Psychoid

Psychoid is Jung’s term — adopted from Hans Driesch and elaborated in “On the Nature of the Psyche” (CW 8) — for the deepest stratum of the archetype, at which the distinction between psyche and matter loses its force. The archetype per se, as psychoid, is neither mental nor material but the formal ground from which both precipitate. It is the region of the unus-mundus — the one world prior to the division — and the structural condition for synchronicity, the acausal ordering that links inner image and outer event.

Jung formulates the psychoid most carefully in correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli, whose physics supplied the conceptual permission to think a non-psychic substrate of the psychic. The psychoid is load-bearing for the Jungian metaphysics: without it, synchronicity is inexplicable; with it, the archetype becomes a principle of order common to matter and mind.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• unus-mundus
• synchronicity
• archetype