Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'blinding' functions as a polyvalent symbol occupying the intersection of shame, punishment, heroic failure, and initiatory knowledge. The term's richest elaborations emerge from mythological and tragic readings: Oedipus's self-blinding stands as the paradigmatic case, examined by Cairns as a shame-response rooted in the inability to meet the gaze of others — a literal enactment of the aidos-impulse to avert the eyes — and by Williams as a self-imposed, excessive reckoning with erga that resists the progressive critic's neat moral categories. Neumann frames blinding symbolically within the hero's developmental arc: where dismemberment and castration represent failures at the Great Mother stage, blinding — like that of Samson and Oedipus — signals a higher form of defeat, one in which the ego is arrested precisely at the threshold of spiritual independence. Hillman, reading the Oedipal myth as a critique of psychoanalysis itself, interprets blinding as the 'eye-opening truth' that the analyst-hero is culprit rather than cure. A subsidiary register appears in clinical and mystical literature: the Philokalia identifies passion and avarice as causes of intellectual blindness; Corbin treats a 'bedazzlement and blindness' caused by excessive divine proximity as a paradox of visionary apperception; and Jung invokes deliberate self-blinding as a failure to recognize mythologem for what it is. The term thus traverses the tragic, the clinical, the mystical, and the epistemological.
In the library
11 passages
Oedipus' self-blinding is thus a consequence of his inability to face others, an extension, as is made quite clear in 1385, of the impulse which leads one, when subject to aidōs, to avert one's gaze
Cairns argues that Oedipus's self-blinding is a literalized, extreme expression of the shame-response — the aidōs-driven compulsion to avert the gaze — making it a psychologically legible act rather than an arbitrary punishment.
Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993thesis
Like the blinding of Samson and of Oedipus, captivity, which in many myths and fairy tales takes the form of being eaten, is a higher form of failure than dismemberment or phallic castration.
Neumann situates blinding within a hierarchical typology of heroic failure, asserting that it represents an ego arrested at a more advanced developmental threshold than castration or dismemberment.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
Oedipus's response, when he made his discovery, was self-imposed: 'I have done it with my own hand,' he says of his blinding.
Williams foregrounds the self-imposed character of Oedipus's blinding as an index of a moral psychology irreducible to progressive notions of responsibility, pointing to the compacted expression 'I suffered those deeds more than I acted them.'
Like Oedipus, we move to Colonus only when we recognize the blinding eye-opening truth that we are the culpable and not the cure.
Hillman employs the paradox of blinding-as-vision to indict psychoanalysis's hubris, claiming that genuine self-knowledge requires the analyst to recognize himself as the source of pathology, not its remedy.
we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms.
Jung deploys blinding as a figure for willful psychological resistance — the refusal to recognize a mythologem's symbolic character — making it an epistemological failure of the interpreting consciousness.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
Teiresias, who is blinded by Athena for having seen what no man should see: 'Night took his eyes'... Teiresias himself becomes a kind of kolossos, an image of death among the living.
Vernant connects Teiresias's blinding to a liminal transformation — the seer robbed of ordinary sight becomes a figure of living death, yet retains noos among the shades, illustrating blinding as paradoxical initiation into deeper knowledge.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
The intellect is made blind by these three passions: avarice, self-esteem and sensual pleasure.
The Philokalic tradition locates blinding not in myth but in the moral-ascetic register, identifying specific passions as the agents that occlude spiritual intellection.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
speaking of a bedazzlement and a blindness whose cause is certainly not extreme distance but too great a proximity
Corbin identifies a mystical paradox in Iranian Sufism wherein blinding results not from absence of the divine but from overwhelming proximity to the Deus absconditus, reframing blindness as an excess of light rather than its lack.
Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
eternity is all around us, blinding and overwhelming. The unprepared mind cannot encompass such power, and so consciousness comes to our rescue, closing off the major part of our spiritual energy.
Pollack frames blinding as the natural effect of unmediated encounter with transpersonal energy, with consciousness functioning as a protective veil that simultaneously limits and preserves the psyche.
Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting
With self reported measures, blinding of the observer was less important. We judged the majority of studies (24 out of 33) to be of low risk of bias.
This passage uses 'blinding' in its strictly methodological sense — observer blinding in clinical trials — with no depth-psychological valence, appearing only as a research design consideration.
Abbass, Allan A, Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies for common mental disorders, 2014aside
The integrity of the blinding procedures was assessed by having the monitors complete a questionnaire after each session on which they guessed the capsule content.
This passage addresses experimental blinding as a methodological safeguard in psychopharmacological research, tangentially relevant to depth-psychological inquiry only insofar as the study concerns mystical experience.
Griffiths, Roland, Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance, 2006aside