Absence occupies a remarkably heterogeneous position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ontological condition, psychic wound, spiritual trial, and structural necessity. Marion Woodman locates absence at the etiological core of addiction: addicted persons live within an ‘absence of reality,’ their ground of trust having been destroyed, leaving simulation as the only recourse. James Hillman confronts absence theologically, questioning whether the apparent flight of the gods is genuine withdrawal or a modern misreading of immanence — and pressing the more radical question of whether divine beings can absent themselves at all. Wolfgang Giegerich theorizes a distinctively modern ‘absenteeism’ in which homo absconditus has subtracted himself from meaningful engagement with truth, contrasting presence with the fullness that absence eclipses. Jacques Derrida treats the absence of the addressee as constitutive of writing itself, arguing that a radical, non-empirical absence is the structural condition enabling textual signification. In religious psychology, Glaz documents the paradox that the experience of God’s absence positively correlates with deepened trust, self-understanding, and openness to encounter — a finding that resonates with the apophatic and ascetic traditions. Turner’s liminality schema encodes absence of property, rank, and status as the anthropological substrate of transformation. Damasio approaches absence from neuroscience, studying consciousness through the phenomenology of its own disappearance. These divergent positions share a common recognition: absence is not mere negation but a generative, structuring force.
What is ultimately real for them is an absence—an absence of reality. The best they can do is simulate its presence.
Woodman argues that addiction is rooted in a foundational ontological absence — the destruction of trust in reality — leaving the addict to substitute simulation for genuine presence.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993thesis
If their presence or absence depends on our behavior regarding them, the gods of myth are really nothing more than what secular enlightenment insists: fictions of human fantasy.
Hillman challenges the modern assumption that the gods have genuinely absented themselves, arguing that divine absence contingent on human behavior would reduce the gods to mere projections.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
A written sign is proffered in the absence of the addressee. How is this absence to be qualified? … this distance, division, delay, difference must be capable of being brought to a certain absolute degree of absence for the structure of writing.
Derrida posits that writing is constitutively defined by an absolute, not merely empirical, absence of the addressee, making absence a structural condition of signification rather than an accident.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Your crimes are not due so much to the presence of the shadow … but rather to a specific absence, the lack of human feeling … that cold absence.
Hillman reframes criminal psychology around a constitutive absence — the privatio of eros — rather than the presence of the shadow, locating evil in a psychic lacuna.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Absence, lack vs. fullness, presence 61 Absenting himself, modern man’s (homo absconditus) 225
Giegerich’s index entry signals a systematic theoretical opposition between absence-as-lack and presence-as-fullness, with modern man’s self-absenting theorized under the figure of homo absconditus.
thesis
knowledge as an absentee … Man has subtracted himself from his notion of life and reality. When life or fate knocks at his door, he says, ‘Nobody is home.’
Giegerich diagnoses modern consciousness as a form of systematic self-absence (‘absenteeism’) in which the human subject refuses to stand present before the demands of truth and reality.
supporting
the past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern us, and so make themselves felt within the present.
Drawing on Heidegger, Abram argues that past and future are modes of absence that paradoxically make themselves felt as active presences within sensuous experience.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
how we can comment, from a personal perspective, on the absence of consciousness, considering that the absence of knowing and self should preclude our experience of that absence.
Damasio identifies the methodological paradox of studying consciousness through its own absence, using transitional states between unconsciousness and waking as windows into what is otherwise inaccessible.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
Man who is convinced of God’s presence, can however experience His temporary absence. Sometimes it is accompanied by the inner emptiness and loneliness.
Glaz empirically documents the experience of God’s absence as a distinct religious phenomenon correlating with emptiness, loneliness, and doubt, yet paradoxically coexisting with active religious life.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
Experiencing God’s absence is conducive to deepening my trust in Him … During the experience of God’s absence, I have the opportunity to better understand myself.
Scale items reveal that the experience of divine absence, far from being purely negative, is positively associated with deeper trust, self-understanding, and openness to others.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
the crisis of meaning (non presence in general, absence as the absence of the referent—of perception—or of meaning—of the actual intention to signify) is always linked to the essential possibility of writing.
Derrida maps multiple registers of absence — absent referent, absent signified, absent meaning — arguing all are internally connected to the structural possibility of writing and not external failures.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
There is an absence of psychic reflection of the spirit and an absence of spiritual realization within the psyche.
Hillman identifies a double absence structuring the puer complex: the absence of psychic reflection and the absence of spiritual self-realization, both arising from the puer’s separation from the senex.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
Absence of property/property Absence of status/status … Absence of rank/distinctions of rank
Turner’s binary table of liminality encodes absence of property, status, and rank as defining features of the liminal condition, constituting the anti-structural pole of social transformation.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
a statistically significant relationship is recorded between the experience of God’s presence (PG) … and the experience of God’s absence (AG) … and the sense of meaning in life (PIL).
Quantitative data demonstrate that both divine presence and divine absence correlate positively with meaning in life, though the presence correlation is significantly stronger.
, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
The IRES measures a sense of influence of God’s presence or absence on one’s life.
Glaz clarifies that his measurement instrument captures the perceived influence of divine presence and absence, distinguishing this from broader religiosity dimensions.