the sociospatially
extended self with the cartesian self, which they defined as the ego/self as an isolated nonspatial
thinking thing. The authors further explained how intrapsychic layers and dialogical processes of
I-positions gradually extend into the external world. This explanation implies the self spatially
extends beyond the confines of the body. The authors proposed that the outer edges of the psyche
expand further toward social and cultural layers, which contain I-positions in their own right. At
the outer layers, individuals experience I-positions as the other (e.g., my mother, my teacher, my
friend, the schoolhouse, the tree, the lake). Hermans and Hermans-Kenopka differentiated these
extended social I-positions by terming them external and the inner layers as internal. The way
they presented boundaries between these layers appeared permeable and fluid. They offered no
defined point where the self ends and the other begins. Self-extensions might involve the
interpenetration of the world and the individual into each other. Accordingly, self and other create
a dialogical feedback loop.
However, Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010) emphasized the reality of actual
others, which is important for their ethical understanding of dialogue and the social distribution
of power. They asserted that “because the self of the actual other is, in principle, as
multipositioned or multi-voiced as one’s own self, the other can potentially be interiorized as
more than one position in the self” (p. 198). In other words, the multiplicity of actual others
interfaces with the individual’s own multiplicity in ways that new I-positions can be inculcated. I
interpreted this to mean the psychological person is a dialogical self; the dialogical self is a
permeable multivocal entity that extends into culture as it assimilates and takes up I-positions,
and other persons are psycho-physical others in their own right who are also dialogical and
perform the same functions. This creates the dialogical network of the sociospatially extended
self.
Cultural Considerations of the Dialogical Self
Hermans and Hermans-Kanopka (2010) asserted the modern-day phenomenon of
increasing globalization is tantamount to complexifying relations between intra- and
interpersonal I-positions. The authors saw the phenomena of the intrapsychic other as an aspect
of the extended self, foreign to a presently occupied I-position. Ethically speaking, they
distinguish between the other as a reality of different I-positions experiencing each other and the
phenomenon of othering, where people or groups of people castigate and exclude minorities or
different identities as inferior.
Making a focused effort to include cultural considerations in their text, Hermans and
Hermans-Konopka (2010) identified three strands of cultural influence that speak through the
dialogical self. Traditional cultural voices emphasize sanctity, morality, purity, authority, and
dogma. Modern cultural positions emphasize individuality, liberty, unity of self, the individual
versus the other, universal truth, and post-Enlightenment rational values. The postmodern
Iposition challenges unity and universal claims; it emphasizes relativity, enshrines fragmentation,
and focuses on differences. Ultimately, dialogical self-theorists aim to transcend the confines of
these three enculturated incarnations while also incorporating their valuable dialogical
positioning. This objective represents another area where DST has an individuating tendency,
which is not about the individual per se but a transindividualistic emergence of meaningful and
dialogical unity. The authors claimed the dialogical self to be the transcendent fourth level that
integrates and expands on the positioning of its traditional, modern, and postmodern forbears. I
wondered if the authors were aware that Jung (1959/1978) interpreted the number four as a
symbol of individuation. Importantly, Hermans and Hermans-Konopka regarded psychic
multiplicity as a perennial human attribute. However, they believed forces of globalization have
made multiplicity exponentially relevant and, therefore, asserted it is necessary to become
sophisticated in dialogical practice. Persons with a multivoiced toolkit will better deal with a
globalizing society.
A Dialogue With Dialogical Self Theory
Given its social emphasis, the boundaries of individual selfhood blur considerably in
DST. For example, although persons with their own I-positions do exist, cultural group identities
can also speak through the self as if they have their own I-positions (Hermans,
HermansKonopka, 2010). In this way, DST theorists secure their perspective on the self as a
highly mercurial entity with permeated intra- and interpsychic boundaries. I thought this idea
hinged on the premise that culture influences people and creates psychic positioning within them.
Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010) explained the developmental origins of this dialogical
self, which includes imitation, imagination, provocation, and roleplay. I noticed that the authors
heavily emphasized socialization. These factors should facilitate the development of positioning
and counterpositioning within the dialogical self throughout the lifespan. Arguably, when
considering other sources in the literature review, DST theorists may not sufficiently account for
constitutional temperament differences in their developmental theory. Although the authors do
credit the study of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience with establishing that there are
universal biological and social constraints on the degree to which I-positions can develop and
change, they do not include the fact that humans are also biologically unique. Therefore, DST’s
extended sociopsychic postulations may present issues when compared to those in other
reviewed literature.
Additionally, DST might not adequately address the structural components of how the
self could allow for external voices to possess consciousness via I-positions. As a
counterexample, Redfearn (1985) pointed out that “one can only introject what one is in the first
place, in an important sense” (p. 10). He made a convincing argument that the personality can
only incorporate what is innately within its capacity. Strachan (2020) made a similar argument
for a principle he called “attraction and connection,” in which he asserted there is no
unidirectional influence but only the unique interactions of distinct entities that create emerging
psychic factors. I found Redfearn and Strachan’s arguments sensible because the moment I
ascribed any constitutional structure to the psyche whatsoever, it followed that it would interact
with the world based on given tendencies. Whatever emerges through the process of development
will then likely result from bi-directional interactions between the self and its contextual
relations. The psyche responds accordingly to the parameters and contexts of a given
environment. I further substantiate these claims in a later section on evolutionary psychology and
behavioral genetics.
In essence, the position of DST theorists on cultural voices speaking through the mouth of
a person requires a belief that the psyche’s unique constitution is irrelevant or null regarding the
effect of cultural and social dynamics on I-positions, a viewpoint I found unconvincing. Jung
(1959/1969) articulated the problem well:
It is in my view a great mistake to suppose the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula
rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. In so far as the child is born with a
differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it
meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones,
and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception.
(p. 66)
Although Jung (1959/1969) maintained a universal substructure of archetypes, in the
above passage, he took care to point out that ontogenetic factors also exist that predispose the
human personality and that these will affect downstream behavior in significant ways. This line
of thinking aligned with Jung’s (1954/1970) work as he emphasized the importance of the unique
individual as the ultimate foundation for psychology and the realization of wholeness, which is
precisely the type of individualization DST theorists criticize. From this perspective, the idea of
external positions taking up space in an individual’s psyche, without taking into account the
interactive proclivities of that psyche’s constitution, offers an ineffectual level of analysis. I
thought it would be more coherent to say that one’s unique psyche engages in a participatory
interaction with their cultural and environmental contexts, leading to specified responses wherein
they assimilate, accommodate, engage, or bypass certain sociocultural elements based on their
personality. However, I deemed it equally important to consider their position’s validity to avoid
losing the contributions they have made to the present subject.
Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010) did not make clear that human beings are always
situationally embodied in a sociocultural history and present context. They convincingly
articulated that there are no completely closed-off persons who make meaning of life in a
decontextualized manner. Culture, history, social norms, and interpersonal dynamics always
provide an a priori dialogical context through which language, thoughts, actions, and behaviors
are manifestly realized and occur as sensible to certain I-positions. A given sociohistorical and
present cultural context, therefore, shapes the landscape of possible interactions in a nontrivial
manner. For my part, I decided to take this view of contextual cultural embodiment seriously and
contend with it in any discussion on personality or individuating. It also helps account for the
risk of reducing behavior below the level of cultural context, which strips behavior of some of its
situated meanings.
In my opinion, DST has enabled scholars to make impressive contributions to the topic of
psychic multiplicity and unification. I found it particularly valuable that they established a
diversity of I-positions and intrapsychic dynamics within the psyche and that they emphasized
the emergence of dialogical meaning that transcends previous dichotomies. Furthermore, I
deemed it important to consider the role cultural context plays in setting the stage for possible
psychic interactions.
I noticed differences in DST theorists’ view of the structure of the psyche from others in
the literature review. Much like Rowan (2010), they emphasized the permeability of psychic
multiplicity to a large degree. However, I aimed to show throughout the course of these pages
that multiplicity inherent to the personality is not as malleable as a theory such as DST might
suggest. Biological components of idiosyncratic humans may specify the unique capacity and
range of their subpersonalities.
David Lester on Subselves
Lester (2010) preferred the term “subselves” to describe psychic multiplicity. In a series
of propositions and corollaries, Lester mapped out a theory of multiplicity in great analytical
detail. He included an overview of psychic multiplicity housed in various schools of psychology
and sometimes philosophy or mysticism, elaborating on what he felt were the most salient
features and possibilities within that framework and beyond.
Lester (2010) proposed that, “at any point in time, one sub-self is in control of the mind.
It may be said to have executive power” (p. 25). Lester suggested readers find once again a
revolving door of conscious identity via psychic multiplicity, which is highly context-dependent
and perspectival. I add that Lester corroborated the questionability of the ego concept, in which
different selves alternate in conscious control of the mind. Still, certain subselves may uphold the
habit of dominant executive control of the mind.
To Lester (2010), an intrapsychic conflict indicates two or more subselves are at odds.
Further, the presence of a particularly ravenous desire or focus of the mind suggests one subself
might have executive power at that time. On the other hand, a feeling of peace and harmony
might indicate the group of subselves is in a state of relative acquiescence.
Lester (2010) offered readers three possible resolutions to the question of how a
multiplicity of subselves comes to wholeness, individuation, or integration. Those possibilities
include: the potential of one subself to eventually eradicate all others, the potential of subselves
merging into a single self, and lastly, the idea that subselves do not go away but learn to live in a
better state of harmony. I found the first suggestion problematic. To cancel other subselves in
favor of one subself would wash out the very nuance that makes them dynamic forces of being.
Furthermore, this would amount to a suppressive psychic move, one that vies for control rather
than harmony and mediation. Treating the mandala as a collection of selves, as in Strachan’s
subpersonalities or Jung’s archetypes, seemed more viable in terms of psychodynamic relevance
and therapeutic intervention. Therefore, I wondered if it would be better to accept Lester’s latter
two proposals in tandem: subselves can merge into a greater sense of being and simultaneously
maintain their independent nature in a more harmonious relationship with one another.
Your Symphony of Selves—James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber
Fadiman and Gruber (2020) collaborated to provide a comprehensive overview of the
multiple selves view of the psyche. They emphasized healthy, normal, and nonpathological views
on psychic multiplicity. Although they presumed that there are pathological instances of multiple
selves (e.g., dissociative identity disorder), they argued that multiplicity is a completely normal
part of being human. Fadiman and Gruber explained mental health amounts to a matter of
embodying the right self during the right situation. Often, pathology results from a mismatch
between embodied attitude and environmental circumstances. The determination of what is
deemed mentally healthy depends on context.
Increased awareness of multiple selves can lead to greater functionality and well-being.
The contributions to multiplicity detailed in this part of the literature review contributed to my
ensuing arguments because they destigmatized the idea of multiple selves. Whereas many
late19th-century psychologists tended to emphasize the pathological side of multiplicity,
Fadiman and Gruber (2020) revitalized multiplicity as a fact of psychic life. The authors
explained that the idea of a single and unitary self is a pervasive illusion propped up by
monotheism, Western philosophy, and standard science. They called this illusion the single-self
assumption and argued that it was easily penetrated upon close examination. Fadiman and
Gruber argued the personality or self is not the predictable and consistent entity that the single-
self assumption would have readers believe. They made the following points: individuals often
contradict themselves as humans, a great diversity is conspicuous in the overall personality, there
are many incongruences and competing interests consume human behaviors. They scrupulously
exemplified these observations in their text, presenting them as a devastating blow to the single-
self assumption.
Fadiman and Gruber (2020) explained multiple selves are not metaphorical, nor are they
simply a heuristic tool. The authors proposed selves are real dynamic beings with their own
agency:
Each of your selves, whether or not you ever name them or identify any of them with
precision, is a very real being, entity, or self-state, an autonomous complex (as Jung
called it) that has its own agenda, its own needs, and its own ways of working with your
other selves and other people (and their selves). It is not just that you have different
moods, aspects, or feelings; it is that there really are different alive autonomous parts of
you—different selves, different personalities, different parts. (p. 14)
In taking psychic multiplicity to the level of embodied subagencies in a network defined
as a person, Fadiman and Gruber (2020) supposed there was no convincing reason to postulate a
super self, a deeper self, a higher self, or a soul self. They argued for multiple selves all the way
down. Regarding Jung, they celebrated and summarized his great contributions to psychic
multiplicity, but they also asserted he unduly elevated the single-self assumption by
overemphasizing the Self archetype and individuation. Fadiman and Gruber also railed against
other approaches that elevated a supraordinate self as the director, spiritual guide, or manager of
a selves system. They swiftly deliver these objections in a section called “Forget Forging a
‘Super Self’ Captain” (p. 276). The authors concluded that doing so is either distracting or
unproductive in facilitating psychic harmony.
Yet, Fadiman and Gruber (2020) left the question unanswered of how they invoked
harmony as a metavalue worth striving for in the absence of a supraordinate arbiter of psychic
goals and values. Hillman (1975) would have rebutted that this harmonic ideal is an embedded
psychic image (i.e., perspective) that the authors promoted without mentioning that it, too, would
function as a relative value position. I wondered if they had inadvertently used circular reasoning
(e.g., selves need harmony because harmony is good, so therefore, selves need harmony). I found
Hillman (1975) to be more logically consistent in his argument structure; he promoted the
decentered psychic relativity of archetypal persons, removed the ideal of a supraordinate Jungian
Self, and then advocated for falling apart or pathologizing (i.e., allowing the disintegration that
an extreme relativity of psychic values naturally leads to). Hillman’s argument struck me as a
coherent sequence of premises and propositions, whether the reader agrees with those premises
or not. If Fadiman and Gruber were correct in claiming no gestalt or greater self stands for the
whole and that only multiple selves exist, I could not see the point of the selves increasing their
compatibility. Instead, I wondered if it would not be more desirable for dominant selves to
continue in their dominance, even if other selves suffered. I also wondered to whom these selves
owed a compromise and for what purpose in the absence of a supraordinate aspect of the
personality.
Contrastingly, Bogart (1994) argued that multiple selves and a wholeness of self can and
do coexist. Using the terms subpersonalities and personas synonymously, Bogart wrote: “Rather
than the alternatives of subpersonalities or a whole self, both our personas and our total organism
change and grow toward greater levels of maturity together” (p. 84). Bogart articulated a
dialogical relationship between part and whole. He advocated for a model where multiple selves
learn to share power rather than compete for it, which would have the benefit of increasing
harmony and meaning for the whole self. Comparing Bogart’s elucidation to Fadiman and
Gruber (2020) conveyed what I saw might be the issue: implicitly promoting a search for
harmony and meaning and denying that there is any psychic principle of wholeness only begs the
question. Strachan (2011b) handled this by positing a soul; Jung (1959/1978) defined the Self
archetype, and gestalt therapists hold that wholeness is irreducible to the sum of its parts (Perls et
al., 1954/1994). These observations all proved useful in my exploration of psychic multiplicity.
Ultimately, I found Fadiman and Gruber’s (2020) single-self assumption very useful, so I
referred to it throughout these pages. Its utility lay in the fact that regardless of whether a
supraordinate self exists, individuals largely overlook multiple selves in their everyday life.
Literature Review Part 3—Some Views on Multiplicity in Psychological Science
As outlined by Jungian scholar Clifford Mayes (2020), the Jungian community has a
variety of opinions on bringing contemporary psychological or biological science into Jungian
psychology or how to approach the archetypal dimension in general. For example, although some
have preferred to treat the psyche’s archetypes strictly as a qualitatively imaginal activity, others
have viewed them as developmental constructs and still others have striven to connect
evolutionary understandings and other natural sciences with the Jungian approach (Mayes,
2020). Although I see subpersonalities as modes of consciousness that cannot be reduced to the
sum of their parts, I contend that psyche and soma are deeply interconnected in ways that should
not be overlooked. Jung (1960/1975) made this reasoning relevant. He wrote:
The motivation of the will must in the first place be regarded as essentially biological.
But at the (permitting such an expression) upper limit of the psyche, where the function
breaks free from its original goal, the instincts lose their influence as movers of the will.
(p. 183)
Jung appeared here to connect to the fact that the collective unconscious is often regarded
phylogenetically and in reference to instincts that secure an archetypal valence in the realm of
psyche, image, myth, and spirit. Jung’s position resembles the reasons I decided to include a
psychobiological section of the literature review. Moreover, Jung (1960/1975) maintained that
although the psychic enterprise must have some degree of freedom from the pure compulsions of
instinct, those physiologically based compulsions remain inextricably connected to the psyche
and may even lay at its foundation.
However, readers may not be convinced and wonder why psychobiological factors may
be relevant to the discussion on individuation and multiplicity within Jungian psychology. I
found them relevant because the ontological premise of the existence of subpersonalities as
having robust biological antecedents leads to very specific conclusions about the structural and
process-oriented dynamics between multiplicity and individuation. For example, if genetic
predispositions to subpersonalities are accepted, individuals pursuing self-discovery can work
with them, understanding they are not eliminating a subpersonality. Rather, they are learning to
work with subpersonalities in new functional ways that may include expanding forms of
consciousness, retraining neural pathways, and creating epigenetic variations in self-expression.
Removing these biological antecedents would likely lead to very different conclusions for those
working with subpersonalities. This appeared, for instance, in John Rowan (2011a) or DST
where theorists came to distinct conclusions about the process of the part–whole relationship
based on precepts that heavily emphasized an amorphous and social reality of the psyche. If
theorists assume the psyche has an entirely different structure or perhaps has no definite structure
(i.e., a blank slate), they may end up in propositional territory that will not be compatible with
my later conclusions or rhetoric. Therefore, I aimed for my readers to be able to track my
reasoning so they will at least see how I have tried to build a coherent epistemic process that is
applicable to the field of Jungian psychology, even if some Jungians or post-Jungians may differ
in their ontological presuppositions. Moreover, in further pages, I also argue for a restoration of
consciousness to nature, which, instead of making psychic multiplicity a reductionistic exercise
in biomechanical determinism, gives nature a creative psychic consciousness in and of itself.
Moreover, I hoped to show I am in dialogue with other views rather than in a selfenclosed
monologue with a single perspective, echoing the importance of multiplicity in my approach. I
believe that Jung’s stated interests in biology and other scientific developments of his time make
present-day scientific discussions equally and maybe even more relevant. This can be true if
relevant scientific progress has occurred since Jung’s time (i.e., progress that might deepen
understanding of the psyche). I deemed evolutionary psychology as being among the most
compatible recent developments in partial accordance with Jung’s phylogenetic psyche, so I
began there.
Motivational Systems and Subpersonalities
Cosmides and Tooby (2009) explained that the field of evolutionary psychology indicates
much of human behavior and psychology can be attributed to evolutionary adaptations with
underpinning genetic factors. Scholars in the field have proposed that neural networks of the
brain have evolved through natural selection, priming humankind with corresponding
psychological dispositions. Autonomous modules constitute these networks, spurring behaviors,
psychological motives, urges, and experiences. Stewart-Williams (2018) claimed psychological
factors such as jealousy, love, lust, status-seeking, affiliation, learning, shame, parental drives,
creativity, exploration, aggression, and many others can be viewed via the distally causal lens of
natural selection.
Contemporary evolutionary psychologists have defined natural selection as the process by
which genes are self-selected for replication in future generations through activities of survival
and sexual reproduction (Stewart-Williams, 2018). Evolutionary psychologists, therefore,
undertake a reductionistic exercise to establish the most plausible, logical, and coherent reason
for a particular psychological trait, using inductive and deductive reasoning. It primarily
represents a way of thinking about the psyche rather than a field of empirical experiments or
observations (Cosmides & Tooby, 2009). Evolutionary psychologists attribute some human traits
to cultural learning and others to genetic roots, and they view many behavioral phenomena as a
mix of cultural and genetic influences because genetic expression is context-dependent.
The Jungian Connection
At this point, I must discuss the overlap between Jungian psychology and evolutionary
psychology. To solidify this connection, I considered evolutionary psychologist Marco Del
Giudice’s (2018) description of his field: “The central premise of evolutionary psychology is that
our present minds embody the deep historical past, having been shaped across millions of years
by the changing demands of the human ecology” (p. 5). Here Del Giudice spoke of the psyche’s
far-reaching antecedents that, rather than being a product of life experience alone, have a
transpersonal backdrop. This formulation brought Jung’s collective unconscious and its
archetypal patterns to mind. Indeed, a mainstay of Jungian theory involves looking at the psyche
as a historical being (Jung, 1959/1969). Therefore, by starting this section of the literature review
with evolutionary psychology and building from there, I positioned contemporary studies in
psychology as a continuation of and as in dialogical tension with Jungian observations, aided by
the faculties of modern research.
Evolutionary psychologists have implicitly contributed to an understanding of psychic
multiplicity when positing various distinct motivational modules within the human being. In an
essay on evolutionary psychology and personality development, Del Giudice (2019) asserted,
“selection tends to favor the evolution of multiple mechanisms for the control of behavior –
much like distinct mental ‘organs,’ each specialized for dealing with a certain kind of domain”
(p. 26). Diverse units of specialization allow for increasingly functional and adaptive responses
to social and environmental complexity, as well as increasing evolutionary functionality (Del
Giudice, 2019). This suggested that the more semiautonomous a subsystem becomes, the more
its specialized faculties can perform and succeed in its domain of competence or expression
without the inhibiting constraints of other driving forces. These mental organs referred to by Del
Giudice appeared to me as evolutionary psychology’s provision of a foundational inroad to
psychic multiplicity and subpersonalities.
Jung (1958/1969) also referred in a similar manner to archetypes as “organs of the
psyche, (which) are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an
extraordinary degree” (p. 519). The qualification of archetypes as organs with instinctual
precedents shows that Jung professed their functional biological necessity for humankind. The
organs of the psyche that Jung (1958/1969) referred to are indeed a product of inheritance, not in
content, but in interactive dispositional tendencies, which once more suggests the presence of
compatible principles between Jung’s psychology and evolutionary psychology.
Motivational Systems in Detail
Del Giudice (2018) defined these specialized systems as evolved mechanisms called
“motivational systems.” Each motivational system has a semi-independent biological network or
circuitry, professedly designed by natural selection to increase the organism’s survival and
reproductive prospects, thereby increasing genetic replication. According to Del Giudice, a good
but noncomprehensive list of these motivational systems includes systems of aggression, fear,
security, disgust, status, mating, attachment, caregiving, pair bonding, affiliation, reciprocity,
acquisition, play, and curiosity. These specialized systems purportedly evolved within the human
species to deal with the ever-changing complexities of environmental and social situations while
attempting to ensure genetic replication occurred and increased functional responsiveness to life
experience.
Each system can also utilize a variety of emotions to drive behavior based on its unique
motivational perspective. Emotions do not qualify as motivational systems but are intrinsic to the
perceptive patterning and mobilization of behavior within those systems (Del Giudice, 2018).
Therefore, emotions help the system act out an associated behavior or mode of psycho-affective
relatedness. This means, for example, different systems with different motivational perspectives
may rely on the emotion of anger. In the pair-bonding system, a lover might feel anger at a
perceived slight or disloyalty performed by their romantic partner. Conversely, in the aggression
system, a warrior might feel anger at their foes on the battlefield or when protecting their family
and tribe. Emotions can occur flexibly across a variety of different motivational systems.
Importantly, however, specific motivational systems may have a proclivity toward certain
emotions and thereby enact those emotions more frequently (Del Giudice, 2018). This
information may contribute to understanding how subpersonalities are rooted in deeper driving
forces, how they may experience different emotions, and perhaps how they have certain
emotional tendencies.
I want to further instantiate how this conceptualization of motivational systems overlaps
with the strands of psychic multiplicity established thus far. Jung (1971), for example, referred to
special psychic systems that have an instinctual readiness to respond to life in a particular
manner. He said that “individual attitudes are certainly as inexhaustible as the variations of
crystals, which may nevertheless be recognized as belonging to one or another system” (p. 531).
Essentially, Jung spoke of generalized phylogenetic systems of behavior that are manifested in
individuals in idiosyncratic ways. I found Jung’s direction of thinking quite prescient for the
relatively new field of evolutionary psychology, in which theorists have professed the same
principle, even while having some differing theoretical details. Like Jung’s archetypal theory,
specialized evolutionary modules have an a priori structure that leads to implicit psychic values
in life experience and is a distinct mode of perceiving and enacting behavior (Stewart-Williams,
2018). Hunger provides an obvious example. Human beings do not choose to experience or be
motivated by hunger; it naturally occurs to them to pursue eating, and they are motivated to do
so. The same reasoning applies to many other motivational experiences, such as sexual arousal,
cooperation, exploration, creativity, or competitive drives (Stewart-Williams, 2018).
Although they have underlying biochemical structures and processes, psychological
experiences characterize and make these motivational systems evident, which I believe gives
them a status nearly indistinguishable from subpersonalities. Moreover, in the following passage,
Del Guidice (2018) provided a perspective that more deeply connects psychic multiplicity to
evolutionary psychology:
If one considers the fact that the mind contains a multiplicity of motivational and
selfregulatory systems and that each system may accommodate several dimensions of
variation, it becomes apparent that there are dozens if not hundreds of personality traits
potentially worthy of description. (p. 75)
Two points of particular interest emerge from this statement. First, Del Guidice suggested a
personality trait or a motivational system need not be restricted to a single role but can interact
across “several dimensions of variation.” This entails an understanding that psychic nodal points
are not restricted to a unidimensional activity and have a relative degree of flexible application.
This idea represents a potential connection with Jungian complexes. From the lens of depth
psychology, Jacobi (1925) articulated that the lived value of a complex depends on the way in
which it is realized and engaged. Complexes are inherited dispositions, so when taken out of the
reactive judgments and contours of habits formed in personal life, they can be engaged in a
manner that is flexible and valuable to consciousness. This idea also corresponds with
self/soul/spirit’s refusal to pathologize subpersonalities because their underlying dispositional
reality is neither good nor bad.
The next point worth distinguishing involves Del Giudice’s (2018) description of
motivational and self-regulatory systems as providing one way to ground psychic multiplicity in
human nature. This idea creates a bridge between a psychology of subpersonalities and biology,
which may be of interest to some Jungian scholars. I also found this point crucial to understand
the part–whole relationship. Furthermore, it may lend a certain scientific momentum and
credibility to the various theories laid out in previous sections on psychic multiplicity. Most
importantly, it provides another lens through which to push the multiplicity of conscious modes
of being further into this discussion. This lens allows for an accruing understanding of how the
traditional centrality of an ego identity is potentially dubious even at the level of biology. A
variety of neuroscientific findings on psychic multiplicity cited in the introduction support this
idea (Gazzaniga, 2018; Kaku, 2014; LeDoux, 2003). These researchers claimed narratives of a
single conscious nexus of identity are always post hoc contrivances driven by the brain’s need to
make sense of its experiences.
However, Jung (1954/1970) emphasized the development of ego complex for adapting to
life in which the child ego begins to say “I” and “gradually frees itself” from the “expression of
primitive identity” (p. 107). Jung (1954/1970) spoke of the I emerging from the collective
unconscious and gradually getting an adapted handle on life. Not only did Jung mention the
importance of a well-adjusted ego, it served as a staple in Freudian and post-Freudian
psychoanalytic psychology (Mitchell & Black, 1995/2016). Taken together, these claims imply
that the ego must propitiate a distinct identity that separates itself from unconscious drives so it
may perform the discerning functions of an adaptable consciousness. Therefore, the absence of a
functional ego is easily construed as psycho-affective chaos (Jung, 1960/1975). Yet, I found the
ego complex to be an unnecessary concept for describing human functioning. As I describe in
detail in Chapters 4 and 5, select principles from phenomenology, neuroscience, genetics,
psychology, and philosophy, can facilitate an argument for how subpersonalities play their
adaptive roles in functional individuals without the need for an ego complex. I understand
readers will not accept this preliminary argument outright, but I must provisionally remove the
ego complex as a theoretical postulate to explore how the psyche might function without it. Thus,
the observations on motivational systems produce more leverage for the driving question of how
individuation and multiplicity might coexist without an ego structure.
Ogilvy’s Biologically Perspectival Contribution
Rooting multiplicity in physiology provides one way to continue the psyche-matter
dialogue inherent to Jungian and archetypal theory. In the 1970s, James Ogilvy (1975) discussed
the human body as multiple phenomena. He referred to organs, nervous nets, delineations in
brain hemispheres, bones, and fascia all as their own semi-independent functional centers.
Ogilvy dismantled the mistaken view of the human body as a single unit. Crucially, he affirmed
that centers of anatomical function behave semiautonomously, like subpersonalities.
Ogilvy (1975) offered the term “heterarchy” in place of hierarchy. Politically,
psychologically, and anatomically, he believed in multicentered systems of information exchange
and relatedness (i.e., heterarchy) in which clear-cut delineations of identity or power are made
ambiguous. Regarding evolutionary psychology, Ogilvy provided a useful statement on how “the
body proves that pluralized, multicentered systems of order can function” (p. 115). He directly
stated that the body is multicentered, showing functional multiplicity is possible, as is apparent in
the body’s capacity to stay alive, act, and adapt. This provides further evidence against the
monolithic construct and idealism of psychic singularity generally accepted in Western
civilization. Like Fadiman and Gruber (2020), Ogilvy proposed functional multiplicity, and he
used physiology as a convincing example. His philosophical maneuvering, while keeping an
archetypal eye, supported the connection between evolutionary psychology and psychic
multiplicity.
Ogilvy’s (1975) point, in part, established multiplicity as a basis for viewing all of life.
Importantly, this view overlaps with Del Giudice’s (2018) exploration of multiple motivational
systems. Fadiman and Gruber (2020 warned against conflating functionality with singularity, so
Ogilvy offered a drastically different view of life and the psyche. Ogilvy (1975) further implied
that the “Apollonian predisposition toward the need for singular authority” (p. 115) will, in
effect, be discharged by continued study of the various bodily centers. Based on some
contemporary theories in evolutionary psychology, Ogilvy’s decades-old statements pair well
with a discussion on genetically and neurologically designed motivational systems, which
provides refreshing new perspectives that support his polycentric views of biology. Moreover, if
these motivational systems qualify as subpersonalities or functional complexes, the single-self
assumption collapses even further.
Motivational Systems as Subpersonalities?
Although motivational systems, like subpersonalities, are often cooperative or symbiotic,
they are not always harmonious. Sometimes, these modes of being and behaving may even
outright contradict each other or struggle for dominance in a lived moment (Del Giudice, 2018).
Human beings embody many evolutionary conflicts of interest with many incongruent desires
(Stewart-Williams, 2018). Intrapsychic conflict, viewed as contesting subpersonalities, maps well
onto the evolutionary motivational systems as laid out by Del Guidice (2018). He conveyed the
position that any given human being is not unitary or consistent but rather could be considered as
a relative compromise between genetic subsystems pushing differing interests. Del Giudice
referred to the process by which the whole organism internally resolves competing drives and
facilitates decision-making and behavior as self-regulation. Any decision made might then
indicate the emergence of certain motivational systems over others, as the cooperative effort of
two or more systems, or perhaps as a gestalt energy of the system intending a direction. To me,
these considerations provided more evidence for a strong connection between this evolutionary
view of multiplicity and the psychic multiplicity discussed in previous pages.
However, the fact that subpersonalities might be rooted in evolutionary processes
reintroduces the question of individuation. If the premises of motivational systems are accepted,
and the meaningful realization of wholeness is to be achieved, it may be conceived as hard won
by the psyche’s mediation, intentional design, and repurposing of its modules. Evolutionary
psychologists have illuminated some of the deep antecedents of psychic multiplicity; I address
the question of what scholars and therapists should do with that information in reassessing the
relationship between multiplicity and individuation in Jungian psychology in later chapters.
A Transition to Human Uniqueness
Notably, evolutionary motivational systems result from categorically derived
observations. No single human being represents the epitome of evolutionary design, nor are all
human beings endowed with identically formed motivational networks. Rather, McAdams
(2015) posited that each human being is a completely “unique variation on the general design of
human nature” (p. 15). This means that every newly born baby offers a new twist on the theme of
humankind. Therefore, psychologists should not imagine that all humans inherit identically
formed motivational systems. Indeed, humans’ differing motivational tendencies characterize the
very construct called personality (Del Guidice, 2018). Del Giudice (2018) reinforced this insight
by stating, “Although motivational and self-regulatory systems share a universal structure, the
details of their functional organization are highly variable” (p. 73). The next sections of the
literature review suggest that although considered a general human structure, motivational
systems may be ubiquitous because their idiosyncratic manifestations in human beings are rooted
in distinct genetic clusters, neurological modules, life experiences, and modes of consciousness.
Furthermore, motivational dispositions encounter unique learning and development
through life experience. Linden (2020) explained that individuals are wired to adapt to their
environment and learn from experience. Everyone inherits a uniquely constructed genome and
emergent genetic mutations, which may or may not be functional, and this naturally leads to a
physiological disposition with a distinct motivational temperament. Strachan (2011) confirmed
that everyone is genetically unique; even identical twins show slight genetic variation, and each
person embodies a distinct temperament. I think these psychobiological observations map onto
subpersonalities coherently, so I based my arguments on the foundational precept that
subpersonalities are also unique to individuals. I concluded, along with Strachan (2011b), that no
two people have the same exact subpersonalities. Hints of this position appeared in Jung
(1958/1969) as well. For example, when he wrote: “Psychic heredity does exist—that is to say,
there is inheritance of certain characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character,
special gifts, and so forth” (p. 517). Jung (1960/1975) also discussed the fact that the individual
child’s brain is not a tabula rasa and carries within it certain unique psychophysiological
predispositions. Interestingly, although Jung (1959/1969) tended to focus on the universal nature
of the psyche’s inheritance, he did, however, remark on the unique a priori biopsychic
constitution of individuals. The field of behavioral genetics certainly comports with that
perspective.
Based on the literature reviewed so far, I deduced that subpersonalities may have many
evolutionary antecedents, new mutational impacts, emergent brain and body wiring, and
responsive alterations to life experiences. However, the following section on behavioral genetics,
which focuses on the environmental and genetic contributions to differences between individuals,
further clarifies this position.
Behavioral Genetics
Behavioral geneticists study how genes contribute to behavior and attempt to account for
the psychological differences between individuals by using heritability studies. Plomin (2018)
explained that the word heritability can be misleading because it is often assumed to be the same
as inheritance. Instead, Barlow (2019) elucidated that “heritability refers to the proportion of
population variation in a trait that can be accounted for by genetic variation among individuals”
(p. 69). Barlow’s explanation made clear that accounting for the differences among individuals
within studied populations is what matters in heritability studies. This focus on accounting for
differences within a cultural context distinguishes this field from the focus of evolutionary
psychology, which still depends on genetic understandings to look for and categorize universal
human traits.
Behavioral geneticists hold that all traits have some degree of heritability because gene
and environment interactions are inevitably involved in any human behavior (Barlow, 2019).
Twin studies, adoption studies, and identical twin adoption studies provide ways of generating
heritability measures. Monozygotic twins share all of the small percentage of genes that make
humans genetically different from one another, and dizygotic twins share roughly 50% of those
genes (Plomin, 2018). However, Jonnson et al. (2021) showed that identical twins are not exactly
genetically identical; research has shown they have some genetic mutations through the process
of embryonic development. This slight variation changed the general thrust of findings for
genetic contributions to personality. Yet, it introduced the plausibility that some personality and
other differences between identical twins result from differences in their genes (Johnson et al.,
2021).
By conducting these studies over many decades, researchers have created consistent
heritability measures for many psychological traits (Plomin, 2018). Pinker (2002) summed up the
findings of the twin and adoption research by stating, “When psychological traits vary, much of
the variation comes from differences in genes: identical twins are more similar than fraternal
twins, and biological siblings are more similar than adoptive siblings, whether raised together or
apart” (p. 102). These findings articulated the particular modes of responding given over to an
individual by their genome. Although the environment solicits particular responses and
developmental pathways, those genetic predispositions make a given behavioral response and life
trajectory possible. Notably, although Pinker made this claim roughly 20 years ago in his well-
known book The Blank Slate, researchers in behavioral genetics within the last decade still report
the same results (Barlow, 2019 Linden, 2020; Plomin, 2018), and the field has now produced
over 40 years of replicable and reliable twin studies (Plomin, 2018).
Behavioral geneticists have deduced that roughly 50% of the psychological differences
between people result from differences in genes (Plomin, 2018). However, Mitchell (2018) and
Linden (2020) elucidated that it is not exclusively genes that explain innate physiological
contributions to personality differences. They showed a modest amount of random variation
exists in brain wiring via embryonic development (the word “random” belies a lack of
understanding), contributing to dispositional traits. Either way, both authors reported that
genetics plays a rather large role. Moreover, whether speaking of genetics or stochastic variation
in embryonic development, the focus remains on the physiological processes that lead to
personality dispositions.
Cultural context also plays an important role in understanding genetic predispositions and
their phenotypic outcomes. Uchiyama et al. (2020) articulated that “at best, genetic effects can
only be specified within the ambit of a specific cultural context” (p. 50). Genetic predispositions
for personality do not make any sense outside of a cultural context, that is, a context that
provides nested family structures, social relations, norms, and behaviors that specify an
individual’s expressive options and give an individual a landscape of perceptual valency wherein
something like preference or tendency is comprehensible. Extrapolating a heritability finding out
of a cultural context resembles taking a sentence out of a paragraph and expecting it to have the
same meaning. Plomin (2018) ensured that heritability findings are about what is in a particular
population, not what could be in some other situation. With this claim, Plomin suggested that
perhaps someone’s personality, even given the same genome, would likely emphasize different
traits and behaviors depending on its contextual relations. Life experiences, therefore, evoke
predispositions and connect them with develop them as traits. This conclusion aligns with the
principle of attraction and connection in Strachan’s (2011b) self/soul/spirit. It also resembles
Jung’s (1960/1975) previously mentioned developmental understanding of complexes. The
articulation of culture’s importance for heritability also appears to partially overlap with the view
of DST theorists that I-positions acquire content and character through a cultural understanding
(Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010). This cultural context view also has the advantage of
transcending the antiquated nature versus nurture debate (Uchiyama et al., 2020). At the risk of
being redundant, I think it’s important to explicitly state that psychic multiplicity and
individuation also appear within a cultural context, and that context matters for understanding
meaningful life directions and choices.
Importantly, Plomin (2018) explained that genetic contributions to personality traits are
polygenic, meaning that they derive from many genes, sometimes hundreds or thousands, each of
which has tiny effects. The author added that genetic contributions to personality can also be
pleiotropic, meaning one gene can have a downstream effect on various traits. Suffice it to say,
the genetic contribution to personality traits is highly complex, and the physiological path from
genes to behavior can be circuitous (Mitchell, 2018). Plomin asserted that no single gene is
responsible for such traits as love, curiosity, artistic ability, or depression. Furthermore, he added
that genetic contributions to personality are probabilistic instead of deterministic; they lead to
predisposed tendencies and not fixed outcomes. I think this leaves much room for learning from
or being affected by experiences, for personal growth or transformation, and for making personal
choices, thus potentially alleviating the concerns of those who feel behavioral geneticists have
enacted an inflexible assault on personal empowerment and life experience.
The above section, which focused on claims in evolutionary psychology, demonstrated it
is relevant to see how all individuals vary in their innate predispositions, which leads to an
idiosyncratic composition of how the expression of motivational systems may be individualized
or emphasized uniquely within a personality. Plomin (2018) stated that genes can be implicated
in personality even beyond the initial measures of heritability studies because of a factor he
called the nature of nurture. Plomin described the nature of nurture as follows:
In the past psychologists assumed that the environment is what happens to us passively,
but genetic research on the nature of nurture suggests a more active model of experience.
Psychological environments are not “out there,” imposed on us passively, they are “in
here,” experienced by us as we actively perceive, interpret, select, modify, and even
create environments correlated with our genetic propensity. (p. 51)
This proactive model of development focuses on the importance of a person’s unique
inheritance and a priori motivational disposition. The application of this reasoning to
subpersonalities might show how a part of the psyche selectively interacts with its environment.
Crucially, Plomin (2018) did not dismiss environmental effects entirely; rather, he argued it has
unpredictable and nonshared effects on the personality and that genes provided the most reliable
root of personality differences that could currently be measured. Moreover, Barlow (2019)
argued for seeing environment and organism (i.e., nurture vs. nature) as a continuum rather than
a division, which renders the nature versus nurture debate meaningless. These findings matter to
psychic multiplicity and individuation in several ways, as I later show. The idea everyone is
constitutionally unique represents a nontrivial fact that contributes to a new way of considering
subpersonalities and individuation.
I deemed behavioral genetics further relevant to this study because what researchers call
traits provides another way of discussing psychic multiplicity. The big five model provides one
system used to measure personality trait differences in heritability studies (McAdams, 2015;
Mitchell, 2018; Plomin, 2018). The big five model includes the traits of openness,
conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotion or neuroticism. McAdams
(2015) broke these traits into sub-elements, and Mitchell (2018) showed them to be robustly
stable and replicable personality measures that are all highly heritable.
The Big Five and Psychic Multiplicity
McAdams (2015) outlined the relevant research on the big five personality trait system.
As described by McAdams, categories of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeableness, and negative emotion or neuroticism all operate on a statistically robust spectrum.
Openness refers to openness to experience and appears in manifestations such as creativity,
spirituality, inquisitiveness, and intellectual curiosity or verbal acuity. Conscientiousness captures
personality manifestations such as hard-working, rule-following, clean, and reliable.
Extraversion strongly associates with sociability, friendliness, positive emotion, and
rewardseeking behavior. Agreeableness represents a continuum characterized by being giving,
amenable, sympathetic, kind, people-pleasing, and generally courteous toward others. Negative
emotion or neuroticism falls on a spectrum that conveys irritability, stress, anxiety, worry,
depression, and insecurity. As stated in the section on behavioral genetics, research has shown
each of these traits has a significant level of heritability. To reiterate, that means studies have
partly attributed the differences related to these traits among people in a specific population to
genetic differences (McAdams, 2015).
Importantly, McAdams (2015) explained that if an individual lacks a trait such as
agreeableness, that implies they are high in disagreeableness. The author continued that being
low in negative emotion implies high emotional stability or emotional regulation. These broad
trait categories, according to McAdams, represent statistically reliable ways of measuring
personality differences within populations. Although, it appeared to me that these traits are
somewhat limited in how much they can say about a particular individual because they are so
broad.
Psychic multiplicity is inherent to the big five model because any given individual tested
on the big five spectrum will have multiple unique emphases across different traits. It is also
relevant because each trait breaks down into subcomponents or various manifestations.
Acclaimed science writer Rita Carter (2008) characterized the big five is an inevitable doorway
into more nuanced psychic multiplicity.
Rita Carter’s Multiplicity
Carter (2008) reported that some big five researchers shifted their attention toward
assessment questions on contextual situations in which a trait might show its prominence.
According to Carter, this had the effect of being more accurate because, “as our circumstances
change, so do our personalities” (p. 39). This implied that even if an individual is high in a
particular trait, the expression of that trait still depends on context. For example, an individual
might have a particularly high level of conscientiousness that gets emphasized in the workplace
and during the weekends, where they find time for various chores, but they may not express it as
strongly when with friends or when playing with their children. This claim aligns with the
section on evolutionary psychology because evolved specialization circuitries depend on a
context where their behavior is applicable or functional.
To Carter (2008), these context-dependent expressions illustrate that psychic multiplicity
is a natural progression of big five research. Moreover, they provide an increasingly useful
heuristic for understanding personality. Carter illustrated this in the following passage: When
people did a Big Five test in each of several roles—friend, student, employee, lover, and child –
they rated differently on every one of the dimensions in each role. In the ‘friend’ mode, they
were more extroverted; in the student role they were more neurotic and less agreeable; in the
employee role they were more conscientious, and in the romantic role they were more open to
experience. (p. 39)
This passage shows that different subpersonalities would test differently on the spectrum
of big five traits. Carter (2008) proposed that the big five testing implies that certain
subpersonalities are favored in an individual’s overall life, and she called those majors and called
subpersonalities that have less control of behavior minors. Therefore, the big five testing might
predominantly indicate what a person’s majors are because it provides a snapshot of their typical
behavioral preferences. In other words, if someone is typically very agreeable, they could have a
major subpersonality devoted to getting along with, pleasing, or taking care of others.
Carter’s (2008) thinking provides a natural bridge from quantitative to qualitative
approaches to this subject because it takes nomothetic research and maps it onto an
understanding of distinctive personalities and their multiplicity. Subpersonalities cannot be
adequately understood statistically, so their study must emphasize idiosyncratic development and
manifestation, even while one might rely on statistical evidence as a backdrop to validate certain
premises. The big five provides a useful statistical tool, but in my estimation, it stops short of
being specific enough to outline the complexity of individual personalities. As Jung (1953/1966)
wrote, “for the individual is by definition something unique that cannot be compared with
anything else” (p. 285). This line suggests that talk about everyone also represents talk about no
one, which is to say that population statistics describe absolutely nothing specific about a single
person’s lived experience or unique personality. As I developed my arguments, I hoped Carter’s
bridging toward individual complexity would show its relevance. Ending this scientifically
oriented section of the literature review with her work returns the inquiry to the qualitative
dimensions of psychic experience.
Literature Review Part 4—Naturalistic Phenomenology, an Ontology of the Psyche, and
Hermeneutics
Historical Precedents and Phenomenology
Literature relevant to my preferred approach and methodology had the advantage of
abandoning dualistic conceptions of human consciousness and enabling an interdisciplinary
hermeneutic interpretation across a variety of psychological theories and fields of study. I could
then place psychic multiplicity and individuation in a framework that suited the proceeding
approach and methodology. A brief historical overview of the subject–object split assisted my
contextualization of phenomenology’s application in this study. I understood that the historical
complexities were far more nuanced than covered here, yet I believed aa cursory glance would
usefully highlight the salient concepts.
Abandoning Subject–Object Dualism
Philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton each contributed
to the subject–object division in their own way. Descartes (1637/1910) posited the mind as the
cogito (i.e., thinking thing) and opposed it to the res extensa (i.e., physical world). Descartes
treated the thinking mind (i.e., ego) as an immaterial substance that need not depend on the body
or the world. Phillip Goff (2019) explained that Galileo made the contribution of removing the
factor of consciousness from scientific inquiry by championing an objective approach to science.
This approach, while yielding great scientific and innovative advances, had the unfortunate effect
of suggesting consciousness should be removed from scientific inquiry. Kauffman and Gare
(2015) recounted that following cartesian assumptions (Goff, [2019] added Galilean), Newton
proposed a model of physical determinism, which effectively rendered consciousness
meaningless and turned the world into a series of predestined objects and events.
According to Harney (2015),
Scientific explanations of the behavior of living things have traditionally been based on
models drawn from physics. In its most extreme form, behaviour is ultimately seen as a
property of discrete individual things, which relate to each other and to the environment
by way of mechanistic laws of cause and effect, usually expressed in terms of a
stimulus/response model. (p. 664)
In these lines, Harney elucidated that the psychological movement of behaviorism took
inspiration from an objectivist scientific worldview and reduced behavior to automatic reactions,
thereby discounting any interior motivation or consciousness. It appears that the above-cited
cartesian and physical theories, each in their own way, contributed to a secular worldview that
stripped the world of meaning and beings of meaning-making. This worldview renders a
population of isolated subjects closed off from the lived world, a world that is only truly
accessible through empiricism, representational ideations, and obscure cognitive calculations.
For evidence, I turned to a field of study that makes a powerful argument against the subject–
object division and its corollary assumptions.
The Phenomenologists
The philosophical movement of phenomenology burst onto the scene with the work of
Edmund Husserl. Husserl (2014) set the foundation for later advances in phenomenology by
restoring the view that consciousness cannot be explained away. His approach and contribution
partially appear in his edict, “to the things themselves” (p. 34), which suggests a return to the
phenomena of lived experience as it appears. Husserl took this step as a serious philosophical
investigation. Husserl developed a technique called phenomenological reductionism, wherein he
brought the experience of experience itself into awareness. This came to involve the epoche,
which Brooke (2015) described as the bracketing of the natural attitude, entailing the form of
secular consciousness that hinders ontological premises. From there, an individual can perform
phenomenological reduction by turning to a particular lived experience for the sake of its
appearance and paying close attention to the manner in which it is lived (Husserl, 2014).
However, Thompson (2007) explained Husserl came to see his early approach as static
phenomenology because it implicitly left out the fact that experience always emerges from an
individual’s historical context and lived body. As such, this consideration became known as
genetic phenomenology, not to be confused with biological genetics, although sedimentation
could arguably apply to biological genetics. In genetic phenomenology, the researcher sees the
lived moment and its salient appearances as a givenness that is handed over to itself by its own
sedimentary bodily and experiential history. Lived experience does not just appear purely afresh
and randomly situated but instead occurs in a particular manner that reveals itself with an
affective valence supported by a sedimentary structure. The subject does not so much choose
what constitutes its prior basis for perception but enacts and discovers its perceptual tendencies
through lived experience.
Thompson (2007) explained that Husserl eventually also developed generative
phenomenology, which refers to how an individual sees the world as the life-world. The term
life-world refers to the world that is always already present before the particular presence of
anything that can be conceptualized. The life-world represents the umwelt within which every
person is embedded; consequently, no phenomenological reference point exists outside the
lifeworld. Accordingly, objective science can claim to transcend the life-world, but it fails on the
account that all scientific activity takes place within the salient possibilities of the life-world
(Thompson, 2007). Although Husserl’s seminal work served as a major impetus for
phenomenology, others expanded upon the phenomenological approach.
Martin Heidegger
Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger (1953/2010), posited his own philosophy of
phenomenology in his famous work Being and Time. Differentiating his approach from his
former instructor, Heidegger explained he did not prefer a purely descriptive phenomenology that
is bracketed from everyday existence. Instead, Heidegger understood phenomena as always
situated within a metacontext of interpretational givens. Being is then always already understood.
That is to say, understanding is implicit in phenomenology, before given over to a description.
Heidegger challenged the ontological history of Western philosophy and its assumptions.
He claimed being represented the ground of all possibilities and, thus, he argued anything known
is known through lived experience, so no conceivable ontological knowledge exists prior to
being. Heidegger (1953/2010) wrote:
The question of Being thus aims not only at an a priori condition of the possibility of the
sciences, which investigate beings as this or that kind of being which thus always already
move within an understanding of being, but also at the condition of the possibility of all
the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. (p. 10)
In essence, Heidegger (1953/2010) indicated that any field of knowledge, scientific or
otherwise, owes its possibilities and manifestations to the very ground of lived experience (i.e.,
being itself). Moreover, Heidegger claimed lived experience is not describable via the subject–
object distinction. Instead, he argued individuals are always being in the world. This being-inthe-
world represents a being that is always inextricably involved with its worldly extensions.
Heidegger called this being “Dasein,” which scholars often interpret as human being or being
there. As an addendum, this view aligns with Jung (1953/1966), who viewed the psyche as the
inescapable ground of knowledge and experience and “proves itself to be nothing less than a
world” (p. 90). In fact, Brooke (2015) argued for several plausible interconnections between the
Jungian psyche and Heideggerian Dasein. Two notable connections include the inherited ground
of experience (i.e., experience has givens) and the hermeneutic circle of understanding. Taking
these convergences together, for Dasein or for psyche, no point exists from which an individual
can understand themself or the world from the outside. Rather, a self-referential circle of
understanding provides the ground that is not artificially produced but is thrown into existence
with an a priori orientation. As such, the psyche represents a world that constantly gives itself
over to itself in experience.
As a phenomenological rule, Heidegger (1953/2010) argued that, for the most part,
Dasein does not encounter objects; rather, said objects operate as part of self-transparent
involvement in everyday activities. This transparentness also serves as a concealment; that is to
say that engagement with the environment is embedded in experience at such a foundational
level that consciousness typically has no need to reflect upon it. Dreyfus (1991) summarized this
by explaining that everyday equipment withdraws into the hidden ground of experience. This
reflects the larger assertion by Heidegger (1952/2010) that the dominant foreground of
perception becomes a transparent extension of lived experience. In other words, being conceals
itself in its everyday character.
An object’s everydayness and implicit familiarity conceal an object at hand from Dasein.
Heidegger’s hammer provides a typically used example where a hammer being used for a project
is nothing like an object. Instead, the hammer operates as equipment that has assimilated itself
into being; hammering becomes a self-transparent process of taking care, which involves the
activity of being in the world as a being who cares about its involvement (Heidegger,
1953/2010). For Heidegger (1953/2010), objects can only become momentarily disentangled
from the transparent ground of experience if interrupted during the process of their natural
involvement in the world (i.e., taking care). The inconspicuous natural extension of experience
becomes conspicuous only through the interruption of taking care. For example, when driving a
vehicle, the driver does not experience the vehicle as an object but as a transparent extension of
experience. However, it may become an object of inspection if it breaks down and interrupts the
sequence of taking care and smoothly being involved in the world. Scientific consciousness has
learned to interrupt the everyday worldly involvement by taking this entanglement itself as an
obstruction to be overcome for the sake of striving toward objective knowledge.
Heidegger’s (1953/2010) work contributed that lived experience disconfirms the subject–
object distinction as a valid presupposition. The concept of Dasein suggests it is impossible to be
removed from the contextual givenness of worldly involvement. No subject can be cut off from
its lived world. Yet, another philosopher aided the discussion even further by involving what
might be called the lived body.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012) approached phenomenology in a way that assimilated
some of Husserl and Heidegger’s work yet made the body a more important bedrock of
experience. He delivered this perspective in The Phenomenology of Perception, originally
published in 1946. Contrary to what Merleau-Ponty referred to as cartesian physiology, he
asserted the body and the soul (i.e., being/consciousness/phenomena) are inextricably bound
together as a lived body. He added that this soul/body union is not primarily discovered through
an abstract theory, unlike the assumed cartesian separation between soul and body. Rather, it
emerges in the moment-to-moment activity of life, where the body and experience are given as a
union, directly observable in physiology. Merleau-Ponty clarified his position as follows:
The experience of one’s own body, then, is opposed to the reflective movement that
disentangles the object from the subject and the subject from the object, and that only
gives us thought about the body or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the
body or the body in reality. (p. 205)
Therefore, the very cartesian idea of the body results from reflective analysis, which takes for
granted the ground of experience within which a person finds a lived body that is always already
being in the world. Phenomenology brings the thinker back to the body, not as an object, but as
the indefinite ground of experience. The body provides the ground of an individual’s own
possibilities.
In addition to being in the world, the body also represents being toward the world, which
is to say that the body has embedded modes of relatedness and expressive tendencies that the
world solicits from it in a given moment (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Merleau-Ponty (2012) referred
to this as the body schema. The body schema can renew itself through learning and acquiring
habits that affect the perception of salient sensibles. This readiness to perceive and act is a
realization of salience that the body takes as its possibilities and enacts in one manner or another.
As a readiness to act, it corresponds with the sedimentary structure of genetic phenomenology
introduced formerly by Husserl. The body schema, therefore, offers a fluctuating ground of
possibilities and affordances within which a person takes up their possibilities and implicitly
realizes them as manifest experiences or direct actions. I think the body schema and its
perceptual modes of relatedness might also correspond with the literature reviewed on psychic
multiplicity.
Commenting on the importance of the sedimentary structure of perception, Merleau-
Ponty (2012) wrote:
Every consciousness is, to some extent, perceptual consciousness. Were it possible to
unfold at each moment all of the presuppositions in what I call my “reason” or my
“ideas,” then I would always be discovering experiences that have not been made
explicit, weighty contributions of the past and of the present, and an entire ‘sedimented
history’ that does not merely concern the genesis of my thought, but that determines its
sense. (p. 416)
In these lines, Merleau-Ponty (2012) expressed the underlying structure of experience,
which is given over to worldly present-moment engagement with a distinct presentation of
salience. This meaningful sense that arises does not represent an ex-nihilo expression of being
but rather the expression of a given condition that has a specified possibility, shape, and
direction. I interpreted this as relating eminently to Jungian psychology and to psychic
multiplicity. Jung’s (1960/1975) archetypes and complexes expressed precisely this sedimentary
structure. He called it the unconscious/collective unconscious, which gives rise to
phenomenological life, and moreover, can only be described as somewhat teleological in nature.
Still more, in recalling the themes laid out in the review of evolutionary psychology and
behavioral genetics, the sedimentary presupposition becomes even more relevant. I wondered if a
motivational system, a disposition, a self-aspect, or a subpersonality engages as being-in-
theworld within a particular landscape of perceptual configurations that occur as sensible and if it
is taken up as sensed in this or that way precisely because of its given inclinations. Further, I
wondered if different subpersonalities could entail varied epistemological emphases or disclosive
modes of interaction that emerge from the ground of being. And last, I searched for any clues for
individuation because “by returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole
already pregnant with an irreducible sense” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 23). In other words,
perhaps the wholeness given over to perceptive experiences, strung together through the course
of time and self-expression, signifies something approximating the Jungian individuation
impulse where wholeness is found simultaneously in the ineffable gestalt of the Self and the
momentary expressions of the Self through its multiplicity (Jung, 1959/1978). In my estimation,
these correlating factors and suggestions aided the conclusion that a phenomenologically
oriented research approach to psychic multiplicity and individuation is consilient and potentially
generative.
Naturalized Phenomenology
It may seem I have set a foundation for the proceeding discussion that partially depends
on an appreciation of biological contributions to psychological experience while potentially
obscuring that effort with a phenomenological contribution. By introducing a phenomenological
ontology that often challenges traditional scientific assumptions, I have risked situating the
research design in a terrible conundrum. Yet, I argue there is no contradiction here.
Some modern currents of thought have attempted to bridge phenomenology and the
natural sciences and do so with a coherent foundation. Moreover, Jung (1960/1975) himself
wrote with an interdisciplinary approach that utilized phenomenology and natural science.
Although some could interpret this as an incoherence in Jung’s work, I prefer to see it as an
underlying psycho–physical monism in which he attempted to make layered and sophisticated
contributions to psychology. The self/soul/spirit model also proffered a monistic ontology, which
suggests stark divisions between nature and psyche are ultimately contrived.
Kee (2019) pointed out that it was the shortcomings of the behaviorist approach that
opened the door to phenomenology. He credited Merleau-Ponty’s (1942/1963) The Structure of
Behavior with originating this position. Kee took care to explain the importance of the fact that
phenomenology emerged in a historical dialectical context because it was behavioral objectivism,
running itself into its own shortcomings, that created fertile ground for a phenomenological
approach. That behavior could not be stripped of its meaningful experiential factors and
explained away was a discovery made possible by the approach seeking that very position’s
verification. Kee (2019) asserted that the idea science and phenomenology were ever split should
be reconciled as untrue. Instead, Kee asserted that “phenomenology is continuous with empirical
inquiry” (p. 28). This appears to mean that whatever a behavioral science attempts to discover
necessarily includes a phenomenological understanding. Merleau-Ponty provided the ground for
a naturalistic phenomenology wherein continuity is derived from the historical context of
phenomenology’s emergence (which was dialectically needed for science). Moreover, he
incorporated the fact that, despite Husserl’s epoche and reduction, a pure transcendental
consciousness is never fully secured given that being is always already being in the world as a
lived body (Kee, 2019).
Kauffman and Gare (2015) asserted that practitioners of a naturalized phenomenology
tend to make criticisms in two directions that strengthen and differentiate its approach. For one,
this approach finds a phenomenology that repudiates the natural sciences untenable. Conversely,
it finds an approach to natural science that eliminates the importance of consciousness and lived
experience unacceptable. As such, Kauffman and Gare put forward an endoscience—also
referred to as endophysics and endobiology—characterized by a restoration of the experiential
dimensions of qualia to scientific inquiry. They claimed this approach transcends cartesian
dualism and idealism. Moreover, the authors elucidated that scientists are a part of the world they
are trying to understand. With this idea, they ensured there is no true and absolutely objective
scientific position above and beyond phenomenological experience. But they ardently maintained
that this point does not render scientific inquiry obsolete. Rather, it encourages scholars to
understand science as the contextual revelation of a lived world that is only measurable in terms
of interrelated aspects that depend in part upon phenomenological reality.
Drawing from the work of ethologist Jakob Von Uexkull and his positing of the umwelt
(i.e., an organism’s lived world), Harney (2015) wrote:
The environment is not a passive backdrop to the organism and its interests and pursuits,
but interacts dynamically with the organism by means of feedback. In short, the
environment means something to the organism. At a very basic ontological level,
organism and environment cannot be understood atomistically as separate entities, but
only relationally, that is to say in terms of dynamically changing relations of reciprocity
in nature. Nature, in other words, consists in relationships—it is a dynamic system of
interdependencies, not a collection of separate things. (p. 664)
As Harney (2015) articulated this new understanding of nature, it became clear that
natural beings have experience, preference, and orientation; that they partake in directed activity;
that those experiences matter for behavior, and that natural beings are, therefore, not Newtonian
objects deterministically bounding through space and time. This represents part of the reason
why Kauffman and Gare (2015) argued for getting past the world of cartesian dualism and
classical physics and incorporating phenomenology as a foundation of scientific inquiry.
Thompson (2007) explained that once scientists understand the crucial role that phenomenology
plays, they can no longer proceed without including it. The author continued that the heritage of
cartesian dualism must be seen finally for what it is: a false presupposition that mind and life
were ever divided and a restoration of lived phenomena to nature.
Considering the direction of the chosen literature, I deemed naturalized phenomenology
highly appropriate to this inquiry into psychic multiplicity and individuation. From this approach,
phenomenological inquiry and scientific inquiry appear interrelated and crucial to one another for
their mutual understanding. Through the conjunction of phenomenology and natural scientific
inspection, I believe a dialogical emergence of meaning occurs that would not be possible with
only one branch in focus. If naturalizing phenomenology englobes phenomena within nature
(Kaufmann & Gare, 2015), then it also restores phenomena to nature; that is to say, scientists can
no longer exclusively take nature as an abstract scientific object, but now must see it as a process
of being and becoming with inherent qualia. Phenomenology needs science (Kauffman & Gare,
2015), and according to Rosen (2015), natural science needs phenomenology. This claim also
corresponds to Strachan’s (2011b) position that soul is inherent to life processes. With soul
comes interior dimensions of experience (Hillman, 1975) and, hence, phenomenology. Aristotle
(1907) first posited the soul as inherent to life processes. Jung (1963/1970) maintained the anima
as the life principle, wherein there is a capacity for lively animation or the process of being
animated, and Hillman (1981) envisaged a restoration of soul to the world. However, Hillman
(1975) hesitated to naturalize the imaginal realm of the psyche. Instead, he moved more in the
direction of an imaginal participation that stands strictly in and for itself, seeming to share some
similarities with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction applied to the imaginal. However, I
suggest Jung’s position is arguably very compatible with naturalistic
phenomenology.
Naturalized phenomenology, therefore, offers a fitting approach and contribution that
resonates with Jung’s (1960/1975) understanding that “the separation of psychology from the
basic assumptions of biology is purely artificial because the human psyche lives in indissoluble
union with the body” (p. 92). This conclusion appears to result from the phenomenological
experience of being embodied along with the coordinated facts available through the study of
life, that the body has its particular structures and activities. This also has the effect of continuing
the dialogue of the spirit–matter continuum in Jungian psychology because “life is essential to
spirit, since its truth is nothing if it cannot live” (p. 250). Apparently, whatever spirit might be, it
makes if value known through life itself. In the Jungian sense, it remains debatable whether spirit
can be viewed as a metaphysical force. I will carefully explore this subject in Chapter 5. In any
case, spirit represents, at minimum, a psychic factor that elevates the instincts to an imaginal
numina, the conscious and meaningful realization of which is intrinsic to individuation (Jung,
1960/1975). Therefore, I suggest that bringing awareness to the lived body as a natural and
sociohistorical entity with all its disclosing modes of engagement and multiplicity of selfhood
potentially also evokes the meaningful realization of wholeness.
Reviewing the Hermeneutic Approach and Method
Zimmerman (2015) explained hermeneutics as a process of understanding through which
meaning reveals itself as an irreducible wholeness nestled within particular contexts.
Hermeneutic scholars regard interpretation as an always occurring implicit preunderstanding that
is also capable of becoming explicitly, but only partially, articulated. As traditionally conceived,
Zimmerman said hermeneutics involves the interpretation of texts, which was central to my
dissertation. The hermeneutic approach also relates deeply to phenomenology, as reviewed in the
earlier section. According to Zimmerman, scholars in the phenomenological tradition, in
alignment with hermeneutics, have conveyed that humans are interpretive beings who are always
situated within an embedded context of meanings. I consider the following succinct outline of
hermeneutics a continuation of what has so far been established by both phenomenology and
hermeneutics.
Rennie (2012) pointed out that a qualitative hermeneutic research method involves
demonstrative rhetoric. As opposed to sophistry, qualitative researchers using demonstrative
rhetoric “argue on the side of their understandings” (p. 391), which is to say they authentically
submit their views and illustrate their reasoning. Moreover, they work as reflexive researchers
who name their own biases and preferred viewpoints and, in effect, invite the reader to engage
with the content in whatever way suits them. Demonstrative rhetoricians draw out examples and
invoke arguments on that basis. Rennie (2012) wrote:
This work involves noticing something in a text; educing the meaning of what has caught
attention; conceptualizing it whether as a category, theme, or structure, and so forth;
treating the theme as a modified abduction; and testing the abduction through the
theorematic deduction and ensuing induction that the abduction in turn modifies (p. 392).
Rennie (2012) first mentioned the acts of noticing and drawing something out from a text.
The mere act of noticing and the subsequent bringing forward of a passage to a reader represents
a thoroughly hermeneutic act, given that it involves an implicit attraction and interpretation.
Educing refers to the process of drawing out a potential but perhaps not always obvious meaning,
the making explicit of an implicit notion. As a modified abduction, the hermeneut has now
presented a possible or probable conclusion from the graspable latent meanings embedded in the
text. They can then make a syllogistic argument that supports their interpretation and furthermore
opens the text into a wider context with new latencies and potential meanings. I suggest this last
act delivers the process over to the hermeneutic circle because the holistic context and its
questions, speculations, and answers continue to be born out of one another (Zimmerman, 2015).
Rennie (2012) explained that hermeneutic research generally has an unspecified and
widespread application. While historically applying the method to the interpretation of texts,
Rennie said the meaning of the word “text” can refer generally to life situations beyond written
words. I suggest this is because in many fields of study and experiential variety, life, in general,
lends itself to the contextual interpretation of hermeneutics. Rennie went so far as to say that
hermeneutic research is an all-encompassing methodology.
Having concluded the literature review, I now turn to the details of the ensuing research
approach and methodology. I show, given the foregoing review of phenomenology and
naturalized phenomenology intrinsic to my approach, that hermeneutics encompassed my subject
matter and rhetoric as an approach and a method. I also clarify that the naturalized
phenomenology connection is intrinsic to my ontological assumptions.
Chapter 3: Research Approach and Methodology
Research Approach
The research approach I used while discussing psychic multiplicity and individuation was
hermeneutic (i.e., interpretational), phenomenological with the ontology of a naturalized
phenomenology (i.e., considering felt experience as it appears to consciousness connected to life
processes), and interdisciplinary (i.e., bridging other disciplines toward a coherent dialogue with
depth psychology). The approach and methodology used herein cohere with depth psychological
commitments and are potentially regenerative to perspectives within the field of depth
psychology. Phenomenology closely relates to hermeneutics and tends to highlight the
experience of being in the world. Depth psychologists Nelson and Coppin (2017) posited
phenomenology as a process that continuously entails the implicit apprehension of meaningful
wholes encountered in being. The interdisciplinary aspect of my research followed from
hermeneutics and phenomenology. I attempt to articulate salient connections and dialogues
between disciplines that emerged as meaningful and relevant in the context of the presented
perspectives. Importantly, I explored these research approaches within many of the ontological
and epistemological commitments of depth psychology as I have hermeneutically drawn them
from Jung.
A central ontological commitment in depth psychology involves the reality of the psyche
(Nelson & Coppin, 2017). As such, depth psychologists view the psyche as an epiphenomenon or
as the production of illusory experiences. Rather, they view the psyche as a reality. From this
ontological perspective follows the epistemological notion that knowledge of the psyche is based
on the experience or images of psychic phenomena (Jung, 1963/1970). Once again, this fits with
the above-cited review of the concepts of naturalized phenomenology and endoscience.
Importantly, the reality of the psyche needs no evidence other than experience. I deemed psychic
phenomenology as essential to my dissertation, and interpreting a phenomenology of psychic
experience represented a primary epistemological strategy. When discussing the
phenomenological insights of Merleau-Ponty, Nelson and Coppin (2017) claimed that “humans
are always situated in a perspective, always knowing the world in part through the momentary
perspectives they inhabit” (p. 152). These epistemological notions overlap considerably with the
chosen subject of psychic multiplicity. Images, affects, voices, states of being, perspectives, and
styles of consciousness all represent accessible experiences that lend themselves to a way of
knowing the psyche. This brings me to present my research methodology, which builds from the
reality of the psyche and the experience of the psyche through perspectival means.
Research Methodology
Given the diversity of writing on psychic multiplicity and individuation in my literature
review, my work necessarily involved hermeneutic processes in discussing relevant texts,
theories, and understandings. I carefully assessed different texts, coming from sometimes
different disciplines, and dialogued with them in my writing in a way that creates a robust
context and supports the conclusions I have drawn. By dialoguing with texts that draw different
conclusions from my own, I displayed my process of sense-making, allowing readers to engage
with their own process of interpretation. I included reflexive statements to make it clear what
conclusions I drew and any strong assumptions or biases. I have also stated openly when I lacked
answers to a problem or question. I brought forward salient discussions out of the texts based on
reasoning, logical analysis, and imaginal phenomenal presentation. I applied various forms of
logical reasoning where appropriate, as already outlined in my comments on demonstrative
rhetoric (Rennie, 2012).
As displayed in the literature review, I invoked many psychological theories on
multiplicity as it manifests in personality. This step adheres to the interdisciplinary approach to
my research. Importantly, many of the other psychologies I have introduced are
phenomenological in nature, with some differences from depth psychology but much
compatibility. Ultimately, all material I considered can be assimilated under the depth
psychological approach. Even quantitative conclusions are discussed insofar as they relate
(nonreductively) to the primacy of psychic experience. Given that I focused in this study on
theoretic postulates and their intrinsic argument structure and my interpretation of relevant
literature, I believe more qualitative and empirical research would be helpful to support and
challenge the strength of the ideas presented here. Nevertheless, I intended the scope of the
research to provide an adequate opening for new discussions in the field of Jungian depth
psychology.
Ethical Considerations
Given my hermeneutic methodology, I strove to frame the interpretive structure of my
study and my engagement with sources ethically. As such, I adhered to the most accurate
representation of literature possible. This involved making it clear what each author said in the
context of their writing and then offering clearly distinguished transitions to my interpretive
voice. This ensured I did not misrepresent or plagiarize the texts or make them into strawmen.
Further, I based the ethical foundation of this study in the building of relationships with
various texts. By treating the text as an other with its own distinct identity and relationship to
many individuals and communities, I cultivated a respectful dialogue with these sources and
honored their individuality and importance. I prioritized such respectful dialogue, and when I
disagreed with my sources, I did so with an openness that could lead to further dialogue rather
than creating a closed circle of decided ideas. Finally, in the spirit of ethical research, I aimed for
my perspectives to make a contribution to a field of depth psychology rich in ideas and to assist,
however modestly, in furthering insightful dialogue in the field.
Chapter 4: Subpersonalities as a Lived Dynamic
In this chapter, I address the following portion of the research question: “What happens if
subpersonalities are viewed as a viable theoretical replacement for traditional ego
consciousness?” The purpose of this chapter is to address that question and apply a more detailed
analysis of a multiple consciousness theory of subpersonalities in juxtaposition to traditional
Jungian depth psychology and archetypal psychology. Whereas the previous chapters provided a
general overview of the topic, this chapter offers a more thorough ontological and
epistemological discussion of subpersonalities as a consciously lived dynamic.
The Story So Far
Throughout the introduction and the literature review, I outlined several approaches to
psychic multiplicity. I continued to highlight multiplicities of consciousness as a viable
counterargument to other historically more monocentric views of consciousness, particularly
Jung’s. I used the term subpersonalities to represent these possible multiplicities of
consciousness. Importantly for Jung, a relatively monocentric view of consciousness did not
entail a monocentric view of the psyche as a whole. As presented, he posited a multiple psyche
via archetypes and complexes within the total wholeness of the Self. Yet, he used an unconscious
psyche as a conceptual structure containing that multiplicity. Conversely, I introduced the
possibility of subpersonalities as consciousnesses to explain human behavior and experience. I
invoked new questions about how individuation might occur in the context of such a multiple
consciousness. Thinkers such as Jung and Freud posited the status of an unconscious as a given
premise. I instead asked about the ramifications of a multiple consciousness in its place. This line
of inquiry raised questions about the nature of consciousness that differ from traditional Jungian
theory. To justify this exploration, I have provided arguments that might give multiple
consciousness, via the form of subpersonalities, a solid theoretical framework. I have aimed to
persuade the reader that a valid dialogue among experts exists within psychology and depth
psychology that makes revisiting psychic multiplicity and individuation a productive topic for
research. Within that research, I have introduced the possibility of subpersonalities being
consciousnesses and have questioned whether or not the ego complex is valid in theory or
practice. However, that question still deserves more thorough attention and scrutiny.
Subpersonalities in Place of a Single Ego Complex
Previously, I demonstrated that Jung positioned the ego complex as the center of
consciousness activities, the interior side of persona expressions, the central hub of self-reflective
emotional and cognitive states, the ongoing narrative self-identity, and the assimilation of other
complexes into consciousness insofar as they may affect behavior and conscious experience. I
have suggested, with support from the reviewed literature, that positing an ego complex as an
entity unto itself may be erroneous because it can equally and perhaps more effectively be argued
that subpersonalities interact with life directly without the mediation of a singular hub of
conscious identity. To further my arguments, I review and expand the connection between
subpersonalities and metacognitive faculties.
Metacognition and the Sense of I
With the aid of Kastrup (2021), I observed in Jung’s various texts that the ego complex
has an explicitly metacognitive connotation. By this, I mean it surrounds narrative identity,
executive planning, and action with self-referential capacities and self-awareness in the form of
sensing that one is an I who acts, perceives, and engages in activity. In the introduction, I argued
against metacognition as a reified noun or as the capacity of a single part of the psyche (i.e., a
privileged ego). As a crucial alternative, I proposed that metacognitive processes may be
accessible to different subpersonalities to varying degrees at different times, implying that
cognitive, memory, and attentional systems may be tools for the use of the different motivational
perspectives of subpersonalities10. This means that the conflation of metacognition and selfhood
may be mistaken. If metacognition is a verb rather than a noun, it may be something that certain
subpersonalities do rather than an identity unto itself. Accepting this position radically changes
the meaning of self-aware identity. Taking metacognition as a capacity rather than an identity
certainly poses problems for attempting to conflate a single ego consciousness with
metacognitive awareness, which Jung continuously demonstrated in his position.
Current researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology have explored
metacognition and general cognition in relationship to the concept of the self. Metcalfe (2021)
explained it is a matter of debate among researchers whether metacognitive functions, including
the sense of I-ness accompanying behavior, are controlled by a single locus in the brain or if they
are distributed and utilized by multiple monitoring systems. She concluded that current results
indicate “there may be separable neural underpinnings associated with the metacognitive
10 As outlined by Zwir et al. (2019), robust research has indicated there is also a multiplicity of
“dissociable systems of learning and memory” (p. 3858) that incorporate temperament and
character traits separately. Complex genetic-environmental “adaptive networks” are then
activated and formed via life-experience (p. 3870) that act as a catalyst for certain self-aspects to
come into functionally organized relations (p. 3,870). Klein and Gangi (2010) adumbrated
another perspective on the topic of the dissociability of cognitive and memory systems in a paper
called “The Self: As a Construct and Neuropsychological Evidence for its Multiplicity.” Again,
outlined research indicated multiple systems involved in cognition and memory. In this
dissertation I focused on the multiplicity of personality parts that overlaps with this but is
importantly different than the multiplicity of cognitive and memory systems. I have provisionally
suggested that different traits may have access to different layers of cognition and memory and
therefore may oscillate using different systems in altering contexts. Whatever is made of these
discussions and findings, it certainly brings a single ego complex for metacognitive functions
further into doubt at a scientific level. It also reinforces the point that multiplicity of the human
psyche and function presents a topic of great breadth.
monitoring of distinct object-level tasks,” and “rather than being a single Cartesian thinker it may
turn out that the self is a whole chorus” (p. 7). Metcalf’s reasoning displayed the multiple self-
parts being capable of using metacognitive capacities. I am partial to her conclusion that the self
is a chorus, indicating multiple psychic selves that have the capacity to emerge at the forefront of
attention, cognition, and behavior. Fadiman and Gruber (2020) would doubtless nod in approval
at Metcalfe’s comments based on the previously reviewed text, Your Symphony of
Selves. I suggest if metacognition functions as a multisystemic process facilitated by the chorus
(i.e., subpersonalities) of the self, the traditional Jungian ego may conceptually disintegrate as
consciousness unfurls into multiple selves.
Gazzaniga (2018) presented a multiplicity of consciousnesses that is inherent to modular
brain structure and connectivity. As mentioned in the introduction, he maintained that the idea of
a singular conscious self is an illusion constructed post hoc by the sense-making impulse inherent
to the human brain. Likewise, Eagleman (2011) suggested that the brain is a “team of rivals” (p.
101) that compete and cooperate in goal-directed behavior. This suggests that multiple selves are
involved in the perception of salience and motor output that drives behavior. Importantly,
Eagleman remarked that the activities typically referred to as behavior either did or did not
happen. For example, a person either did or did not take a walk at noon on May 24. However, the
psycho-perceptual inputs and interpretation that lead to that walk are driven by the team of rivals,
the multiple selves who all have a unique motivational position. These selves may work as a
team, and they also may compete for control over behavior. Eagleman illustrated his point by
asserting
There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each
competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can
accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling
yourself to do something. (p. 107)
To perform the internal argument asserted by Eagleman (2011), multiple parts of a
person’s self use metacognitive capacities. This action qualifies as metacognitive because it
involves the self-referential understanding of being an I and what I want and how I will get it,
versus another I or other Is performing the same functions to accomplish their goals. Because
human beings have the demonstrated tendency to weave their multiplicity into a post hoc
coherent story, a sort of amnesia often occurs that erases the awareness of multiple selves so that
the compulsive storyteller wired into the human brain can signal a unified self (Gazzaniga,
2018).
For example, if a person decides to take a walk at noon, they may construct an
interpretation after the fact that sounds something like this:
I was not sure if I would take a walk as the weather was gloomy, and I didn’t have an
umbrella. I decided the worst that could happen is I would get a little wet, and it would be
good for me to get the exercise because I had been lazy recently and my fiancé said I had
been gaining weight, and she was concerned.
This statement represents an attempt at justifying a behavior, a post hoc fabrication that
creates a coherent, unified story represented by a single self. According to the multiple-self
perspective demonstrated here, a more faithful statement might go as follows:
As the mellow part of me, I was dreading the walk and wanted to sit on the couch and
enjoy my favorite show. Getting wet is no fun anyway, and I’d rather relax. As the athlete
part of me, I was highly motivated to get in shape, and yet, as the lover of beauty, I just
wanted to enjoy the scenery. As still another part of me who is wild and free, I was
hoping it would rain because I enjoy getting wet and feel invigorated by the damp
coolness of the rain and the raw power of nature. The parts of me that wanted to walk
won and I was able to get the energy to override the hesitant part that wanted to stay
mellow.
Eagleman (2011) continued to use the example of being offered chocolate cake at a party
and being aware that one part of a person may want the cake while another part that is
monitoring a set of health-based agendas would rather not have it. I believe these are distinctly
separate Is with competing agendas, and as such, they may use metacognitive capacities to
achieve different ends. One can surely be aware of varied responses that could include: “I am
saying yes to eating this cake,” and “I would love some cake! Thank you,” or, “No thank you, I
am watching my weight,” or “Darn, I should not have had that cake!” Whatever the internal
narrative and accompanying behavior, it appears more than one subpersonality can
metacognitively think for themselves. Moreover, as mentioned previously, the idea that
metacognitive processes are not codified into a single identity shakes the very definition of the
ego complex. Psychic multiplicity may, therefore, amount to various conscious forces and centers
with degrees of access to metacognitive reflection within the greater field of consciousness that
comprises the whole human person.
Self-Multiplicity and its Diverging Theoretical Premises
Importantly, Hillman’s (1975) claims on multiplicity appear to diverge from those made
here, particularly because he would not ultimately place multiplicity within the wholeness of
human beings. Hillman warned against turning soul-making into humanism, explaining that by
doing so, “the real issue of feeling—discriminating among and connecting to archetypes—is
ignored” (p. 189). He argued humanism centers itself around fantasies of growth and well-being
that are beholden to only one archetypal perspective, whereas his psychology opens up to all
archetypal directions. Therefore, something in Hillman’s conception of the human stands
antithetical to psychic insight. Conversely, I argue for subpersonalities as a part of human nature
and consider them in potential service to the soul’s individuation. I explore Hillman’s concept of
the human in detail later in this chapter, distinguishing the present dissertation from archetypal
psychology.
Before considering Hillman’s (1975) nuanced antihumanistic multiplicity in more detail,
I want to further explore how notions of psychic multiplicity branch out in many directions.
Diverging theories of psychic multiplicity are abundant. In his assessment, Turner (2008/2021)
asserted that “concepts of self-fragmentation are themselves fragmented and confused by the
multitude of different disciplinary contexts in which they originate and evolve” (p. 4). Turner
revealed that self-multiplicity conceptions can be fraught with nuances that depend on the
respective ontological and epistemological inclinations of a given theorist. I explored some of
these nuances in the literature review and starkly demonstrated that when comparing to DST
largely culturally driven direction to a more biologically active version of multiplicity. Some
divergences in psychological multiplicity amount to subtleties that are a matter of emphasis more
than outright disagreement. Thinkers such as Lester (2010), Rowan (1990), and Redfearn (1985)
primarily explored the phenomenology of subpersonalities and how they are conspicuous as
intrapersonal and clinical observations. Others, such as Carter (2008), explored phenomenology
while also searching for scientific biological underpinnings to those facts.
I contend that many divergences in multiplicity psychology are not always radically
different at face value but can have major downstream consequences that eventually make the
differences much larger. For example, having reviewed biologically substantiated models of
psychic multiplicity, I found the range of differentiation between multiple-self models much
more subtle while still being impactful. I saw this when considering motivational systems in
evolutionary psychology (Del Guidice, 2018), which might tempt scholars to apply this
generalized model to subpersonalities. A theorist could simply assume universal principles of
evolution to categorize everyone’s subpersonalities as relatively the same. With motivational
systems, such as pair-bonding, aggression, security, status, and play, a theorist might wonder why
they might not simply list the categories for each individual and be done with it. However, this
view has major limitations when applied to individuals because a study of motivational systems
serves as a nomothetic model through which the theorist attempts to generalize human
multiplicity for the sake of understanding the major processes of human evolution as they are
applied to psychology.
Yet, evolution really does not manifest in generalities when it comes to organisms in and
of themselves. Every organism is unique, and no individual human represents the epitome of
natural selection (Mitchell, 2023. A great range of variability exists within which individual
personality differences can be viewed (Del Giudice, 2018). In my opinion, psychologists apply
the generalities post hoc by categorizing and grouping things together for conceptual learning
and understanding. The reviewed literature on unique genetic predispositions established that no
two human beings are alike and that personality traits are idiosyncratic (Barlow, 2019; Plomin,
2019; Strachan, 2011b). A therapist should not choose between these two models of multiplicity.
If they accepted universal principles, they would make assumptions about people’s
subpersonalities, and therapy would exclude uniqueness. However, the principles of evolution
serve as guiding ideas and not universally applicable rules because humans are all unique.
Adhering to this view illuminates the multiplicity manifested through unique genetic
predispositions and life experiences and, therefore, honors subpersonalities for their authentic
one-of-a-kind existence. Therefore, even within a psychobiological model, nuances about the
nature of multiplicity can change applications and experiences of what it means to be multiple.
The investigation in this dissertation provides another adequate example of nuanced
premises of multiplicity having major downstream consequences. It may seem a relatively
isolated suggestion that subpersonalities interact and behave without the need for an ego
complex. But under scrutiny, the difference becomes more pronounced because the downstream
consequences of this pivot affect everything else in Jungian theory, leading to more difficult
follow-up questions. If an ego complex is superfluous, then theorists must ask why multiplicity
needs an unconscious psyche. If the unconscious is not needed, then questions arise about what is
meant by consciousness. If multiplicity serves as the engine of behavioral tendencies, then the
question arises of how an individual manages the unique, sometimes contradicting, impulses
coming from different subpersonalities to ensure a functional lifestyle. In fact, if multiplicity is as
rampant as I suggest, then the question arises of how people manage to function at all. Even
though I have approached some of these questions in this work and will continue to do so, I aim
to highlight how crucial one change of thinking can be to an entire theory that includes
multiplicity. More examples of theoretical divergence in understanding multiplicity emerge in my
exploration of Hillman’s (1975) imaginal perspective, which serves as a launch point for the
major arguments in this chapter.
Because I situated the present work within the field of depth psychology, I must further
differentiate Hillman’s approach to multiplicity. I believe Hillman’s position is eminent because
Hillman moved past traditional Jungian theory in ways that support the claims I make here. At
the same time, he offered counterpositions to my own, and exploring those refined the present
arguments. Additionally, important nuances in his work illuminate a path forward in addressing
my research question and helping me argue more clearly how the current dissertation emerges as
distinct from Hillman and Jung’s established positions.
Differentiating From Hillman’s Multiplicity
My arguments both differ from and resemble Hillman’s (1975) notion of multiple
consciousnesses. The similarity lies in the fact that a thoroughly multiple consciousness negates
the theoretical need for a centralized ego function. Hillman (1983/2021) eventually defined the
ego as an insufficient idea when he said, “I often say don’t use the word ‘ego,’ I’ve never seen an
‘ego.’ I don’t know what we’re talking about” (p. 8). Although Hillman (1962, 1975) still utilized
the ego concept in his earlier writings, he foreshadowed his eventual abandonment of the concept
in the following passage from Revisioning Psychology:
If human nature is a composite of multiple psychic persons who reflect the persons in
myths, then the experiencer is also in a myth. He or she is not one but many, a flux of
vicissitudes. A fixed recording center in their midst is the archetypal illusion of
selfidentity. (p. 117)
Accordingly, the narrative of a single identity in consciousness (i.e., an ego complex)
presents a dubiously constructed artifact confounded by a multiple consciousness suffused with
psychic persons. However, Hillman’s (1975, 1983/2021) approach differs from what I assert
because even as he articulated multiplicity as a human being’s natural heritage, he ultimately
committed to de-humanizing psychic multiplicity into impersonal movements of a strictly
imaginal substrate. In other words, Hillman described the realm of the imaginal as independent
and as more important to multiplicity than that of human life. In my view, Hillman appeared
more concerned with the aesthetics of the imaginal realm of archetypes than he was with the
functional multiplicity of humanity. Conversely, I tried to establish subpersonalities as a
psychogenetic reality, therefore having substantial implications for human lives.
Relevantly, variability exists in which the concept of impersonal might be used, and
Hillman’s use may differ in some respects from Jung’s. First, I should mention the way Hillman
and Jung’s positions resemble one another. They both use the concept in contradistinction to a
monolithic position in normative human consciousness. In part, I contend Jung’s (1953/1966)
archetypes are impersonal because they are alien to the ego complex that is subsumed in what he
would classify as the personal domain of the psyche. He corroborates this in his statement that
the experience of the archetype is the “primordial experience of the nonego” (p. 78). For Jung,
this entails an experience that penetrates the depth of the psyche in ways that disrupt the
homeostasis of habitual consciousness and cannot be said to belong to the ego complex. Here, he
conflates the non-ego with the impersonal domain of the psyche. Moreover, for Jung
(1953/1966), personal appears to mean all that which comes with conscious life experience after
birth. For Hillman (1983/2021), however, I contend archetypes are impersonal because they are
alien to the human. He characterized archetypal psychology as having an “impersonal
profundity” (p.63). because the archetypes are nonhuman and transcendent imaginal factors. The
key similarity between Jung and Hillman in this regard involves the fact that the impersonal is
characterized as consisting of certain psychic powers that are alien to a coagulated position in
normal human consciousness. Later, I explore in more detail how similar Hillman’s concept of
human may be to Jung’s notion of the ego complex. For now, I believe it is sufficient to say that
insofar as the Jungian ego and the Hillmanian human are inextricably tied up with the personal,
archetypes operate as impersonal forces.
However, I contend another layer to the impersonal nature of Jungian archetypes. Here,
Hillman appears to split from Jung because Jung’s archetypes precede life experience, and he
often described them as inherited (Jung, 1959/1969). These points place Jung within the
framework of evolutionary ideas. Jung (1953/1966) summarily expressed his reasons for
devising a system in which there is a personal and impersonal element to the psyche, and this is
owed primarily to the factor of inheritance of a priori psychic dispositions. Archetypes function
as inborn priming factors that predispose patterns of psychic life as they eventually manifest
through lived experience or complexes and become known through psychic images (Jung,
1953/1966, 1959/1969). Jung (1953/1966) also referred to the impersonal as synonymous with
transpersonal precisely because it historically transcends the life experience of an individual
person. In this sense, Jungian archetypes and modern views of genetic personality predispositions
share the common thread that they are given prior to an individual’s life experiences, later
becoming an important factor in the realization of those experiences. Goodwyn (2010) made a
similar observation that Jung’s model of the a priori archetype corresponds reasonably well in its
presuppositions for behavioral tendencies with some of modernity’s wellestablished
understandings of biologically innate motivational systems. Although, in an important difference,
personality traits are idiosyncratic and not universal like archetypes.
Hillman’s (1975) use of dehumanizing appears to be a qualitatively different impersonal
approach from those just described. As distinguished from an a priori psycho–biologic
characterization of archetypal dispositions, Hillman stripped the psyche from the human
organism and performed what archetypal writer Robert Avens (1984/2003) called an imaginal
reduction. The imaginal reduction may be partially understood in Hillman’s approach to images,
which entails sticking with an image as it appears and allowing it to present its own meaning
through the careful perception of its aesthetic qualities (Hillman, 1977, 1992/2014). Avens
(1984/2003) connected this approach to phenomenology, which also involves being attentive to
phenomena as they occur in all their intrinsic salience. Husserl’s (2014) concept of
phenomenological reduction, or the epoche, appeared to me as the precursor to this hybridized
imaginal reduction. As elucidated in the literature review, phenomenological reduction requires
the individual to bracket their assumptions and prior knowledge while allowing a phenomenon to
present itself on its own terms. Hillman asserted this means images are imbued with selfadhering
meaning, requiring no analytical extraction for engaging their significance. He preferred this
approach to analysis of symbolism or archetypes as an abstract theme or as a noumenal
counterpart to imaginal experience.
This also means, to Hillman, that nonhuman images provide the basis for all life’s
activity, a point which becomes important in further paragraphs (Hillman, 1962/1972, 1975,
1989). He partly claimed this because he felt that the term “human” came to mean “humane,”
which fails to incorporate the “misanthropy that is also human” (Hillman, 1975 p. 188). In other
words, concepts of modern humanity failed to incorporate the human’s shadow into its
selfdefinition. This argument appears to arise from Hillman’s (1975) insistence on pathologizing,
which is to say, following the imaginal realm into the suffering of the soul, which may present
itself in any number of violent and grotesque images. Moreover, Hillman (1975) rejected the
Aristotelian identification of psyche and life and instead saw the fantasy of life as secondary to
the imaginal field of powers that instantiates humans’ ideas about life. Therefore, he rejected the
notion that “we locate the Gods within us or believe we make them up as projections of human
needs” (Hillman, 1975, p. 209). Here, Hillman shifts his understanding of the psyche in such a
way that human beings, as distinct individual entities, become secondary to imaginal reality. The
psyche is not, therefore, a part of human nature; rather, fantasies about human nature function as
just another psychic fantasy. I think the above quote shows a certain nonmetaphysical psychic
externality to Hillman’s work. It appears he attempted to reconfigure the ontological roots of the
world by positing world as psyche (i.e., anima mundi), which in his writing overrides the
selfcontained inwardness of an individual psyche and even abolishes its validity. In fact, the
question of the individual’s human psyche seems obstructive to his aim to re-vision psychology.
By reducing psychic activity to nonhuman images, human beings cease to be vessels for psychic
multiplicity. Rather, they become infinitesimal agencies surrounded by and at the mercy of a
pantheon of impersonal gods and goddesses. Readers may observe that this notion of human
consciousness begins to sound reasonably similar to the Jungian ego complex.
Yet, unlike Jung, Hillman (1975) asserted that an a priori or impersonal psychic structure
has no biological or otherwise human meaning but takes on an imaginal form wherein the images
and myths of the psyche themselves comprise the ontological bedrock of all systems of thought
and movements of life. Even when Hillman (1996/2017) invoked behavioral genetics, he did so
as a fantasy image of a Daimonic force that grips the psyche, and he rejected the literalism of
genetic psychology. Thus, fantasies or images offer modes of involvement at the root of all
behaviors, perceptions, and activities, and they themselves constitute all epistemic valences. In
accordance with the archetypal sensibility, fantasies are best understood by reverting to
polytheistic gods and goddesses (Hillman preferred Ancient Greek polytheism), which serve as
impersonal Daimonic entities that transcend the limited psychic aperture of modern humans.
Consequently, Hillman (1975) spoke of soul-making for images, ideas, and archetypes but
expressed less interest in such interventions for humans.
In trying to understand psychic activities in terms of biological antecedents (or any
antecedents other than the imaginal itself), Hillman (1975) only indicated that a fantasy image
insists on such a position. Furthermore, he held that to propitiate a generative psychology, people
should pursue the images themselves rather than their arguments or self-coagulating positions, or
rather than assimilating them to a human style of consciousness. The outcome of this movement
appears in Hillman’s critique of traditional Jungian individuation and in his dissatisfaction with
humanistic psychology, both concepts that he deemed too centered around fixed notions of
human identity and a moralization of the psyche’s activities. Therefore, although Hillman put
forward multicentered views of consciousness, he wished not to confine the archetypal
imagination to human-centered narratives, human sciences, or humanistic visions of growth.
Conversely, because I argue subpersonalities represent crucial aspects of the fabric and
movement of the psyche, and because I have articulated that psyche as being part and parcel of
human existence, I proffer a somewhat different view of multicentered consciousness than
Hillman. I see no conflict in accepting human organisms as simultaneously psychic and biologic,
entailing no dualism or irreconcilable contradictions. I affirm the possibility that organismic
activity is psychic activity (not necessarily the other way around because the absolute limits of
psyche are unknown). I detailed this in my research approach, citing a restoration of
consciousness to nature.
Moreover, in my view, Hillman (1975) contradicted himself by strongly suggesting that
true “human nature is a composite of multiple psychic persons” (p. 177), and at the same time
rejecting the notion of human as too literalistic and nonimaginal. He stated that “man is not large
enough to possess his psychic organs” (p. 173) and that it is a human’s job to “care for the
psychic persons entrusted to (their) stewardship” (p. 175). Here, Hillman sought the archetypal
core of each psychic activity and showed he believed these do not belong to human individuals,
nor do they adhere strictly to any psycho–biologic proclivities. Hillman defined them as persons,
goddesses, and gods of the imaginal realm, an ontological category in and of itself. These quotes
align with the ambivalence in the text about what the term human means. On one hand, Hillman
broadened understanding of what humanity is (i.e., a great multiplicity of psychic persons), but
on the other, he rejected moral humanism and the identification of psychic multiplicity with
living beings or individuals.
If psychic multiplicity accurately characterizes humanity’s natural condition (Hillman,
1983/2021), I can unambiguously suggest a much more inclusive framework of what it means to
be human. Moreover, if multiplicity is humanity’s natural condition, I question the purpose of
Hillman’s polemics against the notion of a human psyche as a strategy of extolling a multiple
psyche in its place. I contend that if a human is a multiplicity, then the psyche and its multiple
persons are not inhuman or impersonal in the sense that Hillman implied. Rather, this fact would
make all movements of the psyche deeply personal to humanity and its natural polymorphous
condition. I might be justified in questioning whether Hillman may have overlooked the
implications of his own assertions. Yet perhaps this line of criticism only obscures Hillman’s
(1975) intended message by partaking in the very literalisms he abhorred by literalizing his
notion of dehumanization. For example, he acknowledged that his “aim of dehumanizing
conceals an attempt to rehumanize in another, more classical sense of ‘human’” (p. 193). Here,
he clearly attacked what he took as a fallacious construct, a vision of what the term human may
have come to mean in modernity as the human concept was constricted to limited values and
monolithic perspectives.
However, in my estimation, Hillman (1975) reified the same premise he wished to
abdicate, circuitously validating what he claimed was an insufficient characterization of humans
through his very counterarguments. By equating the psychic and the imaginal as nonhuman and
far beyond the tangible grasp of human life, Hillman only reinforced a definition of human
nature that he claimed to reject. In making the imaginal and archetypal dimension the realm of
the “daimon,” which is “inhuman” and “demands human service” (p. 175), he again defined and
restricted the human precisely in the way he disfavored. Consequently, the human agent again
becomes that limited single center of consciousness that many assume is the one-and-only I, the
single-self assumption (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020) for conscious human life. He arguably reified,
however unintentionally, a single ego complex for conscious human life, which he purported did
not even exist, that he claimed was a mere illusion (Hillman, 1975). This reification appears in
his treatment of gestalt psychotherapy, where he says the practitioner feels oneself into each of
the persons in a dream or fantasy, acknowledging that yes, this too is mine. By identifying with
their feelings, they become my feelings, thereby assigning the autonomous images that are not
mine straight to the ego. (p. 38)
Hillman (1975) asserted that in gestalt dream work, an ego merely plays the roles of
deeper aspects of the psyche. In my view, this amounts to a categorical error. If each human
being is, in reality, a multiple consciousness, the dreamer in the exercise may not be an ego
simply playing the roles of different psychic persons. The multiple dream figures would then
need no conceptual ego intermediary to be subordinate to in terms of conscious qualities and
intensity. Those psychic persons may be quite capable of speaking for themselves through the
course of gestalt therapy, just as they indubitably do in the dream. My previous claims on
subpersonalities being able to use metacognitive capacities support this notion because those
subpersonalities can experience themselves as their own I with complex self-referential thoughts
and feelings. The above passage belies a major premise in Hillman’s claim. He assumed that the
oneself, the mine, and the my exist as possessive terms that belong to the subject of a singular
ego, which he then conflated with his definition of human. Hillman wrote in such a way that
human and ego become synonymous. When Hillman placed the psyche’s rich multiplicity outside
of the human, he only reinforced the human as homogenous and unidimensional; a single ego
complex solidified and even expanded to the entirety of human life.
Moreover, Hillman (1975, 1983/2021) expressly and repeatedly posited multiple persons
in consciousness and described a human as a collection of such persons. Yet, in Revisioning
Psychology, he may have tried to have it both ways by retaining the ego as the heroic stance of
habitual human consciousness and simultaneously decentering and challenging its illusionary
monolithic status. I question how he could speak of an ego as if the term continued to have any
meaning in this multiple consciousness, where the ego had been reduced to a complex among
other complexes (Hillman 1975). As I argue in more detail later, an ego concept may not have
any footing as an idea in a multiple model of consciousness. If, as Hillman stated, humanity is a
multiple consciousness, and the ego as such is an illusion, “a fixed recording center… the
archetypal illusion of self-identity” (p. 117), then Hillman only supported the illusion he wished
to dissipate by defining his counterposition in contrast to it. As previously cited, Hillman
(1983/2021) rejected the concept of the ego altogether, leaving room for new interpretations of
archetypal psychology’s movements and ramifications. Importantly, criticism is always easier in
hindsight, and in my view, Hillman’s shift away from a traditional Jungian understanding of ego
consciousness toward a more polymorphous consciousness amounted to a move that was nothing
less than radical and pioneering for his time.
I assert that Hillman’s (1975) concept of dehumanization may represent an overcorrection
to traditional monotheistic consciousness, which has the implacable tendency to calcify one-
sided values to bolster a certain agenda for humankind (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020). Researchers
have construed Christian monotheism, for example, as at odds with internal selfmultiplicity in
many respects (Turner, 2008/2021). According to Turner (2008/2021), this traces back to St.
Augustine’s personal observation of his own multiplicity, which was regarded as pathological
and undesirable by his account. Consequently, pathologizing may underlie the modern belief that
disunity is inherently problematic. Moreover, Turner claimed that Christian theology’s
attachment to ideas of internal unity and selfsame identity was largely rooted in the doctrine of
imagoe Dei, which entails that humans are made in the image of a unified God. Hillman (1975)
said: “Because our minds have been monotheistically prejudiced we forget to see things through
other colors of the pluralistic spectrum. Polytheism, which many call a heresy, implies a radical
relativism” (p. xxi). As such, the monotheistic perspective has historically buttressed its value
orientations and codified them as sacred laws and unassailable truths, rather than relative
positions of value. Hillman sought to destabilize the monotheistic tendency to solidify
perspectives into privileged realities by insisting on the polymorphous imaginal ground of
existence, which he characterized as the embrace of an extreme form of relativity. In my
estimation, such an extreme relativity constitutes precisely what Hillman offers. Although
eminently sensible in the context of cultural and personality differences, the consequence of such
relativistic thinking, taken to the extreme, appears to be that nothing substantial or moderately
objective can be said about the shared world. Rather, individuals can only reflect on images or
fantasies as styles of apprehension, all being equally valid as positions of understanding.
Naturally following that premise, Hillman admonished his reader against the literal
understandings offered by science and culture because he saw them as relative archetypal values
that had been calcified and presented as absolutes.
Contrastingly, I prefer to view perspectival multiplicity as a pervasive phenomenon at
work within physics, biology, psychology, and society, and I believe it need not rob individuals
of having some formidable knowledge of their shared world and its processes (however limited,
relative, and intersubjective such knowledge may be in the final analysis). As elucidated by
Harney (2015) in her analysis of C.S. Pierce and Merleau-Ponty, the process of empirical inquiry
and relational disclosure allows individuals to posit the “hypothetical status of the real” (p. 668).
Her choice of phrasing is partial to a phenomenological understanding of science, which she
made reliable and robust through conscious interrelatedness, dialogical processes, and
experiential inquiry, instead of relying on Kantian intangibles. Kaufmann and Gare (2015)
characterized this new paradigm’s ramifications in the following way:
The convergence of naturalized phenomenology and endophysics not only transcends
Cartesian dualism, it also transcends Idealism and more importantly, as far as science is
concerned, the form of objectivism that identifies true knowledge with a logico
mathematical order that denies reality to temporality and emergence and thereby to life
and mind. (p. 236)
Mending the conceptual divide between subjective consciousness and objective science
enables an understanding of science as a semirelative process to emerge, illuminating the
scientific method as the disclosure of knowledge to explicit consciousness. This version of the
scientific method allows scholars to inductively perceive the operant designs of a shared world
from a particular vantage point in a greater ecology of relatedness. I believe that the dialogical
emergence of knowledge bespeaks of more than imaginal impulses disconnected from physical
reality; rather, it discloses discernable patterns of life that are approximate understandings of
existing phenomena brought into creation by relational dynamics. Therefore, the ontological
premises in my arguments are rather distinct from Hillman’s. Having made this and other pivotal
distinctions, I now turn to subpersonalities as they engage human life via consciousness. In this
exploration, I maintain the multiple consciousness perspective with a different, more human
foundation.
Multiple Subpersonalities in Human Consciousness
In the literature review, I aimed to establish that each subpersonality within a human may
take center stage of perceptual activity, motor activity, emotion, cognition, or attention at any
given moment of a person’s life. A subpersonality may also share the stage with others as they all
compete and cooperate in controlling of psychic preferences, and perceptions. This process
generates behavioral manifestations. Eagleman’s (2011) example of a person deliberating over
whether to eat cake at a dinner party exemplifies this process. Whichever subpersonalities seize
control of the energy in the human system will mobilize and achieve their desired behavior (i.e.,
cake or no cake).
Within this theoretical proposition, the proactively conscious behavior of subpersonalities
renders the notion of a single semistable nexus at the center of consciousness (i.e., an ego
complex) superfluous. This argument against the ego complex hinges on uncovering multiple
distinct psychic drives and motives in and through conscious activity. Recalling Ogilvy’s (1975)
argument, considering the human body and its various centers of activity suggests that functional
multiplicity exists. Moreover, Del Giudice’s (2018) description of motivational systems
suggested the always shifting ecological and social milieu of the human species has required the
development of various psychological modes of interaction. Evidence has shown that some of
these evolved psychosomatic capacities may even operate at cross purposes (e.g., aggression and
social bonding). In examining these diverse forces within humans, I returned to Jung’s
(1956/1967) views of the Self as a coincidentia oppositorum, which appears in his expository
pantheon of diverse archetypal imagoes. He may have considered some of those archetypes as
opposites of a whole, emphasizing entirely different psychic factors and motives. McGilchrist
(2021) referred to these opposites as di-poles, because, like Jung, he saw them as two sides of a
whole picture. Although Jung often proffered the psyche in terms of oppositions and apparent
contradictions, Hillman (1983/2021) believed construing psychic multiplicity into oppositions
belied a monotheistic predilection, so he preferred to see it as a diversity. I am inclined toward
Hillman’s suggestion, given that intrapsychic diversity often occurs without a defining opposite.
For example, childlike play is not the opposite of parental warmth; they are merely diverse
positions of engagement.
The literature review showed arguably functional, plausible, and necessary reasons why
diverse subpersonalities might exist within a whole person. A highly complex organism must
have semiautonomous systems and capacities that can perform specific and general functions or
roles or enact modes of interaction while not totally stultified or inhibited by other modular
functions (Gazzaniga, 2018). Partial dissociation of semiautonomous subpersonalities may,
therefore, enable functional complexity of psycho–behavioral capacities. Importantly, given the
ongoing heritable variation occurring through the course of evolution made explicit in the section
on behavioral genetics, I have emphasized unique subpersonalities for every human being. The
idea that a central agent holds consciousness together and assimilates complexes into
metacognitive performances may turn out to be an assumption.
To be fair, some psychological theorists have dealt with the arguably dubious claims of a
single-ego identity by instead positing multiple egos or ego positions. Berne (1961/2015)
presented ego states to represent the multiplicity of personality, and Bogart (1994) called
subpersonalities personae or personas. Moreover, in the progression of the psychoanalytic
tradition, theorists such as Bromberg (1996) have begun to use the language of self-states to
promote the multiplicity of conscious identities. In this sense, multiple egos become synonymous
with subpersonalities. However, I have declined to adopt terms such as “egos” or “ego states”
because, in my analysis, the history of the term ego carries too many connotations and meanings
that would dilute my position. The colloquial ambivalence with which many use the term
notwithstanding, ego has historically represented the unity of consciousness in a monolithic
vision of the one and only I.
The Historically Homogeneous Meaning of the Ego
The conflation of ego with unified consciousness or self-identity has appeared in my
previous examination of Descartes and Kant, who clearly articulated a vision of a unitary mind or
self that was eventually challenged by the advent of psychology and the unconscious
(arguably an inherently multiple psyche). Descartes (1641/1998) himself declared, “I am a thing
that thinks, that is to say, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is
ignorant of many things, wills, refrains from willing, and also imagines and senses” (p. 69). He
instantiates a singular I that corresponds with various activities and experiences, whereas I assert
there may be many Is; there may be one I that doubts while another affirms, one that understands
and another who misunderstands, one who denies while another accepts. Washburn (2012)
summarized Descartes’ position with great relevance, writing, “As an incorporeal substance, the
ego is the owner of consciousness because it is a thing of which consciousness is a power” (p.
195). Washburn suggested the ego has historically been posited as a homogenous agent and
proprietor of consciousness and all its contents. Descartes (1637/1998) himself explained that he,
as a thinking thing, was the perceiver of many things, seemingly through the senses. He added:
It is so obvious that it is I who doubt, I who understand, and I who will, that there is nothing by
which it could be explained more clearly. But indeed it is also the same “I”
who imagines . . . [and the same] “I” who senses. (p. 66)
Descartes (1641/1998) presented a monocentric I who perceives the transmissions of
bodily percepts and assimilates them into their own self-same identity structure. However, I
believe he incidentally mentioned his own multiplicity while addressing the subject of whether
any reality external to his own mind existed. He wrote: “as far as natural impulses are concerned,
in the past I have judged myself to have been driven by them to make the poorer choice when it
was a question of choosing a good” (p. 72). He essentially argued that he could not be quick to
trust his experience of a real external world because his experiences had betrayed him in the past.
Yet, I think his illustration reveals an opening to psychic multiplicity that may have been
underexamined in his philosophical position. In these lines, the homogenous cartesian I now
confronts the category of natural impulses, which, instead of being a part of the self, appears as if
distinct and separate from the self. This position would align with a dualist view that objectifies
the body and its desires as separate from the ego. Descartes wrote as if the natural impulses were
some distinct object of the psyche’s perception rather than a subject of their own, which
regrettably influenced his single I. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) provided a strong
counterargument to this idea by asking, if bodily percepts are “merely objects among objects
beneath the gaze of the genuine I, then how can we ever merge with our own body?” (p. 215). If
the ego is a separable unity, it remains a question how anything embodied can have any meaning
or directive for consciousness. Indeed, I wonder how these impulses can overwhelm Descartes if
he is not, in some sense, an embodied multiple self. It is easy to see here some very nascent
parallels to Jung’s (1960/1975) more psychologically sophisticated position, in which he asserted
unconscious contents and complexes can subtly or drastically influence the ego. Even though my
interpretation opposes his position, I contend Descartes exemplified his own psychic multiplicity.
He revealed himself to have been confronted with and perhaps even driven by diverse impulses.
If I rephrased his comments in the context of multiple conscious subpersonalities rather than of a
single I, it would sound something like this: In the past, the judgmental and religious-seeking
parts of me condemned other parts of me and deemed them as immoral for their behaviors.
Unlike Jung, Descartes had no unconscious in his theory, leaving the ego alone to
comprise the self or the psyche. The generally accepted singular nature of cartesian selfhood and
its consciousness appears to have left little room for a multiplicity of selfhood in the formation of
the ego concept and onward. The singular self notion thematically developed from original
assumptions and came to be used in modernity. In essence, I make this claim because the ego
was, by definition, a single unified self, the very notion of multiple subpersonalities (or any
multiplicity) in consciousness confounds the premise from which the ego concept originated.
This leaves me with the conclusion that to avoid muddled contradictions, I should leave the ego
terminology behind when discussing models of multiple consciousness. Although some scholars
may wish to appropriate the term ego and evolve its meaning, I preferred to start with more
neutral and fertile terminology that was unencumbered by contradicting history. As such, I chose
the language of parts or subpersonalities. However, many sufficient terms exist, and a variety of
these have been stated in the literature review and introduction.
Given the prevalence of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, the advent of early
psychology posed a radical challenge to self-same assumptions about the human psyche.
Because consciousness had been widely established as a highly unified phenomenon (Kant,
1781/2007), I believe it is plausible that psychologists had to invent new language to explain the
obvious psychic multiplicity, intrapsychic conflict, and complexity portrayed in themselves and
their patients. Descartes (1641/1984) held that the psyche was entirely transparent to itself, that
all states of it were known by the one and only ego, the monocentric psyche. Early clinicians
obviously disagreed, as becomes clear with ideas as diverse as James’s (1987) notions on the
divided self, Freud’s (1949/1989) tripartite structure, Janet’s dissociative psyche (Fadiman &
Gruber, 2020), Jung’s (1959/1969) archetypal predilections, and many others who contradicted a
homogenous psyche. In a common thread among all of these positions, the psyche does not
function as totally unified and self-transparent to a single ego.
In my estimation, with the invention of the Freudian and Jungian unconscious,
psychology continued to reinvigorate the reality of psychic multiplicity, thus contradicting the
assumption that a single ego is tantamount to the entire psyche. Although Freud and Jung
broadened the scope of the psyche, they reinforced a narrow purview of consciousness, building
on the unfalsifiable assumption that a whole psychic world exists without consciousness.
Problematically, no introspective or scientific way exists through which to validate the notion of
an unconscious mind because the very nature of the idea unconscious denies epistemic access on
multiple fronts. Access is denied on the introspective front, given the obvious logical issue of
consciousness being unable to penetrate unconsciousness to prove its existence. Jung
(1959/1979) understood this dilemma well, qualifying the unconscious as that which is
psychically unknown and unknowable to consciousness. Moreover, access to or validation of a
psychic unconscious may remain scientifically impossible because psychologists can only
assume something may be unconscious. They currently have no objective measurements to
thoroughly inculcate subjective landscapes. Perhaps even more importantly, in the context of a
phenomenal definition of consciousness, meaning that consciousness entails any qualia (i.e., a
feeling of something that it is like to be) whatsoever, the phrase “unconscious psyche” is an
oxymoron because for something to be psychic, it also must exist as having some interior feeling
sense (Kastrup, 2021). In sum, for multiple reasons I cannot deny conscious experience to any
parts of the psyche, just as I cannot definitively deny consciousness to other animals,
microorganisms, or even their subordinate cellular constituents.
Regarding my choice to use the term multiple consciousness instead of the unconscious, I
hope I made a clear point by highlighting Jung’s focus on metacognition, narrative identity, and
dependence on the notion of the ego complex, which I attempted to argue against as an actual
entity. Earlier, using a review of Jung (1960/1975) and Kastrup’s (2021) work on
metaconsciousness/metacognition versus a phenomenal consciousness, I showed that I was
operating under the more global definition of phenomenal consciousness, from the philosophy of
mind. By doing this, I did not aim to make what Jung called the unconscious irrelevant. Rather, I
sought to change the language so completely as to include his work on the total psyche in a more
globally defined consciousness. By changing the definitions, I aimed to make the psychic
territory he mapped amenable to a new look at subpersonalities and individuation. In this sense,
the creative powers of the psyche, such as the visions, dreams, and nightmares found in Jung’s
(2009) The Red Book, would all become part of a wholly phenomenal definition of
consciousness.
Earlier, I reviewed Jung’s (1960/1975) "The Unconscious as a Multiple Consciousness,"
which appeared in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. I intended this review to lead
naturally into this area of reexamining the nature of consciousness. In this section, Jung
concluded that the unconscious may be seen as a certain multiple consciousness. However, he
found that idea unsatisfying because he viewed the ego complex as so qualitatively different that
it alone could be said to maintain consciousness proper (i.e., metacognition). Yet, because I
designed so much of my argument to question the validity of a single ego complex, when
removing it I felt it logically necessary to view the whole psyche as a whole multiple
consciousness, given that there may be no single metacognitive center that holds consciousness
together. I meant to portray metacognition as a process that the multiple subpersonalities of the
psyche perform rather than a fixed ego entity.
Regarding a phenomenal approach to consciousness, scientifically satisfying ways to
approach consciousness may prove irreconcilable in principle. Thompson (2010) suggested this
problem reveals that the principles themselves are flawed, tracing errors back to subject–object
distinctions. As elucidated by Kastrup (2019), current scientific methodologies fall short in
measuring consciousness or the experiential components of a given organism or microorganism.
If scientists cannot measure where consciousness begins or ends, they also cannot posit the
boundaries or even the existence of true unconsciousness within living beings. Consciousness
“resists easy measurement” (Strachan, 2011b, p. 4), a difficulty philosopher Chalmers (1996)
framed as the hard problem of consciousness. Chalmers pointed out the difficulty of
understanding and proving how subjective experiences arise from or are tightly correlated with
objectively measurable biological or cognitive processes. The author summed up the hard
problem of consciousness by apprehending the tension between mechanism and experience. For
example, scientists may articulate the brain mechanisms behind how certain complex cognitive
functions occur, but they have yet to uncover why those mechanisms and functions should be
accompanied by experience. Again, under the previously discussed definition of phenomenal
consciousness, this question characterizes consciousness, at minimum, as something with a felt
sense of experience. Jung’s (1960/1975) little luminosities qualify as conscious under that
framework, which is why I argue that removing the ego complex makes the whole psyche a
multiple consciousness.
