Betweenness occupies a generative, if undertheorized, position across the depth-psychology corpus. Its principal theorists approach it from three distinct angles. McGilchrist, the most sustained voice, treats betweenness as the ontological ground of relation itself — the space in which music, poetry, perception, and selfhood actually occur, and whose collapse in schizophrenia marks a diagnostically legible failure of the right hemisphere's integrative function. For McGilchrist, betweenness is neither a subjective projection nor a mere logical interval: it is the 'whole that the notes and the silence make together,' irreducible to either term. A second major treatment appears in Yalom's reading of Buber, where the I-Thou relation reconstitutes the very 'I' as betweenness — the self is not a pre-given entity that then enters relation, but is constituted in and through the relational gap. Miller, drawing on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, historicizes betweenness as the liminal cultural time of divine absence, the interval 'between the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.' The tensions among these positions — neurological, existential, and mythological — reveal betweenness as a concept that simultaneously names a perceptual modality, an ontological condition, and a historical predicament. Its stakes are nothing less than the coherence of self, world, and meaning.
In the library
10 passages
Music consists entirely of relations, 'betweenness'. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything.
McGilchrist establishes betweenness as the primary ontological category of the right hemisphere's world, using music as the paradigm case in which meaning resides not in discrete elements but in the relational field they jointly constitute.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
No, the 'I' is 'betweenness'; the 'I' appears and is shaped in the context of some relationship. Thus the 'I' is profoundly influenced by the relationship with the 'Thou.'
Yalom, rendering Buber, argues that betweenness is not a space between pre-existing selves but the very matrix in which selfhood is generated and continuously recreated through encounter.
Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
Both subjectivism and solipsism, on the one hand, and morbid objectification on the other — are equally found in schizophrenia: each is a breakdown of betweenness.
McGilchrist identifies the clinical dissolution of betweenness in schizophrenia as the shared root of otherwise opposed pathologies — solipsism and objectification — revealing betweenness as the structural precondition for any coherent self-world relation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Both subjectivism and solipsism, on the one hand, and morbid objectification on the other — are equally found in schizophrenia: each is a breakdown of betweenness.
McGilchrist identifies the clinical dissolution of betweenness in schizophrenia as the shared root of otherwise opposed pathologies — solipsism and objectification — revealing betweenness as the structural precondition for any coherent self-world relation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
This 'betweenness' is a time of the double lack and the double not: the time of 'the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.'
Miller transposes betweenness from a relational-perceptual register into a mythological-historical one, characterizing the contemporary cultural moment as an interregnum of divine absence that generates relativism and the transvaluation of values.
Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
In reality there can be neither absolutely, only a choice between a betweenness which acknowledges itself, and one which denies its own nature.
McGilchrist argues that the objective/subjective polarity is itself a left-hemisphere artifact, and that all perception is inescapably relational — the only real choice is whether betweenness is owned or disavowed.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
No relationship can eliminate isolation. Each of us is alone in existence. Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates fo
Yalom frames existential isolation as the necessary condition against which betweenness — achieved through I-Thou relation — operates as a partial but genuine mitigation, rather than a dissolution, of aloneness.
Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
Isaac Stern described music as 'that little bit between each note – silences which give the form'… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term.
McGilchrist invokes the Japanese concept of ma as a cross-cultural confirmation of betweenness as the generative interval that gives form to the whole, lamenting the absence of an equivalent Western term.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Isaac Stern described music as 'that little bit between each note – silences which give the form'… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term.
McGilchrist invokes the Japanese concept of ma as a cross-cultural confirmation of betweenness as the generative interval that gives form to the whole, lamenting the absence of an equivalent Western term.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
individual entities are distinguished, but only within a union which supervenes, and qualifies that distinction.
McGilchrist articulates the right hemisphere's view that individuation always occurs within an encompassing relational whole, a structural claim that undergirds the ontology of betweenness without naming it directly.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside