Body as Psychic Substrate

The body as psychic substrate is the Seba tradition’s term for the thesis — held in common by the ancient Greek psychological vocabulary, by Jung’s later alchemical writings, by Neumann’s developmental schema, and by the contemporary literature on interoception — that the body is not the container of the psyche or the instrument of the psyche but the material in which psyche is realized.

The thesis runs against the Cartesian bifurcation that shaped modern psychology: res cogitans on one side, res extensa on the other, mind and body as substances related only externally. The classical and the Jungian-alchemical traditions refuse the split. Homeric thumos is a faculty of the body. Plotinian psyche is seated in the body without being reducible to it. Jung‘s Mysterium Coniunctionis reads the alchemical work as the coniunctio of spirit with matter — the soul’s descent into body as the condition of its completion. Contemporary interoceptive science supplies the empirical substrate in the language of the present. See somatic-unconscious and subtle-body.

Relationships

• somatic-unconscious
• interoception
• subtle-body