Although some psychologists and scientists may be content to use unconsciousness as a
working concept, I do not have the same confidence or inclination. In my view, psychologists
may never behold an unconscious process and, therefore, validate its existence, so I can more
reasonably submit the notion of multiple consciousnesses, which may have different degrees of
cognitive access and recall capacity at any given moment. This would mean subpersonalities are
suffused in every moment of human experience, and within each of those moments, some
subpersonalities naturally have more physiological, emotional, and cognitive command over
perception and behavior. In other words, multiple subpersonalities may inhabit the same human
body, just as many autonomous bacteria species flourish in the human gut. I have offered
positions on consciousness that define it as globally diffused and dissociable as a basic process of
organismic activity. By doing this, many conceptual problems may be alleviated, granting that in
no way has any ultimate truth been proven, rather a position argued. With a global consciousness,
psychologists can avoid having to choose an arbitrary cut-off point where some organisms or
subaspects of organisms are deemed conscious and others are not.
Zemach (1986) argued for what he called multiple consciousness theory instead of an
unconsciousness theory, in which he defined a human as a bundle of conscious selves that have
relative positions of control and power over perception and behavior. He distinguished this
concept from the Kantian assumption that a unifying force must merge disparate contents and
instead assumed the disparate contents themselves consist of consciousness. Although Zemach
made more conservative assumptions regarding how deep consciousness goes in organisms, I
agree with his notion of multiple conscious selves because it naturally follows from the removal
of the ego complex as a valid premise. Moreover, with a good theory of dissociation,
psychologists can posit that certain centers of consciousness are dissociated from one another
and, therefore, at times unable to access each other’s contents (Kastrup, 2019). In other words,
subpersonalities might have different degrees of dissociability from one another. If centers of
consciousness can be partially or radically dissociated from one another, then what Jung
traditionally referred to as unconsciousness could possibly just represent other consciousnesses
aside from the consciousness speaking or writing on the matter at a given moment.
As mentioned, Jung (1959/1978) labeled activity that is unknown to consciousness as
unconscious psychic activity. However, I find this reasoning to be circular because the
monocentric ego-enabling definition of consciousness is already embedded in the premise that
merely repeats itself in the conclusion (i.e., the ego is the center of consciousness, those things
that are unknown to the ego are unconscious because the ego does not know them). Jung’s
reasoning raises the question of what aspect of the psyche is granted the province of knowing and
for what reason. I also find it unclear what forms of knowing cannot be distributed across
different parts of the psyche or what happens if one subpersonality knows something that another
does not. I wonder why one or another part of the psyche should be structurally nested in a
conceptual unconscious when they may, in fact, just have qualitatively unique consciousnesses.
I understand that because unconsciousness has not been proven to exist, psychologists
equally cannot prove whether consciousness is present under certain conditions (e.g.,
ethnologists may argue about consciousness and its validity in different life forms).
Consequently, I acknowledge I am also working with assumptions. Yet, even Jung (1960/1975)
conceded that his observations of the unconscious psyche were only relative and often suggested
that what he called unconscious may really be a multiple consciousness, which naturally belies
the validity of true unconsciousness, especially if rejecting the ego complex as a valid premise.
However unavoidable certain assumptions are, I believe that the working premise of multiple
consciousness as a global phenomenon with dissociable centers in biological entities carries with
it more robust reasoning and less internal contradictions. In other words, subpersonalities in
consciousness may turn out to be more intellectually parsimonious and robust than positing an
ego complex for consciousness and an unconscious for multiplicity.
The Ego Complex and Parsimony
Spade and Panaccio (2019) credited William of Ockham with introducing Ockham’s
razor to philosophy. In the principle of Ockham’s razor, Ockham stated that when something
requires explaining, a person should make the explanation as simple as possible without
oversimplifying. Many have credited William of Ockham with the declaration, “entities should
not be multiplied beyond necessity,” although he apparently never wrote those exact words
(Spade & Pannacio, 2019). However, the phrasing accurately represents the underlying principle,
which entails a process of critical thinking through which individuals attempt to explain
phenomena with the least amount of postulations possible. Ultimately, the principle means that if
a person manages to robustly but parsimoniously account for a topic under investigation, they
have likely provided a more reliable explanation of the topic than explanations that indulge
further postulates. However, Ockham’s razor does not represent a principle of intellectual
certainty; rather, it contains within it an epistemic humility that accounts for the limitations of
human reasoning, where individuals cannot be certain about what is or is not necessary (Spade &
Pannacio, 2019). Individuals can only do their best to argue parsimoniously within the confines
of what constitutes necessity within a given inquiry.
Psychologists such as Jung have long sought to explain how the psyche functions and
behaves, so I found it reasonable to assert that Ockham’s razor represented a suitable guiding
principle for this work. Regarding the question of multiplicity and individuation, I found it
equally relevant. On the other hand, if seeking not to explain the psyche’s functions and core
dynamics but rather to explore its qualities as enriching or gripping experiences as Jung and
Hillman also did, such a project may benefit from more descriptions and images as a heuristic for
knowing and embodying the psyche. Strict parsimony would fall short in a fully descriptive
mode of psychology such as Hillman’s imaginal approach or Jung’s active imagination because
the researcher in such investigations does not aim to provide structural theory; rather, they aim to
invoke psycho-affective contact with a given phenomenon or an unfolding of imagistic
possibilities. Therefore, such projects may benefit from many descriptive and imagistic inquiries
into a psychic event.
Given that my aim in this dissertation overlaps theoretical concepts and descriptive
phenomenology, Ockham’s razor arguably applied as a lens for refining how the psyche and its
subpersonalities may operate at a foundational level. Importantly, this does not mean I aimed to
strip subpersonalities of their qualitatively rich experiences. I don’t believe the full richness of
the psyche’s phenomenology is accessible by brute mechanisms and cold rationality. Rather than
describe the richness of psychic images and activity, I intend to illuminate the underlying
architecture of personality and its multiplicity, as well as the functioning of subpersonalities with
no traditional Jungian ego conception.
However, at this point, a reader might protest that positing an unspecified number of
subpersonalities is hardly parsimonious and question how I will apply Ockham’s razor to any
effect. I contend that positing an ego complex in addition to complexes, archetypes, and or
subpersonalities requires the addition of more structural components to the psyche and the
justification of why that is necessary. Conversely, if I could present a robust model of functional
psychic activity without an ego complex, then I would have applied the philosophical tool of
parsimony to great effect by taking an unnecessary proposition out, leaving only necessary
propositions (i.e., subpersonalities). In the present work, I have provisionally removed a
structural component, the ego complex, and asked if this produces a more robust or dynamic
understanding of the psyche and individuation. I do not claim that certain subpersonalities do not
acquire dominance over psycho-behavioral consciousness and, therefore, approximate something
like a coagulation and strengthening of self-identity and behavioral tendencies. In terms of
explaining human behavior, I believe positing subpersonalities without a reified ego complex is
as parsimonious as possible without being overly simplistic (I have tried to corroborate this with
the evolutionary concept of motivational systems in addition to other scientific constructs.).
Indeed, those who promote the single-self assumption (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020) have far more
to account for in terms of explaining human behavior than those who posit multiple selves or
psychic parts. Those in favor of a monolithic psyche must try to explain how a homogonous
psychic identity can produce the rich diversity of psycho-emotional experience and behavior
evident in humans. Moreover, they must explain the diverse motivational positions that
invariably emerge through the course of psychic experience. In an attempt to wield Ockham’s
razor, I propose subpersonalities comprise a necessary component for understanding psychic
perception and behavior, and the ego complex may not be needed. In making that assertion, I
now turn to the functional and phenomenological ramifications of subpersonalities as proactive
agencies in consciousness.
Subpersonalities Create Perceptual Worlds Infused with Salient Signals and Behavioral
Affordances
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), in rebutting the transcendental ego of Kant and Husserl via
reductio ad absurdum, wrote, “The entire system of experience—world, one’s own body, and
empirical self—is subordinated to a universal thinker, charged with sustaining the relations
among these three terms” (p. 215 ). Further on, he said:
Now, if one’s own body and the empirical self are merely elements in the system of
experience, merely objects among objects beneath the gaze of the genuine I, then how
can we ever merge with our own body? How could we have believed that we saw with
our own eyes what we had in fact grasped through an inspection of the mind? How is it
that the world is not perfectly explicit in front of us, and why does it only deploy itself
‘little by little’ and never ‘in its entirety’? And finally, how does it happen that we
perceive? (p. 215).
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) conveyed that the immediacy of embodied experience
confounds the abstract notion of a transcendental self who holds it all together in a Kantian unity
of apperception. My own reflection of Merleau-Ponty’s quote feeds back into arguments for the
immediate consciousness of subpersonalities; every moment of contact with present-moment
experience is gripped in just such a way, with an animating dispositional framing that makes it
real and psychically tangible. Rather than treating the multiplicity of conscious experience as an
object beneath the gaze of the ego complex, I wondered if perhaps it should be treated as the
deep involvement of subpersonalities.
If I take the latter interpretation seriously, the world becomes epistemologically
accessible through embodied moments of perception given over to experience by the
dispositional nature of whichever subpersonality is presently activated. Gibson (1986/2015)
articulated a foundation for this movement toward subjectively disclosed perceptual worlds in his
concept of affordances. Gibson defined affordances as enabling aspects of the environment that
disclose possibilities for perception and behavior to an organism. Affordances become possible
through bidirectional relationality between an organism and its environmental conditions. It is
further characterized by what that interaction reveals as actionable or untenable in terms of
valence and the ability of the organism to engage its potentialities for behavior. Affordances
derive from the premise that the organism and its environment have unique properties that
invariably interact in the creation of perceptual salience. Gibson wrote that “The environment of
animals and men is what they perceive. The environment is not the same as the physical world, if
one means by that the world described by physics” (p. 54). In other words, Gibson suggested the
environment is meaningful, not as an object, but as the disclosure of significant percepts that
enable psycho-affective assimilation and accommodation. The a priori faculties of the organism
that make manifest the possibilities of engaging with an environment necessarily mediate such
disclosure.
Gibson (1986/2015) described affordances very generally by assessing the faculties of a
species within their respective milieus and by looking at how those peculiar capacities generate
affordances. For humans, a trail may afford walking; a cliff affords injury by falling; a hammer
affords grasping and nailing; a car affords driving. Yet, although these affordances may
superficially occur as objective aspects of an environment, they turn out not to be objective in the
least precisely because subjective organs of perception and behavior make the affordances
possible. A bird does not see guitars that afford strumming any more than humans see perches
that afford roosting or partial enclosures that afford nesting. Kauffman (2016) has referred to an
organism’s unique organs of perception and behavior as enabling constraints, which permit
specific modes of interaction and specify the general conditions of what may be possible. As I
see it, enabling constraints make affordances possible, and the two concepts have significant
conceptual overlap. Furthermore, I see no reason these notions cannot be extrapolated beyond
circumscribed physical organs to psychic capacities and psychic organs.
Heidegger (1953/2010) remarked that the world discloses itself to perception in direct
relationship to moods. In this sense, moods refers to the implicit affective background to activity,
out of which emerges prominent perceptions of what matters in that circumstance. He referred to
this as attunement. Attunement evokes salient percepts and behavioral possibilities for Dasein.
Whereas Gibson (1986/2015) focused on the general affordances of a species and Heidegger
focused on universal existential themes of humanity’s daily condition, extrapolating affordances
and attunement and applying them to subpersonalities may enable a robust theory of
subpersonalities as they relate to perception and behavior. This also seems to roughly correspond
with what Vervaeke (2019) called a salience landscape, which is a mode of interaction from a
positional perspective in consciousness that animates a psycho-affective scene of perception with
definite feeling tones and perceptual affordances.
Subpersonalities may have different modes of attunement and subjective affordances,
which illuminate the perceived world with landscapes of relevancy and affectively charged
images with behavioral significance. I find this suggestion highly plausible. For example, if an
individual is engaged in a subpersonality that is highly competitive, they may engage a
perceptual landscape that reveals a world full of strategic signals, tough or easy competition,
ways to get ahead, or allies and opponents. They may also see the natural world as a series of
challenges to conquer (e.g., mountains to climb, marathons to run). If an individual is in a
nurturing and loving subpersonality, they may see the world through the lens of helping others,
empathizing, growing interpersonal affiliations, and bonding. When they look to nature, they
may see cute animals to care for or beautiful gardens to tend. They may only perceive in high
definition those things relevant to the present attitudinal stance and its underlying subpersonality.
Subpersonalities or parts of the psyche may disclose different aspects of the world by revealing
significations and meanings according to their dispositional framework. This process of bringing
distinct affordances to perception may leave other possible perspectives from other
subpersonalities completely out of the frame of present-moment focus, perhaps literally
drowning out otherwise discernable percepts (e.g., I was so focused on competition I didn’t even
notice someone was trying to help me, or Wow, the bird sounds are so beautiful today, vs., I
didn’t even notice the bird sounds because I am sad today).
I wonder then if subpersonalities might then bring whole psychological worlds into
existence. If by world I mean those psycho-perceptual surroundings and affordances that give
living its meaning and direction, then I believe the answer is yes. A person’s world involves those
things they perceive and find meaningful. Research on temperament may support this suggestion.
A variety of modern psychological literature on personality traits has also proffered that
personality and temperament differences between people also lead to perceptual differences
(Carter, 2008; McAdams, 2015; Plomin, 2018). McAdams (2015) suggested that personality
traits affect perceptions in surprising ways. A person who is high in trait neuroticism on the big
five spectrum may interpret slight facial expressions of others negatively; be highly attentive to
anything that can be interpreted as stress, rejection, or other negative affects; and when gripped
by this trait, may proactively reinforce their own negative feelings by seeking out environmental
confirmation. Plomin (2018) also echos this claim in his concept of the nature of nurture, in
which he indeed posited selective perceptual and behavioral attention based on trait dispositions.
In my view, these claims align with how subpersonalities may engage with life experience
directly and how they might unveil whole worlds of perceptual significations and layered
meanings.
In a recently published neuroimaging study, researchers Matz et al. (2022) reinforced the
notion that personality traits significantly alter the way two individuals with different personality
profiles interpret the same situation. Conversely, the authors showed how people with similar
personality profiles tend to display similar brain patterning when faced with the same naturalistic
stimulus. Matz et al. asserted that “the current results suggest that personality similarity is
associated with similarity in the spontaneous deployment of processes related to subjective value
and interpretation during naturalistic stimulation” (p. 9). An individual, therefore, interprets the
subjective landscape of salient connotations through the lens of their unique personality traits.
Moreover, the authors provided evidence that more than any other factor (e.g., socioeconomic
conditions, ethnicity, gender), personality mediates the evaluation and interpretation of events or
experiences. Indeed, this finding resonates with the claim that subpersonalities bring psychic
worlds into existence through their constitutional preference and implicit interpretive
frameworks.
In a similar vein, Jung (1960/1975) suggested that the psyche organizes sense information
in a manner that renders its qualitative dimensions perceptible. He wrote:
We must first make it quite clear to ourselves that all knowledge is the result of imposing
some kind of order upon the reactions of the psychic system as they flow into our
consciousness— an order which reflects the behavior of a metapsychic reality, of that
which is in itself real. (p. 171)
Jung, therefore, defined the world—as it is assimilated and perceived cognitively and otherwise
—as a process that depends on the psyche’s a priori tendencies, which organize raw sense data
into meaningful percepts. Given each psyche’s respective multiplicity, I think it follows that the
perceptual valence at hand, within an experienced stimulus or milieu, stems from one
subpersonality or another or perhaps from a group of subpersonalities in a harmonic perceptive
stance (Lester, 2010). Whatever happens to be the experience of a given moment procures its
salient dimensions through the subpersonalities themselves, which are psychic factors primed for
specific psycho-behavioral modes of engagement.
Subpersonalities in Consciousness or Subpersonalities as Consciousnesses
Returning to the ego complex, I have attempted to show in the literature review and in
arguments presented thus far how subpersonalities may provide enough of an explanation in and
of themselves for the many elements of conscious and cognitive life. Additionally, I deviate from
Hillman (1975) and maintain that the whole human being is still an essential reality in which a
fluctuation of certain self-aspects is expressed through moment-to-moment attentional and
behavioral frameworks. As an analogy, this leaves the impression that the whole self is like a
fluctuating wave of consciousness, with different nodal points (i.e., subpersonalities) that take a
prominent place in consciousness when they are at the tip of the wave (i.e., have come to
attention). Attention fluctuates naturally through intrapsychic flow and turbulence; it also shifts
as the environmental context changes. Therefore, as suggested by Rowan (2011a), researchers
may no longer need the dichotomous concept of conscious versus unconscious but may rather
view the psyche as a field of consciousness with many smaller consciousnesses that shift in and
out of attentional and behavioral primacy. Seeing consciousness in this new way, as partially
articulated by Strachan (2011b), implies that “there are different layers and aspects of
consciousness, based on brain physiology regarding access and direction, which in no way limits
or assures control over the layers” (p. 3). Importantly, Strachan purported consciousness goes
well beyond the brain, and the brain becomes a vessel for the complexification of behavior and
the experiences of consciousness. If, as Strachan indicated, consciousness involves gradients,
intensities, and varying forms and manifestations, a more effective discussion of subpersonalities
in the absence of an ego complex may become possible.
Importantly, Jung (1960/1975) took care to qualify that the difference between conscious
and unconscious in his work was only relative, which basically indicates a differing degree of
intensified focus and cognitive access. Kastrup (2021) also took care to point out that conscious
and unconscious in Jung’s opus only demarcated the intensity of cognitive and narrative focus.
Therefore, I found it appropriate to address the reader who may interject that the present critique
of the ego complex has so far been a semantic one that emphasizes Jung’s model of the psyche
with different language preferences and not different ideas. To the contrary, I contend the relativity
of consciousness and unconscious granted by Jung contains within it the seeds of reification,
which would endanger the potential view of consciousness as a fluid system and disallow
subpersonalities as fluctuating parts of a whole that work continuously to decenter one another.
Through this reification, the ego complex too easily becomes a coagulated object that is assumed
to be the primary agent of consciousness, and I reject this assumption.
Working Axioms on Subpersonalities
In this chapter’s conclusion, I gather up the most essential perspectives on
subpersonalities posited thus far. I have tried to establish these foundational concepts as robust
psychic factors. This means that for the purposes of this exploration, I took it as a working
assumption that the ego complex no longer represents a working idea and that subpersonalities
can more robustly explain consciousness and behavior. I have provided the following list of
points so readers can follow the argument of the ensuing pages and chapters with explicit
knowledge of the groundwork for my exploration.
1. As parts of whole human beings, subpersonalities may take control of conscious
experiences and direct behavior at various times, for fluctuating durations, and to
different degrees of intensity.
2. Through genetic dispositional strength and protein interactions, including subsequent
neural wiring occurring during the processes of consciousness that include learning
and life experience, some subpersonalities may tend to have more embodied control
over behavior and life experience than others. This may leave other subpersonalities
proactively suppressed, craving expression, thwarted, interacting in consciousness
with less intensity, or quiescent for unspecified periods of time.
3. Certain subpersonalities may engage in psycho-energic competition for control over
behavior or emotions. They may oscillate back and forth as one or another gets a hold
of psychic energy and or behavior.
4. Subpersonalities can form implicit or explicit coalitions, harmonic agreements, or
dynamic congruencies that allow for certain psycho-affective and behavioral
presentations to emerge and constellate themselves as living designs. These living
designs may be observable through phenomenology and behavior.
5. The use of the word I in everyday speech relates to who (i.e., which subpersonality) is
speaking.
6. The assumed value of a given subpersonality’s behavior or experience depends on
context and may be conceptualized on different psycho-social levels. Those levels
include a subpersonality’s felt values based on its own distinct perspective and
motivational urges; the value of a subpersonality as defined by another subpersonality
who may be approving or disapproving; the value of a subpersonality’s behavior
relative to the psychic person as a whole and a soul, including their wants and needs
as dynamic being who has many aspects; and finally, the moralism imposed by
culture. In the latter, social values are ascribed to behavior on the basis of social
regulation, promoting predictable and appropriate social behavior, and on sometimes
arbitrary social norms and one-sided dictums (e.g., men don’t cry, people shouldn’t be
lazy, girls should be polite and agreeable, people should achieve all they can).
Moralism particularly undermines subpersonalities as entities in their own right as
social dictums of “should” and “should not” convolute actual insight, awareness, and
empowerment when working with subpersonalities.
7. Psychic experience and behavior always involve subpersonalities in different
manifestations. This means asking, Who inside me just said that, did that, or felt that?
always represents a viable question.
8. Subpersonalities are phenomenologically world-creating; that is, their perceptive and
motivational leanings may constitute psychic worlds and worldviews such that
information and relationships get interpreted through their constitutional matrices and
dispositional leanings. This should not be confused with giving subpersonalities
control over the physical manifestations of the world; rather, I contend that they
interpret naturalistic phenomena in a manner that gives their world its meaning and
direction.
9. From the perspective of these claims, all the previously stated phenomena occur
implicitly in life experience regardless of an individual’s explicit knowledge of
subpersonalities. This means that a person does not create subpersonalities simply by
virtue of naming and imagining them. Rather, they operate as proactive forces that do
not need metacognitive self-reflective awareness to exist. Explicit acknowledgment of
their dynamic existence and soul-directed choice about what to do with them offers a
therapeutic exercise that I purport has great benefits for individuation.
Conclusion
In sum, multiple consciousness via subpersonalities might offer a solid theory of human
personality and behavior by presenting a challenge and a potentially new perspective for
consideration in Jungian depth psychology. If researchers accept the ego complex is structurally
unnecessary, they may observe phenomenological and scientific reasons for viewing
subpersonalities as living consciousnesses that pervade human life. In this chapter, I intended to
persuade the reader that humans can be made up of subpersonalities, that subpersonalities deliver
perceptions, and that subpersonalities enact behavior. These conclusions still leave open the
question of wholeness and individuation. So far, I have not provided any explanation as to how a
human being made up of many beings (i.e., subpersonalities) can operate as a whole or even how
they may achieve a sense of greater wholeness and meaning. I address these topics in the
following chapter.
Chapter 5: Psychic Multiplicity and Individuation
Aims of Chapter 5
I intended the research question to invigorate the notion that multiple consciousness
contradicts the ego complex. Granting the preliminary critique of the ego complex leads to a
fresh look at subpersonalities and the individuation process. Consequently, the question of how
individuation and multiplicity might coexist becomes a valid research problem for Jungian depth
psychology. Without a singular ego complex to represent consciousness, the question arises of
how psychic multiplicity and individuation are compatible.
In the previous chapter, I positioned the current phase of the research to reinvest the
individuation process with fresh questions that might generate new insights for the field of
Jungian depth psychology. Primarily, having explored subpersonalities as dynamic beings within
consciousness and with consciousness, and having provisionally suspended the theoretical need
for an ego complex, individuation becomes enriched with these new questions. The remainder of
the research question asks what to do with individuation after the provisional removal of the ego
complex and the establishment of subpersonalities as conscious agencies. To remind the reader,
that portion of the question was: “How would something like individuation occur within this
context? Is there some other mechanism or process of consciousness that would allow
individuation and multiplicity to coexist? How might this view of multiplicity affect views of
individuation in the field of Jungian depth psychology?” In this chapter, I address those
questions.
Earlier, I reviewed how Hillman believed a multiple consciousness model of the psyche
meant that individuation is just one of many perspectives, one archetypal image among many.
However, I suggest that individuation is still a transcendent category, even within a
multipleconsciousness model. In using the term transcendent, I mean that a principle of
individuation may be valid if it can be argued as a deeper class of reality within which
multiplicity is enabled. This chapter represents the search for an essential agency, transcending
the realm of subpersonalities, that empowers individuation. Such an agency is necessary because,
without it, no possibility exists for substantiating individuation as a process transcendent to
respective subpersonalities. I explain this thoroughly in a further section on values and
functionality.
A Note on the Use of Self, Soul, and Spirit Terminology
Finally, to avoid any unnecessary confusion in this chapter, I want to reiterate that the
Jungian Self implies the archetype of wholeness undergirding the individuation process and
insinuates a spiritual reality within the psyche. In much other psychological literature already
reviewed, the term self typically refers to the base personality structure or the individual’s
subpersonalities or traits as distinct or in aggregate. For example, in his self/soul/spirit model,
Strachan (2011b) used the term self to connote a person’s genetic and developmental
nature/nurture subpersonalities, and he reserved the terms soul and spirit to discuss themes of
individuation and numinous experience. Jung (1959/1969) (Jung, 1959/1978), on the other hand,
often applied the term Self to mean the spiritual part of the psyche representing unifying
wholeness, whereas Strachan simply used the term spirit for a similar purpose. Therefore, I
capitalize the term Self to denote Jung’s meaning and to best avoid this confusion. In this chapter,
I discuss the concepts of the wholeness of the soul and spirit in connection to Jung’s notion of the
Self. I also capitalize the term Spirit when I use it to imply universal divinity. Jung (1959/1969)
explained the choice of the term Self as partly analogous to an idea from Hinduism, namely the
Atman and Brahman. The Atman represents the Spiritual essence of a human being that is
directly connected to the imago Dei (image of God). The Brahman represented the unfathomable
wholeness of the God or the universe. Therefore, anytime Jung used the word God in the
quotations of this chapter, I took it to be synonymous with Spirit.
A Note on Metaphysics and Psychology
Jung famously tried to write in such a way that disabused him of accusations of
spiritualism or mysticism (Kastrup, 2021). Therefore, he often claimed himself an empiricist who
only took the psyche’s activity for what it was and maintained no transcendental facts. Jung’s
(1959/1969) purported facts related to those of the psyche, facts which clearly exist because the
psyche is full of phenomena. In other words, psychic facts are facts in that they exist because
they are experienced. As earlier stated, Jung could make this maneuver because of Kant, who
made distinctions between the assimilation of knowledge into consciousness and the unknowable
objective universe (Kastrup, 2021). Accordingly, subjects constrain incoming sense data through
their unique organs of sensation, perception, and psychology. Therefore, all that is knowable
results from the distillation of information coming into the organs of apperception; objective
reality at large is opaque. In previous sections of this dissertation, I have shown this claim has
been deeply contested by theorists of embodied phenomenology. Through this applied
phenomenology, I have pursued an epistemology of profound interrelatedness, showing that
subject and object are not easily separated. In sum, the ding an sich (i.e., thing in itself) may not
really exist, for nothing can be said to actually exist that is not embedded within and dependent
on contextual relationships (Harney, 2015).
Moreover, Jung’s partiality to Kantian thinking becomes more relevant in this chapter
because I cover topics that are unavoidably metaphysical in nature. In my opinion, metaphysical
positions on the psyche are unavoidable, even if only implicitly adopted. A researcher must
assume some type of reality proposition to determine the best ways to study and discuss the
psyche. Those who believe the universe results from a happy accident contributed to by small
probability events will more likely study the psyche from an epiphenomenal physicalist
perspective that lacks overriding sentience and intentionality. Jung (1960/1975) explicitly denied
this view of the psyche as epiphenomenal. On the other hand, taking the perspective that the
universe and its creations are suffused with sentience and creativity gives the psyche much more
weight and consideration in terms of its meaning and direction. Indeed, although Jung
maintained an intellectual fortification against metaphysics in his writing, Main (2021) claimed
that much of Jung’s work contains an implicit metaphysics, especially regarding numinous
experience. When it comes to describing these numinous experiences, Main explained Jung did
not always adhere to his Kantian predilections because the numinous takes on a shared reality,
where there is an implied merging between subject and object. I suggest that because of Jung’s
Kantian proclivities, the imago Dei is a category he interposed between the soul and Spirit. This
gives Jung the ability to suggest the experience of the Spirit in the psyche is a psychic experience
of the soul, which manifests through the imago Dei and may or may not have a metaphysical
reality. Again, however, Main et al. (2021) explained that Jung often transgressed this boundary
in such a way that belied his likely metaphysical acknowledgment of a transcendent spirit.
Furthermore, Kastrup (2021) asserted Jung’s work can be interpreted as positing a
phenomenal consciousness and psyche as the ontological root of the universe, where “matter,
psyche (including the psychoid) and spirit are all manifestations of a single substrate” (p 85).
Jung’s (1960/1975) position that matter and psyche mutually relate to one another showed he saw
spirit-psyche-matter as a spectrum of reality. Further evidence appears in his claim that a psychic
function “creates its own organ, and maintains and modifies it” (Jung, 1960/1975, p.
177). Jung, Jung (1960/1975) also criticized modernity’s denial of the soul’s innate power to
“build up the body, support its life, heal its ills and enables the soul to live independently from
the body” (p. 341). Although Jung (1960/1975) did not outright state his unconditional support
for this ensouled perspective on all of creation, he certainly leads the reader to believe it is
plausible and perhaps more justified than the fantasies of materialism. Moreover, his implicit
argument places psyche as ontologically prior to matter. He countered the materialist position by
insisting it is the psyche itself that creates such a captivating materialistic worldview. Thus, in a
sense he gave the psyche a more prominent ontological position than matter. These statements
display the perception Jung had of the power of psyche and phenomenal consciousness. These
positions align with the philosophically monistic view of consciousness as ontologically primary.
I describe the view as monistic because it does not suggest two basically different types
of substances (e.g., mind and matter) but rather the apparent manifestations of matter as
occurrences within a universal consciousness (Kastrup, 2019). Finally, Jung (1960/1975), being
ever complex and varied in his thinking, also hinted at the ultimate transcendent nature of psyche
in his exposition on the psychoid, which is a descriptive term that implies an invisible connection
between psyche and matter. Psychoid also pairs with the heretofore scientifically unaccounted for
phenomenon of synchronicity (i.e., the occurrence of supremely meaningful coincidences) that
causal factors cannot explain. On synchronicity, Jung wrote that these experiences show “the
psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche” (p. 531). The
ramifications of this statement suggest the soul is beyond space and time, nonlocal and acausal. I
explore these points further in a later section of this chapter. To some extent, synchronicity and
psychoid provide another example of an unavoidably metaphysical position in Jung because it
posits a real and invisible connection between the causal and acausal worlds; this represents a
connection between the timebound and the timeless.
Therefore, when I speak of subjects such as the soul or Spirit in conjunction with
individuation, I do not speak metaphorically; rather, I posit them as realities on a continuum with
a person’s psychology. I establish cogent support for an individual’s psychology being imbued
with these factors in this chapter. As put by Strachan, (2011b), “addressing Soul in this
theoretical manner postulates an acceptance of the principles of phenomenology, metaphysics,
and the conceptual framework of transpersonal psychology” (p. 4). In other words, the nature of
the soul prohibits it from being easily pinned into one conceptual territory or another; it has the
hermetic capacity to exist in many dimensions. As Jung (2009) exposited in his own concept of
soul, “I bind the Above with the Below. I bind God and animal. Something in me is part animal,
something part God, and a third part human” (p. 577). The soul’s mercurial nature lies latent in
its very phenomenology, as portrayed by Jung. Finally, in this chapter, I partly benefit from
contemporary scientists and theorists who offer riveting interpretations of consciousness and the
universe that make the modern ideological landscape more flexible.
Regarding the Ontological Categories of Soul and Spirit
I spoke of soul and Spirit in this chapter for multiple reasons. First and foremost, they
function as indispensably central forces in the Jungian individuation process, as evident in the
Jungian literature. Also, a philosophy of soul and Spirit represents a crucial factor in my attempt
to answer the research question involving how individuation and subpersonalities come together
when considering a multiple consciousness. Lastly, I approach these subjects in such a way that
they provide a potentially satisfying answer to the research question at hand.
The New Question of Individuation and Multiplicity
That there is a part–whole relationship in the human psyche does not necessarily invoke
the core themes of individuation. As articulated in the literature review, Jung (1954/1970)
explained that individuation, being a devotional and intentional undertaking, is not a foregone
conclusion for any individual; it requires active participation. Jung characterized the
individuation process as painstaking and requiring tremendous focus and openness. Because
individuation has been adumbrated in such a way that makes it an exceptional part–whole
journey, I must differentiate individuation as such from the base reality of part–whole
psychodynamics. Exploring this difference thoroughly will lead to the topic of individuation and
psychic multiplicity. This distinction is vital to the argument in this chapter because, as I have
mentioned, I must make it clear that the question of individuation transcends the relative
perspectives of subpersonalities.
Part–Whole Psychodynamics Exist With or Without Individuation Proper
Whether an individual proactively seeks the quest for individuation, the psyche functions
as an interconnected web of complex agencies. According to psychologist Craig Piers (2005), in
complex systems, “we observe the dynamic interaction of multiple, cooperating, or competing
variables acting on and in the system” (p. 246). Piers continued by explaining the human psyche
as a complex system comprised of multiple selves. Thus, from this systems perspective,
subpersonalities interact within the superordinate confines of human wholeness, and at the same
time, they also affect the state of the whole psyche with every nuance of their unique
motivational position and movement. To comment on Piers’s observation on cooperating and
competing variables, cooperation, toleration, and competition work as natural interactive modes
between subpersonalities (Lester, 2010). Insofar as the organs of perception, cognition, and
behavior can be coopted by certain subpersonalities, those subpersonalities may interchange in
relative degrees of strength within which they control certain aspects of the human organism and
its behavior. In my estimation, cooperation entails the process of subpersonalities finding a
common cause through which they can function as a unit. I believe toleration, a category I have
interposed between cooperation and competition, suggests a state of mutual and perhaps partially
unsatisfied acquiescence in which subpersonalities coexist and fulfill their present roles.
Competition, finally, appears to be nothing less than an intrapsychic war for perceptual and
behavioral control.
This war for control suggests that under the presently offered understanding of
subpersonalities, human behavior can be driven by complex part–whole dynamics. Multiple
dimensions exist for any given behavior that might make questions of linear cause and effect
seem crude (Piers, 2005). For example, if a high school student elects to pursue a college
education, that decision naturally involves multiple factors. Cultural, environmental, and
rudimentary biological parameters notwithstanding, the decision may also involve many
subpersonalities. They may have a subpersonality who wishes to please their parents, another
who has lofty career ambitions, a socializer who is eager to immerse themselves in the college
scene, a scholar who can get lost in books, and still one who is getting dragged along to school
against their preferences and would rather travel the world. This scenario provides an example of
part–whole psychodynamics. Where value-laden objectives align, it makes sense to assume the
available psychic energy can be shared as subpersonalities constellate themselves around a
shared effort. However, differences in preference and agenda may instigate competition for any
available psychic energy.
As a system of many subpersonalities, the subpersonalities must share and compete for
energy because the psychic system has only so much free energy. Jung (1960/1975) referred to
the energic fuel of the psyche as being quantifiably limited, and as such, he asserted conversion
from one attitudinal and behavioral position to another requires a “canalization of libido” (p. 41).
As certain subpersonalities utilize the available driving energy in the psyche for perception and
behavior, the rest of the psyche continues to be stirred and will attempt various forms of
participation. To use Jung’s (1963/1970) language, “nothing in us ever remains quite
uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in
the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment” (p.
496). Psychic multiplicity ensures the instantiation of a variety of interpretations and judgments
anytime an individual expresses a definite position manifested through attitude or behavior.
Therefore, subpersonalities might find various points of alignment and misalignment when it
comes to human functioning. Where alignment does not occur, it seems natural to conclude that
this leads to intrapsychic conflict in one way or another. In cases of intrapsychic conflict, certain
subpersonalities may succeed through sheer will and domination by taking control of behavior
and suppressing conflicting desires. Alternatively, dramatic psychic conflict will ensue and come
to a crescendo where one subpersonality emerges victorious, and the other succumbs or fatigues
into defeat. In another option, subpersonalities may arrive at a compromise or synthesis and
share psychic energy, perhaps sometimes tenuously. And last, the conflict may be so
fundamentally insoluble that a war between wills occurs in a way that appears to be veritably
entrenched, manifesting psycho-symptomatically through continued struggle and far-flitting
oscillations in behavior and emotion.
In effect, the competitive, tolerative, and cooperative part–whole dynamics of
subpersonalities in and of themselves do not imply much about individuation. After all,
subpersonalities can seek to function toward their own ends, only cooperating, tolerating, and
competing based on their distinct agendas without being concerned about greater wholeness or
soulful intent. Although these three dynamics do not alleviate the present question of
individuation, they do manage to explain how subpersonalities might functionally exist in a
human being in a way that promotes human functioning or at least adaptive survival. This can be
construed through subpersonalities cooperating, tolerating, or dominating and thus controlling
behavior in ways that allow many human beings to function and adapt to their complex
ecological, social, and cultural environment, a question raised in Chapter 4. Of course, instances
of maladaptive dysfunctional persons and behaviors occur that very much depend on how the
term functionality is characterized and used. Properly exploring the term functionality and its
ramifications will create the bridge I need between base part–whole psychodynamics and the
process of individuation. I will make the relevance of the term functionality clearer once I argue
for the importance of understanding the pursuing and achieving of relative values.
Functionality
I established in Chapter 4 the importance of using functionality as a relative term. The
degree of functionality in each circumstance depends on the values being pursued, the
effectiveness in realizing those values, and from whom (i.e., what subpersonality or level of the
psyche) those values are spawned. For example, for an alcoholic subpersonality, compulsive
drinking may seem relatively functional so long as they can continue to drink and feel the effects
of drinking (the inherent value agenda from that perspective is intoxication). As outlined by
Kohnke (2008), studies have indicated that those with the genetics for alcoholism are enticed into
compulsive drinking via the expression of distinct biochemical pathways that intensely stimulate
the pleasure of drinking and reinforce the incentive to drink. Edenberg and Foroud (2013) further
asserted that analysis of the literature indicated genes that affect metabolism are also deeply
involved in alcoholism. Overall considerations point to the conclusion that those who are wired
for alcoholism are at risk due to complex genetic factors that cause their desire for intoxication to
greatly increase after initial consumption. When taking the previous conclusions about genetic
predispositions and subpersonalities into view, an addictive or alcoholic subpersonality may
indeed exist in an individual as one of many proclivities.
In the same individual, other existing subpersonalities who value relationships and other
passions may resent their own drinking behavior as alcoholism interferes with their overall life
satisfaction. Such subpersonalities may even try interventions and seek sobriety. Thus, no matter
how well the alcoholic subpersonality gets away with their drinking, other subpersonalities may
see the enterprise of drinking as entirely dysfunctional, even if they lack the willpower to counter
the alcoholic subpersonality’s behavior. This observation ushers in the idea that functionality may
be defined relatively, as dependent on the evaluating perspective in use.
I understand the ultimate physical dysfunctionality of disease processes often caused by
alcoholism, notwithstanding the corresponding relational and social chaos that affects many
alcoholics. As such, it may sound absurd to claim alcoholism can sometimes be relatively
functional. I hope to clarify this by reinforcing that I am dealing with relative values stemming
from unique subpersonalities and their ability to realize those values. If an alcoholic values
intoxication and can functionally live a lifestyle where intoxication is accomplished, that
subpersonality might say they have a relative functionality. However, in many cases of highly
dysfunctional alcoholism, it appears to me that the drinking that subpersonality so fervently
cherishes destroys them via a physical disease process caused by their alcoholism; it is
selfdevouring. However, Benton (2009) shared one research estimation indicating that “up to
50% of alcoholics may be high functioning” (p. 5), and some specialists estimate an even higher
percentage of functional alcoholics. These claims show some alcoholics function by controlling
their drinking just well enough to stay physically and socially sustainable, and so they have
figured out a means of iterating their drinking habit over time. Such cases might earn the label
“functioning alcoholic.” Meanwhile, other subpersonalities may coexist within those same
individuals (e.g., an athlete or a painter) who are starving for more satisfying expressions of
themselves that they cannot achieve in the alcoholic lifestyle. Therefore, they would classify
alcoholism as dysfunctional because cherished values are not being fully pursued or realized.
I intend this example to convey functionality as a context-dependent term that entirely
depends on value, value-seeking, and value-acquisition processes. Given the established premise
that subpersonalities have varying values, their operational ability to function also varies
depending on their relative ability to engage those values. Moreover, I contend that people can be
seen as simultaneously functional and dysfunctional, depending on which subpersonality or
perspective evaluates their actions.
Therefore, I treat functionality as a term requiring care and subtlety, understanding that its
meaning depends on values and the ability to bring such values to fruition. Moreover, it appears
functionality is comprised of sublevels and metalevels. The concept of metafunctionality refers to
an interrelated web of values and how they relate to one another within a transcendent value.
Within a given person, values grow and are supported from multiple layers. These might include
a given subpersonality and its values, other contrary subpersonalities and their values, a potential
coalition of subpersonalities that may share a given value or values, the human being as an
aggregate of value-positions, and finally, the level of the soul and its values.
I consider the introduction of the soul at this point to be only cursory, but I explore the
soul’s character and nature in later pages. For now, I think it is sufficient to say that if an
individual regards the soul as a unique and motivated entity in and of itself, then I deem it
appropriate to include it in the discussion of values and function. Insofar as the soul may come to
represent a supraordinate level of wholeness, it falls within the category of metafunctionality as it
may contend with its own vital essence in addition to the myriad value-positions of
subpersonalities.
Crucially, as established in the section devoted to dialogical self-theory in the literature
review, values also have societal layers that include the family unit, the social milieu, the culture
and its corresponding belief systems, and the economy and its inherent valuations. I have listed a
diverse spectrum of value-generating and value-latent mediums to show why I have said
functionality, defined as the ability to successfully engage with a value, is a relative term.
Something can seem relatively functional at one personal or social level and look starkly
dysfunctional at another because functionality is context-dependent. In sum, a given behavior can
qualify as functional or dysfunctional in relative terms depending on who is doing the
interpreting. I advocate for approaching value and functionality with nuance.
Values Within Parameters as Enabling Constraints for Functionality
Finally, constraints inhibit the ability to achieve a given desire; therefore, parameters for
the ability to function depend on the goal. I prefer Kauffman’s (2016) previously cited
terminology enabling constraints because it highlights that a limitation often relates to a
disclosed ability. In Chapter 4, I explored the example of bodily appendages, which are naturally
constraining (e.g., a human arm is not a wing and will not provoke flight) but also profoundly
enabling in that they disclose indefinite possibilities of interaction (e.g., with an arm and hand I
can push, lift, swing, row, reach, grab, throw, pull). I applied the bodily examples to
subpersonalities and their unique motivations. Subpersonalities also must work within the
enabling constraints of their own genetic dispositions as well as their surrounding environments.
The surrounding environment includes cultural and natural parameters. Social structures impose
universal limitations (e.g., A conman who gets caught in illegal activity may go to prison and
thus no longer be a functional conman, or an alcoholic could get charged with driving under the
influence, which might constrain the alcoholic behavior to some degree). Furthermore, nature
imposes biological parameters, and relative value positions are carried out or not within those
conditions. Value-driven positions often encounter the constraining factors in nature’s reality
(e.g., An alcoholic’s organs fail; a raging river separates a mother duck from her duckling; a
storm thwarts a hunter; a professional athlete ages and can no longer perform at the same level).
When such scenarios occur, the subpersonality at hand cannot function in the interrelated web of
nature. Thus, nature and culture create a fluctuating parameter space within which value pursuant
possibilities and behaviors vary.
Functionality as Adaptation to Life
Individuals must adapt to life as a basically functional person comprised of an aggregate
of subpersonalities, and they do so through a variety of means. Jung (1954/1970) believed this
was a task for early adult life when individuals ensure they have fulfilled certain roles and
achieved certain milestones that make human life manageable. Figuring out how to adapt to life
represents a vital component of individual development. Many people come to solve life issues
in a manner that allows them to go on with life more easily. Such people may seek to answer
questions such as (a) How do I get along with my romantic partner? (b) How do I obtain and
hold a job? (c) How do I conduct myself in social settings? and (d) What do I do with emotional
issues that are keeping me from participating in life more enjoyably? Whatever the case may be,
people often seek to solve life issues to find a peace of mind that enables them to live
functionally in the world.
Functionality as Individuation
Yet, the individuation process provides another level to which the term functionality
applies. Achieving basic life functioning does not necessarily satisfy the deeper calling of the
soul, which is the quest for individuation. Individuation involves more than adapting well to life
situations; rather, it encompasses the fruition and insightful abiding of a person’s inner life. From
this perspective, functionality transcends the relative position of subpersonalities and develops a
more complex form. The term metafunctionality becomes more relevant here because the value
that creates the drive for a functional existence derives from a deeper ontology than that of
subpersonalities.
On a Superordinate Agency Being Necessary for Individuation
I argue that meta-agency is a necessity for individuation to have any meaning at all within
this paradigm of subpersonalities. Otherwise, no level would exist at which the subpersonalities
could serve any purpose other than their own. Subpersonalities would only align with other
subpersonalities when it suited them, which again may work for some people in terms of basic
functioning. Nietzsche’s (1910) concept of will to power, in which he presented a picture of
competing instincts all vying to fulfill their own designs by doing what it takes to perform their
own unique purposes and agendas. Gemes (2001) explained that Nietzsche is often credited as
being the philosophical antecedent to postmodernism because of his relativistic position on
multiplicity. Gemes did not credit Nietzsche himself as a postmodernist because Nietzsche still
held unity as a goal, even if not as a preformed reality. Gemes described postmodernism as
radical multiplicity with no principle of cohesion, wholeness, or transcendent meaning. This
characterization of postmodernism may manifest itself in a form of relativity that yields no
ability to substantiate any position of value or any claim to a reality; this version of
postmodernism amounts to nihilism. Such radical multiplicity resembles Nietzsche’s will to
power, and in this picture, the propitiation of psychic energy comes across as a zero-sum game
that involves no transcendent source of meaning. As such, subpersonalities would attempt to
control as much psychic energy as possible by whatever means necessary. At the level of
subpersonalities, individuation without a relationship to a meta-agency represents a contradictory
premise due to the relativity of values that stem from the subpersonalities themselves. In this
view, subpersonalities simply go on cooperating, tolerating, and competing as necessary, but not
individuating. Here, I come to the root of the earlier mentioned crucial differentiation between
base part–whole dynamics and individuation proper.
Therefore, without a transcendent agency, subpersonalities may decline to become
involved in anything approximating individuation. In fact, that lack of this superordinate entity
would make individuation a nonstarter because the very nature of individuation has to do with
being psychologically reborn as an indivisible whole. Nietzsche (1954) thought individuals had
to create this supra-agency through sheer creative will. Jung (1959/1969) (1959/1978) thought
differently and argued individuals did not create a superordinate agency any more than they
created anything else of the psyche. Jung asserted that individuals had to find it and uncover and
nurture its hidden powers to grow. In a nontrivial sense, wholeness itself must preexist the fully
awakened realization of wholeness (i.e., the individuation process). An indivisible force must
somehow lie latent in the psyche in a nascent state, awaiting further development. I propose that
this wholeness is the human soul itself. Later in the chapter, I explore how this wholeness can be
seen as an already existing reality, as well as a goal to be achieved, depending on how the soul
engages its existence.
The Soul
A Preliminary Introduction to the Importance of the Soul for Individuation
Pictet (2017) described the soul as that which is associated with “feeling, essence, depth,
and matter,” as well as connecting one with “core values” (p. 176). Being the animating principle
of life (Jung, 1963/1970), the soul gives the psyche a deeper dimension and meaning.
Shamdasani (2009) commented in his introduction to The Red Book, “whereas [Nietzsche’s]
Zarathustra proclaimed the death of God. Liber Novus depicts the rebirth of God in the Soul” (p.
20). This turn of phrase suggests the inextricable connection between Jung’s notion of the Self
archetype and the soul. In the human psyche, Jung (1960/1975) postulated the Self as a force
representative of unfathomable wholeness, which is portrayed by the image of God in the
psyche. The imago Dei, therefore, functions as the phenomenal counterpart to the great unknown
powers of the universe. But if the god image in the psyche represents the connection to an
ultimate Spirit, another aspect represents the essential spark of creation that came from that
divinity, namely the soul, the natural lumen (Jung, 1960/1975). Jung (1953/1968) wrote, “as the
eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God” (p. 10), and “at all events the soul must contain in
itself the faculty of relationship to God, i.e., a correspondence, otherwise a connection could
never come about. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the
Godimage” (p. 11). Here, Jung pointed out that the phenomenon of correspondence between the
soul and Spirit is the imago Dei. This passage portrays the image of God as the experience of
universal Spirit from the perspective of an individual soul rather than as a separate reality. The
word correspondence implies a real communication, not a simply isolated psychic event between
soul and an ontologically real Spirit. Furthermore, it implies a similarity, which is to say that
they commune by virtue of being of a common nature. I believe this amounts to an actual
connection among Spirit, psyche, and nature.
Jung (1960/1975) pulled from ancient alchemical texts that portrayed the deep
importance of soul and Spirit for the psyche. These two represent a spectrum of luminosity and
numinosity. Luminosity refers to the natural light of creation and living organisms (i.e., the soul)
that radiates from within the individual psyche. Numinosity refers to the counterpart, that
godhead from which the natural light has incarnated (i.e., the Spirit). I believe this is why Jung
(1959/1969) characterized the Self (i.e., wise old man) as the father of the anima (i.e., soul). Yet,
in a seemingly paradoxical sense, the anima also represented “his virgin mother” (p. 35). The
reasoning appears to go something like this: the universal Spirit bestows the individual soul its
essential nature, and at the same time, the labors of that very soul might give birth to the deep
realization of that Spirit within an individual’s lifetime. Therefore, whether speaking of the
Jungian Self or soul, it implies wholeness and essence. Individuation depends on soul and Spirit
together.
Jung posited that if individuals could contact this soulful wholeness in an intentional and
meaningful way, they would foster the individuation process. This latent indivisible wholeness
allows the multiplicity of the human psyche to be transfused with greater unifying meaning.
Heidegger (1953/2010) elaborated in Being and Time, explaining that every question creates a
hermeneutic circle in the sense that the question contains within it the seeds of an answer that
may come to fruition. Individuals cannot truly ask a question unless they already grasp some
intimation of possible answers. In the same way, I suggest that the question of an individual’s
own individuation is made possible by the fact that such an indivisible soul already exists in the
first place and can be at least partially felt by an individual.
As I have begun to suggest, I believe it is necessary to establish the human being as
having a soul for individuation to maintain this greater meaning. If the Spirit stands for the
individual’s connection to the numen, only the lumen (i.e., soul) makes that connection possible.
This soul must have greater status than its parts or constituent subpersonalities. Therefore, I
explore the deep reality of the soul in this chapter. I suggest that the personality structure hangs
together as an aggregate or composite of subpersonalities, not unlike a fragmentary Picasso
painting. However, I must establish how the soul belongs to a different ontological category than
the subpersonalities themselves. Jung (1959/1978) deliberately placed the Self in a class of its
own, stating, “unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values
because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei” (p. 31). In other
words, the unifying factor inherent in the Jungian Self encapsulates and presupposes multiplicity
and is, by definition, transcendent. It naturally follows that the soul occupies an equally
privileged and important place due to the established self–soul interdependence.
However, if the subpersonalities are, to a large degree, capable of independent motives
and designs, I wondered how to weave those offshoots back into the reality of a soul. Indeed, one
theoretical advantage of the traditional positing of an ego complex in Jungian theory involves
reconciling multiplicity by assuming complexes are cathected onto a subdivided agency in a
more narrowly defined version of consciousness. I propose that properly exploring the notion of
soul allows individuation to exist within the context of the multiple consciousness of
subpersonalities and vice versa.
Individuation as the Metafunctionality of the Soul
Strachan (2011b) mentioned that some people live their whole lives under the regime of
basic functioning at the level of subpersonalities, wherein subpersonalities do what they do, and
the psyche does not reach deeper levels of soulful engagement. However, Strachan also outlined
another possibility of working with subpersonalities that concerns the human soul as the core of
the individuation process. According to Strachan, the soul itself may intervene, resolving psychic
conflicts or directing meaningful life activity through its determination and intentionality. I offer
explicit examples of soul-directed interventions later in this chapter. For now, I merely intend to
establish the possibility that the soul might direct the subpersonalities with overall intentions that
evoke deeply meaningful new life manifestations. Subpersonalities then fulfill a purpose greater
than themselves. The soul may naturally face the notion that it is itself a qualitatively unique
entity and simultaneously has a personality with various subpersonalities, which the soul may
deal with in meaningful ways. In this sense, the concept of metafunctionality becomes relevant
because several interrelated values and semiautonomous functions may fit within a much larger
whole that also has its own values and functions.
This section offered only preliminary comments on the soul’s possible role in
individuation without the theoretical need for an ego complex. The claims I made on
subpersonalities have given them a relatively high degree of autonomy, and yet that model offers
no way of understanding individuation. To address this issue, I posit the need to explore the soul.
Moreover, following Pictet’s (2017) preliminary comments about the soul’s depth and meaning, I
explore how the soul might be seen as the essence of living beings. I structured the remainder of
this chapter in such a way as to establish a strong position on the soul’s nature and follow up with
depicting possible ways the soul might participate in individuation. First, characterizing the
possible nature of the soul enables a more cogent discussion of the soul’s role in individuation.
The Nature of the Soul
Historically, the soul has been conceived in multiple ways. I picked some themes here
that display the soul as an entity with major implications for living beings. Ancient Greeks
described the soul as a living idea in culture and in philosophy. In pre-Socratic Greek culture,
philosophers understood the soul as a basic essence of living beings, that which made living
things live. The anima, or soul, in that respect, functions as the animating principle. Plato (2002),
enhancing such prephilosophical notions of the soul in his work Phaedo, depicted Socrates as
giving the soul the following properties: (a) it is the living, vital essence of organisms; (b) it can
direct life in meaningful ways, which transcends bodily impulses, and (c) it is immortal and
passes through this life and into the next. Therefore, for Socrates, the soul refers to the immortal
animating essence of life itself and represents a supraordinate agency in and of itself whereby it
can direct meaningful activities in life. Aristotle (1907), by contrast, also defined the soul as the
animating essence of living beings, but he saw no reason to suppose the soul would go on after
the body’s death. Plotinus (2015), the Roman philosopher who birthed neo-Platonism, held the
soul as having emanated from the one (i.e., the self-causing ontologically simple root of the
universe from which all emanates). Plotinus asserted that all souls are ultimately one.
In ancient Indian culture from which Hinduism grew, thinkers described the soul as the
Atman, which is that spark of divinity that connects the individual to the universal consciousness
of spirit (i.e., Brahman; Jung, 1959/1969). Ancient Egyptians formulated the Ba, often translated
as soul (Fadiman & Gruber, 2020) and represented as a bird (Jung 1960/1975), which signifies
the ability to travel back and forth between the earth and the heavens. The ancient Egyptians also
felt the soul had another element, which they called the Ka, an astral body that represented a vital
force beyond the fleshly world of humankind. As discussed by Jung (1958/1969),
The ka is the life-spirit, the animating principle of men and gods, and therefore can be
legitimately interpreted as the soul or spiritual double. He is the “life” of the dead man,
and thus corresponds on the one hand to the living man’s soul, and on the other to his
“spirit” or “genius.” (p. 131–132)
This statement reinforced the idea that the soul is that which animates and seems to belong in an
ontological category of its own. The Ka, like the Hindu Atman, represents universal divinity
encapsulated in an individualized entity. Therefore, iterations of the soul recur across cultures in
manifestations of the universal Spirit that take unique forms.
On the relationship between Spirit and soul, Jung (1953/1968) posited that the soul is an
irreducible reality that “has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness [emphasis
added] of a relationship to Deity. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the
sea, that sea would not exist but for the multitude of drops” (p. 10). Here again, Jung made clear
that Spirit and soul are only relatively distinct based on whether they are viewed in the universe
as manifested entities (i.e., drops in the ocean) or as one big entity (i.e., the ocean itself). Either
way, spirit and soul exist in these writings in complete interconnectedness. Because writers have
construed the soul as ontologically derived from universal Spirit, it has acquired the connotation
of consciousness. This has occurred because although a soul might represent the essence of an
individualized consciousness, that which concerns Spirit relates to a universal consciousness. I
explore a more thorough explanation for why Spirit and universal consciousness often appear
synonymous in further pages. Some might think of soul as the essence of an individual’s
consciousness. Indeed, religious scholar von Stuckrad (2022) explained soul is often defined as a
pure consciousness and also as a singular force with creative powers. He asserted:
The concept of “soul,” which has carried connotations of life, breath, and consciousness
since antiquity, was integrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a
discursive formation that can be called both occult and orphic; occult in the sense that the
soul was entangled with concepts of spirit-matter-science-life force-energy-nature; and
orphic in the sense that the soul was entangled with ecstasy-art-music-literature-
natureempathy-knowledge. (p. 241)
Here, the soul represents an animating force that has consciousness. It also has
experience, felt sense, and vitality. At the same time, it has directionality and can be intentional,
purposive, and creative. It lends its powers easily to the creative endeavors of humankind. As
such, the occult and orphic dimensions of the soul laid out by von Stuckrad resemble Socrates’s
position in Phaedo, in which he portrayed the soul as an essential force of life and a creative
agency.
