Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Beginning’ is not treated as a mere chronological marker but as a psychologically and philosophically charged threshold—the moment at which potentiality crosses into actuality, whether in cosmogony, individual development, or the initiation of action. The term carries several distinct valences across the library’s major voices. For Neumann, it is bound up with the archetypal stages of consciousness emergent from the uroboric void, where ‘beginning’ designates the pre-egoic matrix from which differentiation arises. Von Franz situates cosmogonic beginning within the interplay of fiery prima materia and the first stirrings of logos—mirroring the physicist’s primordial nebula and the alchemist’s originary substance alike. The I Ching tradition, as rendered by both Ritsema/Karcher and Wilhelm, treats beginning as a dynamic quality inscribed in the hexagram texts themselves: the ideogram for ‘begin’ encodes woman and eminence, signaling new life, while the logic of the Changes insists that every completion harbors a new beginning. Hillman recuperates beginning from linearity altogether, locating it in the senex–puer polarity and the alchemical inscription ‘beginning, middle, and end’ as a description of milk—prima materia at every stage. The Platonic tradition, voiced through Plato’s Phaedrus, grounds the philosophical argument that the beginning is unbegotten and therefore indestructible, the fountain of all motion. Taken together, these positions reveal a fundamental tension between beginning as cosmological origin and beginning as perpetually renewable psychological act.
the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a beginning; but the beginning is begotten of nothing… And therefore the self-moving
Plato argues that beginning, as the source of all motion, is itself unbegotten and indestructible—a metaphysical thesis that becomes foundational for depth-psychological accounts of originary psychic energy.
, Phaedrus, -370thesis
the milk is prima materia as ‘beginning, middle, and end.’ … his end in power was his beginning in wisdom
Hillman identifies beginning as one pole of the alchemical prima materia—milk as origin—while simultaneously collapsing linear sequence: end in one register is beginning in another, dissolving the senex–puer polarity into mutual nourishment.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
Begin, SHIH: commence, start, open; earliest, first, beginning of a time-span, ended by completion, CHUNG. The ideogram: woman and eminent, beginning new life.
The I Ching’s semantic field for ‘begin’ encodes origination as feminine vitality and eminence, situating every beginning within a dynamic arc that is only consummated by its complementary completion.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
at the beginning of the whole universe there were fiery gas nebula from which everything arose… the same image is still basic in a hypothesis of one of the most widely recognized cosmogonic theories.
Von Franz demonstrates that cosmogonic beginning—whether mythological or modern-scientific—consistently constellates the image of primordial fire, validating the archetypal persistence of the origin-as-conflagration motif.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
birth and death… are the conditions of the experience of linear time… she calls the appearance and disappearance of individual human beings the ‘supreme events.’
Drawing on Arendt, this passage argues that natality—birth as beginning—is the ontological condition that grants linear time its structure, making every human life an instance of radical origination.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
whether your activity is a beginning is not wholly under your control: It is, instead, a matter of the character of the responses and reactions it provokes
Beginning is here recast as a relational, emergent quality rather than an intrinsic property of an act—its status as beginning depends on the field of responses it generates in others and in oneself.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
the theory of action cannot ignore this antithetical character of the notion of beginning, which may well remain hidden in a naive approach to the concept of basic action.
Ricoeur identifies the antinomial tension within ‘beginning’ as a concept of action theory—its character as a causal initiation that simultaneously disrupts the causal chain remains philosophically unresolved in naive frameworks.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Settlement means the mutual completion of yin and yang… The beginning is auspicious, the end confused.
The Taoist I Ching frames beginning as auspicious precisely because it is the moment of maximal potential within the cycle of yin-yang completion, before the entropy of ‘settled’ complexity sets in.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
unless we grant that the Son co-existed from the beginning with the Father, by Whom He was begotten, we introduce change into the Father’s subsistence
John of Damascus deploys ‘beginning’ within a theological argument about co-eternity, insisting that a true generation from essence entails no temporal beginning and therefore no change in the divine nature.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
generation in Him is without beginning and everlasting, being the work of nature… while creation in the case of God, being the work of will, is not co-eternal with God.
The passage distinguishes between a beginning-less divine generation and a temporally initiated creation, establishing the theological polarity between origination from essence and origination from will.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
the end product… is history that has been ‘comprehended’… as having an end that follows necessarily from the beginning and middle
Abrams, glossing Hegel via Aristotle, frames the philosophical-literary plot as a structure in which beginning, middle, and end are necessary rather than contingent—an archetypal narrative logic with implications for developmental psychology.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
To be able to isolate the moment when love begins, and so block its entry or avoid it entirely, would put you in control of eros.
Carson’s analysis of erotic beginning illuminates the impossibility of locating a discrete origin for desire—the moment eros begins is always already past, rendering beginning retrospectively constituted rather than consciously initiated.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside
I cannot tell the time of the Son’s birth; it were impious not t[o acknowledge it]
The apophatic gesture here—confessing the impossibility of dating a divine beginning—reflects a broader theological pattern in which origin exceeds temporal determination.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside