Adversity

Adversity occupies a complex and multi-valenced position within the depth-psychology corpus. It appears not merely as misfortune to be endured but as a structuring force within processes of individuation, resilience, and meaning-making. The I Ching commentarial tradition — represented here by Wang Bi, Ritsema and Karcher, Wilhelm, Anthony, and Huang — treats adversity (Chinese: Li) as a liminal condition charged with transformative potential: danger that sharpens, a malevolent spirit whose pacification produces healing. This cosmological framing stands in productive tension with clinical and psychological readings. McGilchrist draws on Senecan wisdom to argue that health, virtue, and wisdom are achievable only through the overcoming of adversity — a structural antifragility thesis. Pargament situates adversity within the coping literature, emphasizing how individuals apportion responsibility for their conditions and how religion mediates their response to irreducible hardship. Herman and Siegel engage adversity at its most traumatic register, where early-life adversity compounds combat trauma and disrupts developmental trajectories. Maté links adversity to addiction as its refugee response. The corpus thus reveals a fundamental tension: adversity as initiatory ordeal productive of character and wisdom versus adversity as traumatic wound that scars, derails, and demands clinical reparation. Both registers are indispensable to understanding how depth psychology conceives human suffering and growth.

In the library 13 passages

This minister of the king suffers Adversity upon Adversity, but it is not on his own account... It is by treading the path of centrality and practicing righteousness that Second Yin preserves his sovereign.

Wang Bi's commentary defines adversity as an ethical trial that the righteous minister endures not for personal gain but through fidelity to centrality and moral rectitude, transforming it into a vehicle of loyal service.

Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis

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Adversity, LI: danger; threatening, malevolent demon... it indicates a spirit or ghost that seeks revenge by inflicting suffering upon the living. Pacifying or exorcizing such a spirit can have a healing effect.

Ritsema and Karcher supply the etymological ground of the I Ching's concept of adversity as a demonic-spiritual force whose dual nature — grinding and poisonous — means that its resolution through correct engagement produces healing.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis

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Nothing good is achieved without a degree of adversity being overcome: health, resilience, courage, skill, knowledge, virtue and wisdom are no exceptions. As Seneca is famed to have put it, 'a gem stone is not polished without friction, nor is a man without adversities'.

McGilchrist argues structurally that adversity is a necessary condition for all human goods, citing Seneca to ground an antifragility thesis in which vulnerability enables future flourishing.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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The Sage uses adversity... A hostile fate will last only until we undertake the work of self-correction.

Anthony reads I Ching adversity as divinely pedagogical — a cosmic punishment and teaching instrument that persists only until the individual undertakes genuine self-correction.

Carol K. Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988thesis

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We are responsible for what we make of our handicaps; for our attitudes toward them; for the bitterness, anger, or depression that act synergistically with the original 'coefficient of adversity' to ensure that a handicap will defeat the individual.

Pargament, via Yalom, establishes that individual responsibility for one's response to adversity is inescapable, and that attitude — not merely circumstance — determines whether adversity defeats or strengthens the individual.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001thesis

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The men whose early lives had been scarred by adversity also showed the most enduring psychological scars of combat... Among the men who had experienced both childhood adversity and heavy combat, the great majority still met criteria for the PTSD diagnosis.

Herman presents adversity as a compounding traumatic variable: early-life adversity does not build resilience but increases vulnerability to subsequent trauma, producing chronic PTSD.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis

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All addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory.

Maté reframes addiction as a flight from unprocessed adversity, positioning the unresolved experience of suffering as the generative condition of compulsive self-medication.

Maté, Gabor, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022supporting

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Adversity... attachment and, 187; connection and, 409–410; emotional growth and, 402–403; genes, experiences, and epigenetic regulation and, 52; overview, 405; self-regulation and, 364–365; trauma and, 158.

Siegel's taxonomic index situates adversity at the intersection of attachment, epigenetic regulation, self-regulation, and emotional growth, signaling its systemic centrality in developmental psychology.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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21.5a Trial: adversity. 21.5b Trial: adversity, without fault. 34.3a Trial: adversity. 35.4a Trial: adversity.

The Ritsema-Karcher concordance data demonstrates that adversity is a recurrent hexagram-level quality across multiple I Ching positions, consistently paired with the condition of trial and frequently qualified as 'without fault'.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting

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Others have begun to assess the potential for benefits and growth in coping... Park and her colleagues have developed a measure of stress-related growth.

Pargament points to emerging research on adversity-as-catalyst, noting that exclusive focus on distress measures underestimates the growth potential latent in coping with difficulty.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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Central to this belief system is the idea that a benevolent God participates in our lives to ensure that bad things will not happen to good people... But when traumatic events strike, this belief may be threatened.

Pargament examines how adversity destabilizes theodicy — the believer's conviction that a benevolent God shields good persons from harm — generating a crisis that religious reframing must then address.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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Shock, on the whole, is meant to make us recognize our natural limitations; until we do, the situation retains a vise-like quality. The Cosmic hammer pounds at our consciousness until we wake up to the inner realities.

Anthony's commentary treats shock and obstruction as cosmically administered correctives, implicitly equating adversity's grip with the psyche's resistance to acknowledging its own limits.

Carol K. Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988aside

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People tenaciously try to conserve significance, even in the most threatening conditions... it also speaks to the fact that people are often unable to give up what they hold most dear.

Pargament notes that adversity tests the tenacity of an individual's deepest commitments, with the persistence of value-conserving efforts under threat revealing the depth of human significance-structures.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside

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