The notion of the soul as a spark of universal consciousness now appears to be supported
in some modern scientific theories of consciousness and quantum physics. Mathematician
Hoffman (2019) claimed that space-time is an illusion. According to Hoffman, quantum physics
and evolutionary science have shown that time and space are psychic constructs that enable
organisms to adapt and function rather than actual independent realities. Lanza et al. (2021)
proffered that what individuals think is the objective universe is simply the “complete
spaciotemporal logic of the self” (p. 113). Lanza et al., further postulated consciousness is the
root of the entire universe and used quantum physics to support their claim. Kaku (2014), in
describing how consciousness might serve as the driving force of the universe, explained that
quantum experiments have reliably shown that the wave function cannot collapse into an actual
state from mere probability without a conscious observer. Kaku (2014) carefully described the
argument of quantum theorist Eugene Wigner, who asserted that the conscious observer itself
naturally also must have a conscious observer to solidify its existence and that this regression can
continue until reaching an ultimate “cosmic consciousness or God” (p. 334). Kaku himself sided
with another possibility, suggesting the possibility of multiple universes. Nevertheless, he
testified to the explanatory power of a universal consciousness. Kastrup (2019) postulated that
universal consciousness may have dissociated into multiple consciousnesses, which are generally
consumed by the impressions of their apparent separateness. If space-time is merely the
projection of a consciousness that simulates itself into unique beings, those beings themselves
experience the projection as a functional reality they call the life within which they are ensouled.
The interdisciplinary team Ceylan et al. (2017) posited the soul as an “undividable
whole” and that the “individual soul has a connection with the soul of the universe” (p. 584). The
soul of the universe could naturally be known as Spirit, although an individual life force may be
conceptualized as a soul. Again, Jung’s ambivalent statements on the connections between the
soul, the Self, and the ultimate Spirit are poignant, especially when considering the idea of the
soul as an indivisible wholeness having obvious correlates with individuation. Ceylan et al.
further recommended that the soul, in its essence, exists outside of space and time and that it
provides mental energy via the embodied brain structure that animates the experience of a
conscious personality or a human self-identity. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the concept
of soul as outside of time invokes Jung’s concepts of synchronicity and psychoid. Jung
(1960/1972) concluded, “The psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the
psyche” (p. 531). If the soul is ultimately beyond time and space, like Spirit, then synchronicities
may function as encouraging instances where the soul recognizes its transcendent nature. Main et
al. (2021) suggested synchronicities may occur as affirmations for the soul’s individuation
process. Moreover, Jung (1960/1975) recapitulated an ancient view of the soul that sounds quite
like Ceylan et al. (2017), who wrote:
The ancient view held that the soul was essentially the life of the body, the life-breath, or
a kind of life force which assumed spatial and corporeal form at the moment of
conception, or during pregnancy, or at birth, and left the dying body again after the final
breath. The soul in itself was a being without extension, and because it existed before
taking corporeal form and afterwards as well, it was considered timeless and hence
immortal. (p. 345)
Many ancient people saw the soul as so obvious that it hardly had to be stated. They
believed the occurrence of life itself resulted from the soul manifesting through an individual’s
consciousness (Jung, 1960/1975). Jung (1960/1975) also stated that what he called ego
consciousness was identical to the soul itself in this ancient worldview. He further explained that
an individual’s sense of I grows out of the depths of the soul. Indeed, for the ancient people Jung
referred to, life and the soul are identical. Even as Jung (1960/1975) qualified his support of this
view as entirely empirical and claimed to leave metaphysical positions aside, he hinted at further
metaphysical speculations when he remarked that “while everything else that exists takes up a
certain amount of room, the soul cannot be located in space” (p. 347). Similarly, Nelson and
Coppin (2019) affirmed that the soul is immeasurable, unconfined in its possible meanings and
directions, and ultimately at the heart of the human psyche. This observation matters for
individuation because, as I cited in previous pages, individuation involves the process of the soul
manifesting a meaningful connection between Spirit and matter.
Ceylan et al. (2017) continued that the “‘nonphysical’ soul gains some ‘physical properties’ as it
is reduced into cognitions in the brain” (p. 589). In essence, the soul functions as the animating
principle of the physical being and personality structure, which then gives the organism energy
to partake in psycho-physiological life activities. In this definition, the soul represents a
complex whole entity that immerses itself in psycho-physiological life. Being so immersed, it
may or may not remember its true universal nature and thus may be entangled in the world of
sense impressions, as suggested by Jung (1963/1970) in Mysterium Coniunctionis. Commenting
on the alchemical notion of Mercurius, Jung wrote, “Mercurius is the soul (anima), which is the
‘mediator between body and spirit’” (p. 461). The soul then becomes that which embodies form
and, at the same time, transcends form as it stems from universal energy.
Regarding the soul’s awakening, Jung wrote:
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to
favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the
chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back
by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world. (p. 472)
In light of the soul’s essential nature and animating power, the soul must somehow realize
its own spiritually ordained essence through epiphany or meditative reflection. Plotinus
apparently shared Jung’s sentiments. According to Caluori (2015), Plotinus asserted that souls
“tend to get confused by their activity in the sensible world and lose sight of their own essential
activity and thus also of what they really are” (p. 8). Thematically, these sources show the soul as
so immersed in life that its origin and essence can become opaque, beckoning a remembrance or
awakening.
The Soul as a Creative Life Force
I offer this exposition on the soul to undergird the idea that organisms are ensouled; they
have souls, or souls have them. Moreover, I suggest that the soul itself may be the crucible that
enables individuation. I do not mean to invoke dualism, for once the soul manifests embodiment,
I infer it must inhabit that body totally. The phenomenological dynamics of perception laid out
by Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) display the occupation of psyche and body in total unification, as
he called it, the lived body. In part, he made these claims because perception happens in such a
way that it is always experienced as a complete whole. The world and self interpenetrate each
other as the environment occurs to consciousness as a complete situation. From the standpoint of
consciousness, perception never lacks; part of an individual’s field of awareness does not
disappear into a void of inaccessible objectivity, as if objects somehow exist without perception.
Instead, any perception functions only as itself, and it fluctuates as the psyche and world interact
and change. For example, what I did not notice in my field of vision one moment may emerge in
the next, but that does not mean the previous perception was incomplete. On the contrary, each
perceptive moment totally inhabits a conscious experience of what is, as a conscious moment. I
interpreted those dynamics laid out by Merleau-Ponty to suggest that phenomenal consciousness
is globally diffused and embodied. In contradistinction, the body does not perceive, understand,
and act in a way that assimilates a separate conscious soul-identity above and beyond itself, a
obediently rejoice in its universal nature. Religious structures with rules, admonishments, and
dogmas requiring obsequiousness follow closely until Spirit becomes a mere idea behind erected
social structures (e.g., Jung psychology and religion), which makes actual spiritual revelation
taboo. I can find no rational reason to think the universe keeps a moral tally on the soul’s
behavior. This sort of thinking results from human dispositions for shame, blame, and control. I
prefer to think of what the soul could do based on what it desires as it becomes more aware of its
nature, rather than imposing an ideological structure on its being and becoming. In other words, I
do not define individuation as a rulebound obligation driven by moralizing doctrines; rather, I
described it is a passionate soul-directed quest of discovery and meaning.
transcendental Kantian ego. Rather, the body pervasively, holistically, and directly understands
via its ensouled consciousness. In other words, the soul runs throughout the entirety of the body.
Perception always immerses itself in the contextual meaning of its environment and its
own state at a given moment. It continually already occupies some implicit form of
understanding (Merleau-Ponty, 1974/2012). Without perceptual consciousness, things do not
exist (Lanza et al., 2021). That is to say that objects, as they are understood to be of a distinct
character (e.g., rock, tree, pencil), cannot possibly maintain such a distinct character independent
of psycho-perceptual awareness.
Organs of Perception and Consciousness
Diversity in animal sensory perception makes the relativity of conscious things very clear.
Bats use echolocation to navigate space; snakes have very high sensory awareness of vibrations
in the ground; bees have infrared and ultraviolet vision; dogs smell a staggering world of
richness much more complex than humans; certain fish have electro-perception, allowing distinct
perception of electric fields, and other animals sense magnetic fields (Lanza et al., 2021). I have
by no means exhausted the list of remarkable and diverse perceptual abilities in the animal
kingdom. Therefore, what exists may depend on who it exists for and what their embodied
consciousness assimilates as reality. Nietzsche (1910) asserted that “to the extent which
knowledge has any sense at all, the world is knowable: but it may be interpreted differently, it has
not one sense behind it, but hundreds of senses.—‘Perspectivity’” (p. 13). I view perspectivity as
synonymous with multiple consciousness. Nietzsche used this term to describe the relativity of
perceived salience that emerges from such a multiplicity. Speaking in modern psychobiological
terms, distinct organs of perception allow consciousness to take a particular form of engaged
relatedness and individualized understanding of the world. Any perceived
object only becomes a thing by virtue of its perceptibility from a unique vantage point in the
relational field that is conscious experience. The things individuals perceive as tangible and
independently real are only so convincing because of the ensouled consciousness that suffuses
organs of perception, the animating factor that imbues the lived world. This gives objects what
McGilchrist (2021) called “thisness” (p. 1,286), the qualitatively irreducible, always intrinsically
salient, and radiantly unique aspect of any given perception or experience. McGilchrist avoids
the accusation of solipsism regarding the primacy of soul consciousness here because if
consciousness involves a relational network of consciousnesses within an organism and between
organisms, one individual’s consciousness does not function as the deciding factor for what can
be said to exist in a relational universe full of multiple consciousnesses. In a relational reality,
perceived reality is ultimately interdependent. Myriad psyche-matter relationships constitute
reality, and therefore, one relationship cannot simply supersede this fact through sheer will or
singular perspective.
Moreover, in the light of subpersonalities as phenomenologically world-creating entities
(as established in Chapter 4), unique perception occurs not only between species and between
unique humans, but even within humans, a tremendous amount of psycho-perceptual
differentiation is implied. All these observations lead to the question of what consciousness
might perceive without a body. That question falls outside the scope of this dissertation, but it’s a
question that certainly invigorates the notion that bodily endowments give consciousness a
substantive form and directionality. The question connects to my suggestion that perhaps the
soul, as conscious life force, embodies form and immerses itself in distinct bodily experiences
and activities.
Soul as Animating Life
If a soul operates as the enabling factor behind embodied life itself, the animating
principle, then the question arises of what it means to perceive or to live without a soul—or what
enables the unique things perceived to be given animated aliveness. It appeared to me that seeing
organisms as ensouled is the enabling factor for perceptual salience and phenomenal
consciousness to occur. As Howe (2023) proclaimed, “It seems we have to keep reminding
ourselves that the soul is the source of consciousness as well as its object, and that we are
incapable of seeing it as a whole” (p. 97). In other words, the soul enables perception and
suffuses perceived objects with aliveness. Following my argument closely, I propose the
following possible conclusions:
•the soul serves as the animating life force and essence of a living being’s
consciousness;
•multiple semiautonomous consciousnesses radiate from this core;
•perceptions comprise participatory and relative positions in a multiple consciousness;
•the animating principle enables life, perception, and psychic activity itself;
•to be alive is to be ensouled; and
•to be alive is to feel, perceive, direct, attend, propel, and embody the sentient thisness
of a being.
Living beings are not objects, machines, algorithms, or computations. McGilchrist (2021)
pointed out that all of modernity’s analogies between biology and machinery amount to
inappropriate comparisons. He wrote in retort to the biological machinist, “A serious problem for
adherents to the machine model is that, although they are obliged by the model to explain
organisms from the bottom up only, the deeper they go the less of anything remotely machinelike
can be found” (p. 690). As individuals peer into the actual dynamics of life, they find a ceaseless
stream of activity, a wonderous flow of energy that has no linear on–off switch because the only
true off switch for a living body is death. Cells—even single cells—themselves act in sentient
ways that imply forms of cognition, intelligence, significations, values, memories,
determinations, and most importantly, creativity (McGilchrist, 2021). The same cannot
reasonably be said for the minutia of machinery. Life is not linear, deducible, or reducible to
mono-directional signaling and propelling. Life is, to reiterate Jung’s suggestion, matter
enlivened by spirit.
Plants provide one encouraging example of conscious intelligence running throughout
nature. As carefully laid out by Gagliano (2020) in a documentary called Aware: Glimpses of
Consciousness, plants sense, learn, and respond to stimulating events in creative nondeterministic
ways. Several independent studies have supported these claims. According to
Gagliano, “the incredible amount of data that is emerging in the field of plant behavior and
communication is obviously pointing to more uncomfortable questions of whether plants are
sentient, intelligent, conscious?” (20:30). In this statement, Gagliano inferred that plants have
responsive subjectivity; she goes on to exclaim, “We have plenty of evidence that plants feel,
sense, and respond” (21:02). One example of Gagliano’s claims appeared in a groundbreaking
study published at the Max Planck Institute. In this study, Monroe et al. (2022) found that a
common roadside weed in Europe, Asia, and Africa (Arabidopsis thaliana) proactively mutates
its own genome and conserves already highly functional parts of its genome as appropriate. I
believe this indicates that the plant biology of Arabidopsis thaliana somehow senses via
interoceptive consciousness, how to creatively experiment with the functionality of its own
genome. This radically challenges the old idea that gene mutations occur entirely at random to be
merely selected post hoc by natural selection. The authors directly stated that their finding
suggests that gene mutations do not occur randomly, as previously believed. In my view, the
study suggests conscious intelligence on a molecular level, suggesting the capacity to feel,
respond, understand, and create.
Additionally, recent researchers have suggested that human cells make decisions based on
complex perceptions. Kramer et al. (2022) suggested “heterogeneity and complexity in signaling
networks may have coevolved to enable specific and context-aware cellular decisionmaking in a
multicellular setting” (p. 1). The author’s phrasing implies intelligent and sentient cellular and
intracellular capabilities. They conclude that awareness of the redundant and novel signaling
present in a complex intracellular state allows individual cells to assess and signal a decision for
their own behavior based on their aware information processing. Based on the working
definitions I have provided, awareness implies consciousness; decisions imply evaluations based
on such awareness; intrinsic value positions drive input into behavior, and considerations occur
before signaling inhibition or activation of intracellular communication and action pathways.
Of course, I do not intend to anthropomorphize a cell, so I point out that a cell’s
consciousness would not be like that of experience at the metacognitive capacity of being a
human. I do not mean to suggest that single cells think and act like humans. As McGilchrist
(2021) wrote, “Does a slime mould have awareness? If it does, and I suspect it does, the
awareness cannot be much like ours” (p. 748). I understand that human awareness cannot
comprehend the details of a consciousness foreign or alien to that of humans. Nevertheless, I
suggest that consciousness manifests itself in cells and in the whole of nature through the
categories of perceiving, feeling, sensing, proactively engaging, evaluating, and directing
behavior. However different the colors and contours of other consciousnesses may be from those
of human metacognition, it remains that consciousness as such involves multidimensional layers
of phenomenality and luminescent activity. When it comes to life, I suggest consciousness has no
off switch; its luminous sentience persists in living beings and manifests in different degrees of
complexity and intelligent capabilities. Varieties of human states of consciousness, such as sleep
and wakefulness, merely represent different manifestations of phenomenality. Cells may not
think, “I am a cell making a decision,” but nevertheless, a phenomenal and intelligent experience
of thisness may occur. Computers and algorithms do not appear to share this conscious capacity
to feel, perceive, sense, engage, or understand. I see no reason to assume they would.
Soul and Functional Creativity
Life demonstrates extraordinary creativity; it autopoetically creates its own informational
inputs and organs of perception and behavior and often even modifies its own parameters on the
fly through development, mutation, and evolution. The creative possibilities of life are indefinite.
As Kaufmann (2016) points out, as evolution in the biosphere occurs, it creates new actuals (i.e.,
things that actually exist) that then create new adjacent possibles (i.e., things that could exist
based on new actuals, such as possibilities). This cycle occurs in such an emphatically creative
way that it belies any foreseeably consistent boundaries around the space of possibilities (i.e.,
what’s considered the phase space or state space in dynamical systems theory).
Nature’s possibilities and their ensuing manifestations are indefinite in scope, direction,
and peculiarity. Kauffman (2016) furthered his argument with the example of the evolution of the
swim bladder in fish. Once the swim bladder evolved with the function of creating neutral
buoyancy, the fish did not have to effortfully swim to stay at the same level of depth in the water.
Thus emerged a new actual, a swim bladder. The birth of the new actual swim bladder gave rise
to adjacent possibilities. For example, a bacteria or worm may also evolve to live in that swim
bladder. Then, the existence of the bacteria or worm creates still more adjacent possibilities (e.g.,
perhaps another microorganism evolves to eat those bacteria or worms). This all results in what
Kauffman described as ceaseless creativity. New actuals create new adjacent possibles, which
give rise to more actuals and more possibles. Kauffman called this “the bubbling forth of the
biosphere.” The process is so radically creative and generative that Kauffman interpreted this as a
deeply spiritual and meaningful process. The possibilities of life in the biosphere are so vast that
scientists cannot begin to comprehensively name them all.
To drive his point home, Kauffman (2016) urged his readers to “please list for me all
possible uses of a screwdriver” (p. 70). The request leads to the inevitable conclusion that they
really cannot exhaust listing the possible uses of a screwdriver. Stating some examples will be
useful. If I want to assemble a hutch, I will assemble the hutch by using the screwdriver to attach
the doors and screw in the knobs. But if I change my agenda, the screwdriver also changes its
function. If I want to remove old caulking from the edges of the shower, I can scrape it off with
the screwdriver. If I want to etch a message or symbol in stone for someone to read, I may do so
with the screwdriver. If I want to go spearfishing, I could attach the screwdriver to the end of a
pole (Kauffman, 2016). If I want to chisel an ice statue, I might use the screwdriver as my ice
pick. Or perhaps I could hammer the screwdriver into a high place on a softwood tree to have a
firm enough hold to climb higher to the next limb and take eggs from a bird’s nest for breakfast.
I could use the screwdriver to loosen up dirt in the ground to dig a hole more easily by hand.
Kauffman argued that the indefinite uses of a screwdriver are analogous to nature’s continual
ability to evolve as it always manifests new actuals and possibles in an emphatically creative and
nondeterministic sense. Thus, just as an individual could not list all the possible uses of a
screwdriver, scientists cannot predict what nature will do with its resources to create a function.
I suspect another reason why all uses of a screwdriver cannot be listed is because terms
like “uses” and “functions” depend on value-positions and intentionality. The space of value and
motivated directionality is multidimensional and phenomenological; it resides as part of the
world of psyche and depends on consciousness and multiple consciousness. Each of the possible
uses of a screwdriver above demonstrates a striving for a function driven by a value and desired
outcome. Thus, evolution, nature, and conscious, intelligent creativity can and do find
innumerable uses for any given thing depending on the need, the goal, the value, the
environmental relations, and the potential perceived. I propose that the value-space of a given
consciousness determines direction and function.
According to Kauffman (2023), the creative unfolding of the biosphere “is not a
computation, it’s not a deduction” (3:16). Logical deduction and computer technology do not
begin to touch this space of unfathomable possibility. By contrast, logic drives computer systems
that are unimaginative in and of themselves, yet they effectively fulfill the needs of those who
have imagination. Computerized mechanistic processes cannot possibly drive evolution because
it is impossible to state all the possibilities in advance because they are indefinite. Therefore, no
logical response can be prepared in advance for a possibility that cannot be deduced or modeled.
Creativity represents an appropriate word for nature’s ability to transform and become.
The creative brilliance of nature cannot be denied. Life itself is full of self-constraining
functionalities (i.e., enabling constraints) that can spontaneously and responsively evolve beyond
themselves to a given ecological niche. Organisms may nonlinearly transcend their own
constraints and create new parameters in a creative manner that cannot be modeled or
mathematically projected (e.g., evolution; Kauffman, 2016). For example, dinosaur scales
eventually further evolved to produce bird feathers, and before those feathers were for flight,
they performed heat retention in the body (Kauffman, 2023). That did not stop the creative force
of nature from eventually repurposing them to produce the miracle of flight. Through evolution,
nature repeatedly finds new purposes for already existing organs and functions (Kauffman,
2023). Exaptation refers to the repurposing of previously evolved adaptations for new creative
purposes, which occurs often in evolution.
I would like to carefully consider the ramifications of Kauffman’s argument. He explicitly
showed that the unfolding of life itself is pure creativity unfolding in multiple directions. I find it
impossible to discuss creative acts in a purely deterministic or computational manner. A creative
act is an imaginative act, a resourceful act, a sentient and spontaneously generated act that births
the emergence of a new order. Not only is creativity via determinism an oxymoron, but
accidental creativity also represents a contradiction. Calling the acts of nature creative in the
truest sense of the word suggests there must be some core force of conscious being behind them.
This claim corresponds with Jung’s (1960/1975) previously quoted position that the psyche
“creates its own organ, and maintains and modifies it” (Jung, 1960/1975, p. 177). That statement
directly relates to the unceasing creativity described by Kauffman and the consciousness that I
have suggested directs evolutionary processes in nature. Therefore, if I accept the creative
ingeniousness of nature and admit that creativity does not occur in a vacuum, then I must
strongly consider the soul as the origin of such creativity.
Soul as the Originator and Sustainer of Life
I propose that the soul, the life force, serves as the conscious energic dynamism behind
the emergence and unfolding of living complexity in the biosphere. Otherwise, the question
remains of what pushes life to evolve, change, adapt, animate, and create. If humans are not
machines running on dead, automatic, deterministic algorithms, then they must be souls. We
must be creative life energies taking part in the conscious experience of the universe. The soul
must represent the essence of consciousness or sentience itself, for it makes no more sense to
suggest a creator without sentience or without a felt sense of beingness than it does to suggest
deterministic creativity or creativity by accident. If the unfolding of life is truly as radically
creative as Kauffman (2016) suggested, then this creates a philosophical necessity to place the
soul as ontologically prior to all that is created. I believe this because it would be a contradiction
to suggest randomness, determinism, or computation generate creativity.
In sum, I propose the soul may be essential to understanding life, the psyche, and
consciousness. Without a soul, depth psychology would not exist. In his depth psychology, Jung
took the reality of the soul as a given premise (Nelson & Coppin, 2017). Nevertheless, I believe
it has been useful to interrogate why psychologists hold the soul as ontologically valid.
Ultimately, being immeasurable by any tools known to mankind, the stringent materialist or
physicalist may still scoff at the soul’s existence. However, being stuck with deterministic acts of
unceasing creativity leaves much intellectual fortification to be desired within the physicalist’s
position.
The Soul’s Layers of Access
Based on what has been said so far, it seems the soul has layers of access and direction
within its embodiment, depending on the complexity of an organism. Importantly, I have argued
that metacognitive consciousness only represents a small fragment of consciousness as a whole.
Therefore, I am not suggesting that the soul has omniscience when it comes to its own organism,
with complete and total self-referential metacognitive understanding and control at every layer of
biology. I hope to relieve that potential concern because such a conclusion would undermine my
overall argument. By stating that the soul is a creative life force behind the creativity in nature, I
do not assume it has metacognitive or self-referential capacities in every stage or layer of
biology.
As the process of evolution has complexified, marvels such as the mammalian neocortex
have allowed specific metacognitive abilities, and therefore, the ensouled consciousness has even
more mediums for experience. As I explained regarding unique animals and their varying organs
of perception, I suggest consciousness works through and builds on what already exists. If that is
the case, the creative force of the soul works with what it has in terms of embodied complexity
and capability. I suggest it works within the enabling constraints of its organism and
environment. Creativity is an intelligent capacity and yet it does not necessitate self-referential
abilities or complex forms of narrative identity. However, because this dissertation pertains to
humans and their ability to participate in individuation, I determined metacognitive and
selfreferential capacities are more relevant. Focusing on Jung’s concept of the soul and how it
relates to individuation may assist an understanding of how the soul can directly foster the
individuation process.
Refocusing on the Jungian Soul in Relation to Individuation
So far, I have provided a broad exposition of the soul, interspersing Jung’s views as
relevant and dialogically supportive of the argument structure. However, looking specifically at
the Jungian soul and its relation to individuation will beckon potential answers to the research
question. Because Jung held complex views on the soul that arguably involved his personality
dispositions and surrounding cultural values, I found Jung provided a useful case study about
individuation for this chapter. His usefulness emerged in part through his intimately documented
individuation process in The Red Book. Moreover, this record, in combination with his
intellectual commentary, allowed a potentially robust approach to individuation. I argue Jung
himself provided potential examples of individuation with a soul and subpersonalities and no ego
complex.
As mentioned, Jung (1963/1970) also acknowledged the soul as the living energy of
human beings, described as the animating principle or that which makes the body live.
Importantly, Jung also used what might be regarded as currently outmoded gender stereotypes to
explore his concept of the anima in a man and the animus in a woman. Indeed, Rowland (2020)
pointed out that there was a part of Jung’s writing that had a rigid and domineering relationship
to gender. I see this in the way he sometimes addressed his soul with scorn in the Red Book. For
example, at one point, Jung exclaimed to his soul that “she” was an “adulterous whore” (p. 346).
Another example lies in the fact that when the spirit of the depths instructed him to be a servant
of his soul, he said this was “repugnant to me and I hated it” (p. 134). Still more, he insinuated at
one point that his soul might be a “stupid animal” (p. 159). It appears to me that Jung showed a
subpersonality within him that could not stand subjugating himself to his soul. Yet, as Rowland
(2020) pointed out, Jung also saw the anima as a profoundly generative source of insight and
brilliance. These moments of awe and reverence toward the soul conspicuously appear in The
Red Book, for example, when he apologizes to his soul and commits to trusting her while saying,
“I must learn to love you” (p. 138). Several other instances of deep respect and servitude toward
the soul occur. Indeed, I think the core theme of The Red Book involves Jung’s journey of
learning to love his soul and shedding his previous identity, which was so bound up in what he
described as a superficial need for acceptance (Jung, 2009).
I suggest that Jung had a subpersonality who was beholden to rigid gender roles, cultural
limitations, and austere treatment of psychic reality (i.e., what he called the spirit of the times).
This subpersonality then projected these feelings onto his soul. Meanwhile, perhaps he had other
subpersonalities who were much more fluid with their approach and open to honoring the soul’s
divinity (i.e., the spirit of the depths). Jung (1963) documented his experienced duality between
rigid cultural and worldly adherence in contrast to fluid intuitive livelihood. Since childhood, he
asserted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that this tension had occurred between what he called
Personality Number 1 and Personality Number 2. Personality Number 1 obsessed over the
objective world and its social trappings. Personality Number 2, he claimed, represented the rich
and deep interior world of psyche. I wonder if Personality Number 1 was the subpersonality that
so hated and resisted his soul, and Personality Number 2 rejoiced upon her arrival.
Moreover, whatever the reader makes of Jung’s varied attitudes toward his soul, I am
partial to the popular post-Jungian conclusion that rigidly gendered and contra-sexual attitudes
toward the soul are outmoded. If each human being is unique (Jung, 1954/1970), then it stands to
reason that they will have a unique soul with its own special qualities that may or may not have
different gender associations. I, for example, have long felt that my own soul was best
symbolized by a tree, and it has never occurred to me what the gender of the tree might be. The
only relevance is that the tree is a powerful living symbol for my soul. I hope my reader will
understand that in presenting Jung’s thoughts on the soul, I have attempted to get to the crux of
what a soul is and, therefore, will discard culturally old elements and limitations based on gender
and sexuality.
Jung believed the soul undergoes much change throughout the individuation process. In
The Red Book, for example, Jung (2009) personified his soul in different stages of complexity
and maturity. Initially, he described it as a desert, and he felt empty and starved for meaning. As
he followed the process of his depth inquiry, his soul began to be full of imagination and insight,
fulfilled several manifestations of itself. He described these as “the serpent, and in that or some
other animal form I roam,” “the human soul,” and the “celestial soul.” (Jung, 2009, p. 577). Once
again, Jung characterized the soul as having a multidimensional and hermetic capacity, arguably
developed and made more able to participate with multiplicity throughout The Red Book. The
soul blossoms as a concept through the course of The Red Book, and the rest of Jung’s (2009)
psyche seems to gradually relate to his soul with more understanding, surrender, and equanimity.
Relating to its hermetic capacity, Jung described the soul as the energetic dynamism that
fuels the world of complexes and archetypes and determines its ultimate meaning and direction.
He claimed the anima is the interior world of the objective psyche. This can be seen in his
elaborations on Mercurius in Mysterium Conciunctionis, where Jung (1963/1970) conflated the
soul with Mercurius. He wrote, “the Mercurius of the alchemists is a personification and
concretization of what we today would call the collective unconscious” (p. 462). He described
Mercurius as that total ineffable constituent representing the objective psyche, explaining,
“Mercurius is the soul (anima), which is the ‘mediator between body and spirit’” (p. 461). As a
mediator, the soul operates as a midwife of sorts because the soul enlivens the body, and the
Spirit is incarnated through the soul into the body. Mercurius indeed represented the
individuation process (Jung, 1963/1970). I interpret Jung’s words to mean nothing less than that
the soul is the ineffable root of the entire psyche upon which individuation ultimately rests.
Howe (2023) described Jung’s depiction of the soul as a lived phenomenon and
characterized a major theme of his life’s work as follows: “Research into the soul as an invisible
reality that animates life on its own accord” (p. 93). Animating life itself gives the soul a depth
that puts it at the energic root of all perceptions and living capacities. This position supports the
possibility that the soul’s existence animates subpersonalities. Thus, without the refulgence of the
soul, the psyche has no aliveness. Indeed, according to Jung (1963/1970), the Spirit animus
unites with the anima in the process of individuation, further reinforcing the cruciality of the
soul. Furthermore, as earlier cited, Jung (1959/1969) characterized the wise old man as a symbol
of the Self archetype and Spirit animus, as “the father of the soul, and yet the soul, in some
miraculous manner, is also his virgin mother, for which reason he was called by the alchemists
the ‘first son of the mother.’” (p. 35). Here, Jung implied that the soul and the Self are
inextricably linked and that, as such, readers must assume that individuation is a soul-directed
activity because, without the soul, the Spirit cannot incarnate. In The Red Book, he wrote, “the
God appears to us in a certain state of the soul. Therefore, we reach the God through the self. Not
the self is God, although we reach the God through the self” (Jung, 2009, p. 481). Here, Jung
directly established the deep interconnection between the numinous spiritual realities, the
Jungian Self, and the soul. In response to how the soul reaches the state it needs to propitiate the
individuation process, I propose that a certain state involves the soul coming to embrace and
empower its own agency. Having thoroughly prepared the ground through a thorough discussion
on the soul, I now address that question directly.
Soul Applied to Individuation
Based on what has been presented thus far, I suggest that beings have souls, and they also
have subpersonalities. The working applications of biology and evolution ensure that the more
complex the organism is, the strength of disposition and quantity of subpersonalities will
naturally increase. Based on various sources reviewed so far, I assume that the soul has the
following qualities and properties.
•The soul is essence, life force, vital energy, and animation.
•The soul can direct purposes and intentionality.
•The soul serves as the core of phenomenal consciousness, which drives the unceasing
creativity of organismic life.
•The soul, in its fullest expression, directs the subpersonalities and creates and finds
meaning in an individual’s own circumstances (Strachan, 2011b).
•The soul is pure energy and inhabits the body totally (i.e., it is not a dualistic soul).
•Once the soul is embodied, it is fully embodied up to the point of death (Strachan,
2011b).
Because I have presented the soul as the animating force behind psyche and life, the lack
of a soul would mean no subpersonalities, no living experiences, and no imaginal understandings
or phenomenological disclosures of meaning. The soul operates like the radiant sun from which
all activities and purposes of an organism and psyche receive life. Souls, therefore, represent the
living essence of all beings. Scientists cannot easily measure them, and nor can they summarily
discard them. I contend that the difference between organism and machine discussed earlier can
be most decidedly outlined by understanding that an organism has a soul and a machine does not.
Finally, given the suggested creative nature of the soul, I suggest individuation is a creative
process.
Jung’s Soul Awakening
Based on these premises, I assert that the awakening of the soul to itself empowers it in
suffusing the cogitations and behaviors of subpersonalities with meaningful awareness and
dialogical insight. Furthermore, the soul might operate as an irrefutable power to which the
subpersonalities are subordinate, happily or not. For example, Jung (2009) encounters his own
soul, wherein he found himself thrown at the mercy of his soul’s inflections and activities in The
Red Book. In the earlier portions of “Scrutines,” Jung describes his soul as ascending to the
higher realms, which corresponds with Jung’s alchemical analysis later in his career of the unio
mentalis (i.e., the process whereby soul and spirit unite). In this phase of The Red Book, Jung
undergoes a process of intense personality differentiation. Prior to his soul’s entrance, he locks
into a deep intrapsychic dialogue that I infer involves two of his subpersonalities. At length, one
subpersonality decries another, intensively taking inventory of all its disingenuous qualities; this
continues for several paragraphs. As cited in earlier chapters, Jung later saw this encounter as a
confrontation with his shadow, which he addressed in the Red Book as “my I” (p. 466). But the
passage clearly shows there was another I because he addressed his I from another subject, also
called “I,” and wrote, “after I had spoken these and many other words to my I” (p. 466).
Therefore, I interpreted these interactions as subpersonalities in a dialogue. This interpretation is
a corollary to one of Chapter 4’s working premises, in which I explained that the use of the word
I in everyday speech is relative to which subpersonality is speaking. In this sense, I interpret
Jung’s Is as subpersonalities that contain unique motivational perspectives portrayed as in
tension with one another throughout the passage. The soul’s entrance adds another dimension to
the dialogical psychic process.
Immediately after this diatribe, Jung’s soul entered, becoming another dialogical partner
that cries out, “How distant you are!” (p. 466). The soul then exclaimed that she was flying far
above him and had found much joy. Again, the soul’s ascendance corresponds with the union of
soul and spirit (i.e., unio mentalis). However, Jung’s present subpersonality expressed displeasure
with this event. He found himself enraged, protesting the soul’s divinity as so much unbearable
suffering occurred on earth and within himself. However, he eventually succumbed to his soul’s
reign as he exposited, “Divinity is not humanity” and “I have become enslaved to you” (p. 468).
Essentially, Jung acknowledged that the soul is ontologically and qualitatively transcendent to the
realm of what he might call his complexes or personality. Put another way, he understood that his
subpersonalities were not as powerful as his soul, but rather than being joyful, his presently
active subpersonality interpreted this as a defeat to which he resigned.
Personality-Driven or Soul-Directed
Thus, I have arrived at the difference between a personality-driven life and a souldirected
life, as earlier outlined by Strachan (2011b). In a personality-driven life, the subpersonalities are
enabled by virtue of the soul’s existence to live, but they will find their way forward into action
quite independently so long as the soul has not taken a direct initiative in life experience. Jung
asserted that in a soul-directed life, the subpersonalities are immersed in a dialogical initiative
wherein the soul manifests, repurposes, stultifies, empowers, redirects, reimagines, and generally
lovingly takes leadership within the human being’s life. Once Jung’s (2009) soul claims her
power, the rest of him is indelibly altered, confronting his choice to acknowledge, accept,
celebrate, resist, or engage the soul’s newfound strength. The soul’s crucial role in individuation
may, in large part, result from its penetrating depth, which may reach into the farthest depths of
nature and the becoming of the universe.
Considering subpersonalities as being enabled to exist by virtue of having an animating
soul, I conclude that the soul has a core energy of its own, and that energy naturally diffuses
through the whole psychic system. The soul, as a creative force, spurs the process of
differentiation, which is responsible for multiplicity. As proclaimed by Philemon in The Red
Book, “differentiation is creation. It is differentiated. Differentiation is its essence, and therefore
it differentiates. Therefore, man differentiates, since his essence is differentiation” (Jung, 2009,
p. 510). Claiming differentiation represents the essence of creation, and having already
established the soul as a creative life force, the soul serves as the base of all differentiated
multiplicity. Therefore, although the soul may vary in its levels of direct participation and focus
and may or may not actively pursue individuation, it remains an energic enabler of activity. It
does so by virtue of being the core life force that allows physiological and psychological
existence, which is by its nature multiple and differentiated.
As mentioned, I am operating under the notion that the soul, at its core, represents pure
energy and consciousness. It then stands to reason that to live a soulful life, the soul must direct
the activity of the subpersonalities in a more proactive manner, which means it must come out of
its dormant state and form intentions and focused energy toward life and spirit. As affirmed by
Jung’s (2009) Philemon,
We die to the same extent we do not differentiate. Hence the creature’s essence strives
toward differentiation and struggles against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called
the principium individuationis. This principle is the essence of the creature, from this you
can see why nondifferentiation and nondistinction pose a great danger to the creature. (p.
511)
This statement suggests that the soul must proactively participate in its psychic multiplicity if it
is to adhere to the principle of individuation and fulfill a life well lived. Moreover, given that the
essence of the creative act belonging to the soul is differentiation, I have a potential answer to the
research question. Psychic multiplicity and individuation with no ego complex can functionally
coexist because the soul, in its essential nature, creates and engages multiplicity as a life force.
McGilchrist (2021) professed: “the history of the cosmos looks like one of constant
divergence into multiplicity and uniqueness, yet a uniqueness that is always subsumed within,
and understood against the background of, a coherent whole” (p. 1,297). This statement suggests
a polymorphous monism, a conscious universe that creates ever more unique differentiation
within its indivisible essence. If, as Ceylan et al. (2017) asserted, the soul is an indivisible whole
borne from the soul of the universe (i.e., Spirit), and if it is in that soul’s nature to create,
differentiate, and become, then psychic multiplicity naturally belongs to the wholeness of the
individual soul and universal Spirit. Differentiation then represents the complexification of unity
that occurs within the reality of consciousness and the soul.
Finding a Center
I have not simply removed the ego complex and slipped in a soul as a central
gravitational force for consciousness and multiple consciousness. Rather, I argue that the soul is
central to the whole psyche and not just a structurally appointed domain of that psyche. As with
the ego complex, Jung described it as the center of a structural division that he called the
personal conscious personality, and therefore, not the center of the whole self, which also
included an unconscious psyche. But as I have attempted to interrupt distinctions like conscious
and unconscious and instead look at the psyche as a fluid system with many consciousness
aspects, I can reintroduce a center in a qualitatively different manner. The soul then becomes the
essence of the human being, the central spark of consciousness from which all multiple
consciousnesses diverge, the life force that culminates as an immeasurable quality of existence
that is accessed through a felt sense. The earlier reviewed commentary of Jung’s analysis of the
direct connection between life itself and the soul applies here; moreover, he emphasized that an
individual’s sense of I grows out of the depths of the soul. I argue later in this chapter that the
soul serves as the base of all consciousness from which the multiple consciousness of
subpersonalities springboard for their respective experiences. Consequently, I rely on Jung’s
(1960/1969) observation of the identity between soul and life. Strachan (2011b) drove this point
about the identity of life and soul home with a poignant reference:
In a humorous fashion, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows provide a simple analysis
in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008), as voiced by one of their
characters: “Did any of you ever think that along about the time the notion of a SOUL
gave out, Freud popped up with the EGO to take its place? The timing of the man! Did he
not pause to reflect? Irresponsible old coot! It is my belief that men must spout this
twaddle about egos, because they fear they have no soul! Think upon it!” (p. 7).
I suggest seeing the soul as the base of unique identity restores a sense of meaning to the
psyche, which may have been theoretically displaced by insistence on a centralized ego. In my
view, although the multiple Is of subpersonalities interchange in their focused intensity of
perspective and behavior, all activities of the psyche ultimately rest on the soul’s power.
The soul does not lend itself well to forms of measurement (Strachan, 2011b);
nonetheless, many live by the phenomenon and feeling of having a soul. In Jungian depth
psychology, researchers have described the soul as an ontological reality (Coppin & Nelson,
2017). Without a soul, the subpersonalities would have no essential being within which to
cohere, which would be biologically and psychologically untenable. Yet, having a soul does not
secure individuation in any real sense of the word; the soul simply allows a principle of
individuation to exist. The soul must awaken to itself and its personality dispositions.
Themes of Soul-Directed Individuation
I suggest one way to look at individuating is for individuals to participate in an
exploration of personal authenticity. Although general principles about the process of becoming
and realizing personal wholeness can be extrapolated, the granular exactitude with which
individuation manifests is a highly personal phenomenon. Authenticity suggests uniqueness, an
individual’s self-awareness about their uniqueness, and choice about how to channel that
uniqueness. I, therefore, submit themes of what it might mean to individuate and highlight these
as a way of filling out a bigger picture while understanding that true individuation is always a
unique process. Jung’s project of individuation carries with it many concepts and
phenomenological experiences. The process of individuation itself does not involve an
abstraction or theoretical process. The soul who partakes in individuation has their own
phenomenological experience within which they may feel they have a soul and direct life from
that center. This is why I believe the testimony of Jung’s The Red Book played such a crucial role
in his overall opus. In part of Jung’s (1954/1970) expressed goal of individuation, he
individualized the psyche by manifesting it in a distinct and refined manner through life.
The ideal state of a soul-directed life involves each subpersonality fulfilling its role or
playing its part as a distinct entity, which fulfills the soul’s designs and delivers a life well lived
to Spirit in the ultimate honoring of spiritual oneness (Strachan, 2011b). This resembles
Kauffman’s (2023) notion that “the function of a part is that subset of its causal properties that
sustain the whole” (p. 2). Kauffman described the fact that for a system constituted of multiple
parts, the parts themselves must feed into the functionality of the whole system for that system to
be sustained. This definition connects with the earlier described concept of metafunctionality and
its relationship to individuation. I add that the function of a part can also include that which it
does to sustain itself, which is relevant to what I previously described as relative functionality.
Therefore, to extrapolate Kauffman’s concept of a part functioning in relation to the whole, when
it comes to individuation from the perspective of the soul, the function of a subpersonality
involves that which the subpersonality does to add functional value to the soul’s existence. The
soul often naturally inclined toward depth and meaning (Pictet, 2017), will then cherish those
actions subpersonalities take to deepen its sense of meaningful participation in life. To
participate, I suggest the soul must have a phenomenological felt sense of its own being.
If pure energy and essence comprise the soul, then an individual would have to feel and
be embodied as identified with that pure energy to some extent to proactively partake in the
individuation process. Otherwise, the soul would remain a disembodied idea. Howe (2023)
explained:
An individual who can feel their individual soul’s yearning to connect with its greater
wholeness may experience that yearning as a living pulse in the ‘matter’ or reality of their
personality, leading them toward meaningful creative work that is connected to the soul’s
development. (p. 94)
In other words, a person must have a felt sense of their own soul, and perhaps a soul must
also have a felt sense of their human person and corollary traits, as in their subpersonalities.
Howe (2023) drove her point home by stating, “We are the prima materia for the gradual
realization of the soul” (p. 102). I therefore suggest subpersonalities provide an avenue for the
soul’s awakening and empowerment. I suggest that by engaging with its own essence and
differentiated subpersonalities, the soul may come to embody a deeper sense of belonging and
meaning.
In my view, the soul represents an agency that can be awakened as an embodied felt sense
and enable a sense of personal directedness and meaningful participation within the psyche to
occur. Like Socrates’s position in Phaedo (Plato, 2002) or von Stuckgrad’s (2022) observation,
the soul can serve simultaneously as a life force and an intentional director. Therefore,
phenomenologically, the soul has two components of functional possibilities for awareness. First,
it has the capacity to feel its own energy as a presence of life, a life force; the feeling of being
alive itself might be an adequate description. Second, it has the capacity to be aware of the
content that exists within that broad scope of consciousness. That is, the soul can at once be
aware of its vital essence and be aware of the contents of consciousness and the multiple
consciousness aspects within that broader field of living energy.
Choice and Free Will
Being capable of awareness, the soul may also confront the possibility of choice.
Subpersonalities, as established, will naturally attempt to achieve their desires, and the soul’s
differentiated awareness of their activities substantiates the soulful choice of how to handle life.
Every organism only has so much usable energy within the reality of its body psyche (Jung,
1960/1975). As such, the driving energy, which is akin to fuel for activity, can be allied with
subpersonalities so they may proactively engage with life. However, the soul, as the very focal
point of life as the life force, may have the ability to intervene or generate and direct attention
and drive energy. I suggest the soul has free will in the sense that it can act on its intentions and
reinforce certain subpersonalities over others within the organism’s enabling constraints.
If I accept that the soul has agency and is not merely a powerless soul but a proactive
force, then the soul could contend with the subpersonalities and their genetic proclivities as well
as nurturing experiences. It also follows that the soul transcends the subpersonalities because
although myriad forces that are genetic, epigenetic, energetic, psychological, and conscious drive
the subpersonalities, the soul is more ontologically primary as a pure life force. Being primary
and akin to the fertile ground of being within which subpersonalities foster their potentials, the
soul’s agency and being have intentional power in terms of the overall directionality of
personality expression.
Soul-Directed Participation With Individuation
The soul can direct participation in life’s designs, which indelibly change the state of the
psyche. The starting point for an individual is self-understanding, to know oneself. This means
that an individual must be aware that they have a soul and be aware of their psychic multiplicity
or subpersonalities. With this awareness comes creative space of choice within which personality
and soul may engage. To use Kauffman’s earlier reviewed concept of the new actual and adjacent
possible, the soul’s awakened phenomenological presence represents a new actual occurrence
that enables adjacent possibles to exist within that same person’s psyche. As subpersonalities
participate, they then create new actuals and possibles, creating the bubbling forth of the psyche.
I perceive Kauffman’s work as directly connecting to the phenomenological principles laid out
by Heidegger.
Individuals enact authenticity by owning their own possibilities for existence, which
represented an existential theme in Heidegger’s (1953/2010) Being and Time. I only briefly
restate what has been mentioned in the literature review and add to its potential meaning. As
explained by Heidegger, having the experience of being thrown into the world, Dasein (i.e., a
human being that is aware of being) finds itself always already in some implicit form of
orientation. Being always already oriented, Dasein constantly and implicitly faces its own
possibilities for existence. As a being that is always immersed in some orientation toward the
world, Dasein’s reality by nature becomes its possibilities.
I relate these ideas to Kauffman’s to contribute to a working understanding of the soul
and individuation. To be authentic, Dasein must own its own actuals (i.e., thrownness), meaning
the real situation Dasein finds itself in, and proactively choose how to participate with its
adjacent possibles. Interestingly, authentically owning a situation as an actual and proactively
choosing possibles constitutes a new actual, which generates more adjacent possibles for Dasein.
I view that new actual as the participation of the soul. Granting that the beingness of Dasein
might be synonymous with the soul in the sense that Dasein is a phenomenally existent human
consciousness (Heidegger, 1953/2010), I interpret Kauffman and Heidegger together in the
following manner: The soul finds itself thrown, meaning it is always already embodied in an
orientation toward life made possible by dispositional subpersonalities. Being thrown is the
actual situation the soul finds itself in, and the content of that situation exists relative to the
attitudinal orientation of the subpersonalities in addition to the surrounding life situation. Being
aware of this, the soul always confronts its possibilities for existence. It has a choice to own its
possibilities or not. To own its possibilities is then to be authentic or to be soul-directed. To own
its possibilities may then mean that the soul must take leadership and direct the subpersonalities.
Rather than adjacent possibles unfolding into actuals by the sheer relative will of
subpersonalities, the soul takes part in directing the creative unfolding of transforming possibles
into actuals.
For example, going back to Jung’s (2009) experience recorded in The Red Book, he
described his soul’s stirring, and active participation represented a new actual that enabled new
dialogical possibles and activities to occur within his psyche. Eventually, the subpersonalities of
his psyche directly addressed the soul and vice versa; these new actuals fostered still more
adjacent possibles that eventually manifested into actuals themselves. This process resulted in a
drastic change in attitude toward life (Jung, 1963). In this sense, the individuation process fits
within what Kauffman characterized earlier as the unceasing creativity of the biosphere. Applied
to the psyche, the soul’s direct participation creates major waves in the psychic constellation of
subpersonalities as presently constituted.
The soul’s proactive engagement represents nothing less than a drastic change, sometimes
viewed by certain subpersonalities as an inconvenient disturbance to their agenda and
homeostasis, while other subpersonalities may be refreshed and rejoice. The soul may wish to
change major attitudes and intentions that have been coagulated and maintained by one
subpersonality or another. However, subpersonalities do not always cooperate, so they may need
more intensive soul interventions for the soul to accomplish a life well-lived. For example,
Jung’s soul awakening amounted to a major disturbance to what he called Personality Number 1,
the part of him that wanted to stay in the spirit of the times and was more concerned with social
customs and being his persona than with the depth of his psyche. Previously, I outlined examples
of a part of Jung articulated in The Red Book that directly resisted his soul.
Some Explicit Forms of Soul-Directed Participation
In Chapter 4, I established a working premise that the use of the word I at any given
moment depended on which subpersonality was speaking. I now add one addendum to that
claim, which is that the soul may also speak, feel, and participate as an I (Rowan, 2012).
Qualitatively speaking, the soul might emerge as having a deeper character and a more radiant
felt sense so that an individual can understand when their soul is speaking or enacting its
consciousness.
Active Imagination
Active imagination provides one access point to the soul. Schul (2023) claimed that Jung
discovered active imagination by experimenting on his own psyche. Within active imagination,
an individual creatively accesses the soul through deep feeling and image. Jung (1997)
encouraged individuals to use any psychic image with an effective charge as a starting point. The
word image in active imagination adheres to Jung’s notion that images are expressions of the
psyche with feeling tones and latent meanings. Images can intersect with a variety of senses in
addition to the visual sense. Using active imagination as an intentional exercise of focus may fill
an individual with a sense of their own soul. In summarizing the importance of Jung’s own
healing journey with active imagination, Schul (2023) stated: “It’s through the images and our
creative expressive way of working with them, that we too can find healing” (p. 32:34). Active
imagination stimulates the ability for the soul to self-regulate and embody a sense of
connectedness. It seems that creative expression continues to be a theme of the restoration of soul
and meaning.
As described by Jung (1997), active imagination encourages the process of
differentiation, wherein different parts of the psyche are presented distinctly to consciousness.
Instead of succumbing to a mood or strong affect, Jung insisted individuals should maintain a
focused conversation so they can understand the character of the psychic agency at work. In
other words, individuals must understand the intention and quality of the subpersonality in
dialogue. Fully understanding their semiautonomous nature, the soul may be empowered not to
give its precious life energy away to a subpersonality unless it intentionally wishes to support its
activities. Moreover, through the imaginal dialogue, the psyche may transform via the
transcendent function, and therefore, what previously occurred as a hostile subpersonality may be
willing to change. However, whether or not the subpersonality supports its own transformation,
the empowered soul may benefit from the exercise.
Gestalt Work
Dialogical exercises, such as Perls’s (1969) empty chair work may also prove to be a
useful phenomenological exercise for accessing the soul. Just as the subpersonalities can switch
back and forth between chairs, a chair also might be used where the soul can address the
subpersonalities or whomever they desire. In general, Perls suggested that the expressive process
of gestalt therapy allows an individual to find their center. According to Perls, “achieving the
center, being grounded in oneself, is about the highest state a human being can achieve” (p. 57).
Through the expressive process, individuals are encouraged to reown the disowned multiplicity
in their personality. As the soul participates in differentiation, it simultaneously centers into a
deeper oneness. Moreover, having outlined the participatory and animating power of ensouled
consciousness, psychological exercises that embody the voices within and act them out in an
empty chair setting may invigorate the soul and encourage it to join the process.
Self/Soul/Spirit Dialogue
Following closely from empty-chair work, many other dialogical methods exist for
opening up to the soul. For example, a person might have sticky notes, stones, carvings, or
magnets that represent the soul and the individual subpersonalities. Picking up one or two
representative objects at a time, an individual can engage in the dialogical process of their
psyche. Dialogue between subpersonalities is foundational to the self/soul/spirit work (Strachan,
2011b). Moreover, the soul can learn to speak and own its voice more powerfully as it gains
confidence in its own felt sense of essence and aliveness (Strachan, 2011b). Naturally, other
subpersonalities might sometimes sneak and try to act like the soul in an attempt to maintain their
power. With time, individuals can learn to catch themselves in these moments and come back to
their inner sense of essence. In this phenomenological reality, each individual must determine
when they are fully embodying their soul and how they know. The sense differs qualitatively
from that of a subpersonality, as the refulgence of the soul represents the radiance of a being’s
energy.
Spiritual Awakening and Practice
Many individuals may find their souls through spiritual awakening and epiphany. Such
individuals might have a religious or spiritual experience that connects them with a sense of
divinity or essence. Corbett (2012/2020) wrote about such numinous experiences and explained
that they enable a profound sense of wholeness and healing to be experienced within the psyche.
At times, Corbett explained, these experiences can be completely spontaneous, and at others,
they require practice to cultivate. Corbett commented: “When we call an experience ‘soulful’ we
mean that it is deeply significant. Here we are trying to describe what we experience when Spirit
embodies, or becomes conscious within a discrete personality” (p. 121). Therefore, a spiritual
experience is also necessarily a soulful experience. In addition to the possibility of having a
spontaneous spiritual awakening, Corbett listed several proactive methods of fostering spiritual
experiences that are nondogmatic and practical. These include practicing attention to present
moment experience, having awareness of inner feelings, prayer, ritual, and practice with
surrender and letting go. Corbett reinforced that these spiritual experiences are available within
the psyche. Because the soul radiates from within, an individual does not need dogmatic practice.
Befitting this inward approach, Goss (2017) wrote about the crucial intersection between
spirituality and creativity. Goss portrayed that individuals access true creativity “we are in touch
with something elementally ‘us,’ which may give us a sense of meaning that some may call
spiritual” (p. 55). He wrote of that ineffable essence that rests behind the human personality and
its various forms of identity. These moments of creativity naturally have the capacity to foster
spiritual experience. Goss’s (2017) applications of creativity to spirituality are deeply compatible
with the foregoing conclusions on the soul’s immense creativity and its ultimate relationship to
Spirit. Therefore, a creative practice or spontaneous act, whether it be physical art, poetry,
imagination, or performance, may act as a vector for numinous experience, a deeper sense of
soul, and an ultimate healing restoration of loving and belonging to the psyche. Perhaps the soul
as a creative life force may feel a deeper spiritual connection during the creative moments of
embodiment because it is being attuned to its origins. In other words, experiences being a
creative soul that belongs to a creative cosmos. In my estimation, spiritual experiences offer a
major inroad for the soul to feel its own vitality and begin to partake in a greater sense of agency
and meaning in its own life.
Opening to Many Forms of Participation
Ultimately, the forms of participation that may be ensouled are surely too innumerable to
list and describe here. However, the present work has focused heavily on theory, so it felt
important to me to list some concrete examples of soul-directed activities. As a creative force that
participates in the unfolding process whereby actuals generate more possibles, the soul’s various
possible avenues and forms of conscious participation cannot be contained or deduced.
Chapter 6: Conclusion to the Present Research on Psychic Multiplicity and Individuation
At this dissertation’s start, I introduced the premise that the ego complex, being a
relatively monolithic structure, was problematic due to confounding processes of multiple
consciousness. Revealing subpersonalities as autonomous and motivated agents with conscious
endowments presented a potential challenge to traditional Jungian depth psychology. I
challenged structural distinctions such as ego consciousness, conscious, and unconscious in
Jung’s opus as I argued for a more fluid multiple psyche. I provisionally removed the ego
complex to consider how individuation and multiplicity would occur without such a structure.
Even while I nested my arguments against the ego complex within a provisional framework, I
argued my position against the ego complex as a valid theoretical construct.
Having explored a multiple consciousness model of subpersonalities, I intended to
persuade the reader of the ability of a subpersonality or group of subpersonalities to act on its
own accord and take control of human behavior. Using the scientific perspectives of behavioral
genetics, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience, I argued multiplicities of consciousness as
a deeply rooted phenomenon in organisms. Pairing those arguments with clinical testimonies,
psychological theories, phenomenological and philosophical underpinnings, I attempted to
establish psychic multiplicity as an always conscious fluidity and a penetrating psychodynamic
occurrence that beckons more attention in the field of Jungian depth psychology. Having
challenged limited metacognitive definitions of consciousness, I tried to instantiate
consciousness and multiple consciousness as an ontological premise that operates as a starting
point for organismic and psychic life.
Exploring multiple consciousness with no ego complex in Chapter 4 allowed me to
portray subpersonalities as dynamic agencies with sophisticated behavioral capacities. Melding
together science, phenomenology, and depth psychology, I explored subpersonalities as agencies
with more exactitude. As I unraveled the ramifications of removing an ego complex and focused
on the multiple consciousness of subpersonalities, the question of individuation receded. I did not
address individuation until after I introduced the soul.
The soul, being a quintessential life force, has been argued as the base of consciousness
and multiple consciousness. Using a variety of arguments for the depth of the soul’s nature, I
ultimately placed it as the creative driving force of life itself, a pure energy with phenomenal
consciousness. Being ontologically prior to all other aspects of human psychology, I posited the
soul is also a participatory agency. Applying select principles of psychic phenomenology and a
global consciousness, I portrayed existential themes in which the soul can have a felt sense of its
own being, take ownership of that being, and direct life from that wellspring of energy.
Subpersonalities have the character of always driving toward one aim or another, and I argued
the soul must engage with and direct that process. I used Jung’s The Red Book as an
exemplifying text within which to examine my theoretical suggestions. I am greatly indebted to
Jung’s hard work and soulfulness, which enabled me to bring certain suggestions forward.
I believe that seeing the psyche as a fluid and ensouled multiple consciousness allows
Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychologists to contend with less structuralism and more
dynamism. This may benefit the field by allowing the psyche more range and giving the soul
more power to participate as an active agent in a multiple psyche. Moreover, having applied a
wide array of academic disciplines to the subject matter, perhaps Jungian depth psychologists
might see some previously unconsidered applications to their own work.
I am also aware of the vastness of the topic I chose, which ensures there is much room for
the development of certain ideas. The subject matter would certainly benefit from more follow-
up qualitative case studies and research designs that support or challenge the positions on
subpersonalities, consciousness, multiple consciousness, soul, Spirit, and individuation. I chose a
theoretical hermeneutic approach that I hoped would enable those who wish to collect more
empirical and anecdotal data to experiment with some of the arguments presented.
Finally, I want to reiterate that this study is a work of theory and hermeneutics in which I
relied on a variety of scientific, psychological, and philosophical literature as well as reasoning
methods to support the presented position. However, everything presented here remains subject
to change or growth. The research and theories continuing to be published in the fields of
genetics, neuroscience, consciousness, quantum physics, philosophy, phenomenology,
evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, and depth psychology will doubtless continue to
expand facts and possibilities. Therefore, further research may present robust positions that
considerably contribute to more awareness and understanding of psychic multiplicity and
individuation.
