Black Hole

To avoid a black hole is not foolish or naive. To venture knowingly into its force field would be suicide. The black hole swallows up, sucks up everything—matter, gravity, even light.

Schoen employs the black hole as an archetypal image of Archetypal Evil and addiction, arguing that its annihilating gravitational pull precisely figures the danger of approaching addiction or Archetypal Shadow without the protection of ‘religio’.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit.

Maté figures addiction’s core as a ‘spiritual black hole’ — an existential void arising from soul-loss — which consumerist culture compounds rather than heals.

Maté, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

We know now of such bodies which ‘vanish from sight’ in the so-called ‘black holes’ of the universe. In them any light-signals and thus also space-time become unobservable.

Von Franz uses the astrophysical black hole to anchor Jung’s conjecture about psychic intensity exceeding the speed of light, suggesting that certain psychic phenomena — like telepathic dreams — operate beyond observable space-time.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Grotstein, J. S. (1990b). The ‘black hole’ as the basic psychotic experience: Some newer psychoanalytic and neuroscience perspectives on psychosis.

Schore’s bibliography cites Grotstein’s formal psychoanalytic thesis that the black hole constitutes the foundational experiential structure of psychosis, linking nothingness and meaninglessness to the collapse of self-regulation.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Everybody who has lost someone they loved has had the terrible experience of wanting to move toward the other person, and then they fall into the black hole in the ground.

Von Franz uses the black hole idiom phenomenologically to describe the experiential collapse of orientation that occurs after bereavement, when libido conditioned by a relationship suddenly finds no object.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

each plane was making a black-hole approach, a pilot’s term for an approach over water or sparsely populated land offering few visual cues at night.

This passage introduces the aeronautical term ‘black-hole approach’ in a perceptual-psychology context, documenting how the absence of environmental cues produces catastrophic disorientation — a technical analogue to the broader metaphorical usage.

James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →