Blindness occupies a remarkably heterogeneous position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as neurological fact, hysterical symptom, mythic condition, and metaphor for epistemological failure. The clinical tradition, from Janet’s meticulous dissection of hysterical blindness through Abraham’s psychoanalytic excavation of neurotic visual disturbances, treats blindness as a dissociative phenomenon in which the perceptual apparatus is compromised by unconscious conflict — scopophilia, castration anxiety, and the displacement of genital sensation upward into the eye. The neuroscientific wing of the corpus, represented by McGilchrist, Panksepp, Levine, and LeDoux, centers on blindsight — the paradox of a subject who navigates the visual world without conscious awareness — as evidence of the layered architecture of awareness itself, revealing how much cognition operates beneath the threshold of reportable experience. For Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher, congenital blindness provides an indispensable test case for theories of spatial perception and cross-modal integration, challenging empiricist assumptions inherited from Locke. The mythological register, primary for Hillman, treats blindness as the necessary cost of inner vision: Oedipus’s physical blinding enables Teiresian sight; analysis itself requires ‘putting out the eyes of the physical view.’ Jung, in the Red Book, figures the Blind and Immortal One as a power that moves without seeing. Hillman extends this to diagnose ‘soulless concreteness’ as civilization’s characteristic blindness. The term thus spans sensation, defense, myth, and cultural critique.
That senex intolerance and blindness could wipe us all out. By blindness I mean particularly soulless concreteness.
Hillman argues that the senex archetype’s signature pathology is a cultural blindness defined as the loss of soul in the face of rigid, literal-minded materialism.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
putting out the eyes of the physical view so as to see life more clearly as a field of ignorant projections, as shadows on the wall of the cave.
Hillman proposes that psychoanalysis enacts a deliberate blinding of literal sight, following the Oedipal-Teiresian model, in order to achieve deeper psychological vision.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
it is hysterical blindness. This phenomenon is rare, for it seems that the subject always keeps as much as possible the essential functions, and loses only a part of the vision.
Janet establishes hysterical blindness as a dissociative phenomenon in which the visual system undergoes partial functional loss not attributable to organic lesion.
, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907thesis
This ‘blindsight’ has perplexed students of consciousness, for it highlights how wrong our conscious understanding of our behavioral abilities can be.
Panksepp uses blindsight to demonstrate that conscious self-report radically underestimates the scope of perceptual competence mediated by subcortical systems.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis
He was able to react spontaneously to facial expressions, with an appropriate emotional response accompanied by activity in the right amygdala, even though he denied that he had seen anything.
McGilchrist’s case of affective blindsight demonstrates that emotional responsiveness to social stimuli persists even under conditions of cortical blindness, implicating right-hemisphere subcortical pathways.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
yet they nonetheless insist that they see nothing… He had to squeeze up against the wall to get past a bin: when asked why he did it he said he ‘just felt like’ walking that way.
The cortically blind patient TN navigates complex environments through non-conscious guidance, illustrating the dissociation between explicit awareness and operative perceptual function.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
There is a revealing condition called blindsight. This strange affliction is due to damage to a part of the visual cortex on one side of the brain… patients are unaware of seeing anything at all.
Levine situates blindsight within trauma theory as evidence that nonconscious sensory registration persists independently of conscious awareness, blurring the border between conscious and unconscious response.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
a young man who had been affected since childhood by a dread of darkness and by an obstinate phobia of becoming blind. Later on he had a disturbance of vision which was at once diagnosed by an eye specialist as neurotic.
Abraham documents neurotic blindness phobia as a psychosexual symptom with early infantile roots, connecting visual anxiety to the scopophilic drive and its defensive transformations.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
the eye seemed to have the significance of a penis with which people could be terrified and killed… neurotic women of being ‘bored through’ or ‘pierced’ by the glance of a man.
Abraham argues that neurotic visual disturbances encode the eye as a phallic organ, expressing castration anxiety and scopophilic aggression through displacement upward from the genitals.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
The experience of persons blind from birth and operated upon for cataract has never proved, and could never prove, that for them space begins with sight.
Merleau-Ponty uses congenitally blind patients restored to sight to argue that tactile and visual space are heterogeneous, challenging the empiricist assumption that vision provides the original template for spatial experience.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
‘I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself … it has no sense of itself’ — these are her own words.
Sacks records a patient’s phenomenological self-description of proprioceptive loss as analogous to blindness, extending the concept beyond vision to characterize a global failure of bodily self-awareness.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting
it is blindness, ate, to dishonour the man who is aristos… Zeus too was blinded by ate; but it was not a moral blindness.
Adkins distinguishes between ate as cognitive-practical miscalculation and moral blindness in Homeric ethics, locating blindness within the Greek framework of consequential rather than intentional error.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
I did not anticipate the Powerful, Blind, and Immortal One, who wandered longingly after the sinking sun, who wanted to cleave the ocean down to its bottom.
Jung personifies an archetypal blind force in the Red Book as a primordial power that is great precisely because it acts without sight, associating blindness with the raw energy of descent and the unconscious.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
A figure like the prophet, which is clear and complete in itself, arouses less curiosity than the unexpected form of blind Salome.
Jung’s commentary on the Red Book identifies blind Salome as the more psychologically generative figure, associating her blindness with the problematic of Eros and the unresolved formative task of the soul.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
under the circumstances of congenital blindness, the specialized nerve cells responsible for the visual perception of shape and spatial orientation are negatively affected.
Gallagher demonstrates that congenital blindness disrupts the neuronal development of visual cortex architecture, showing how the absence of early visual experience forecloses certain perceptual capacities at a structural level.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
hystericals are able to effect the dissociation of these two visions… they lose the binocular vision, that is to say the higher, truly human vision.
Janet details how hysterical dissociation selectively destroys binocular — the higher-order — vision while preserving monocular function, revealing the layered complexity of visual integration in neurotic pathology.
, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting
young men, wishing to avoid military service, maintain that they are blind of the right eye and that they are unable to take aim.
Janet examines feigned monocular blindness in military recruits, using the diagnostic challenge to clarify the boundary between hysteria, simulation, and genuine functional visual loss.
, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting
A blind man sees his darkness. But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way.
Jaynes uses the visual blind spot as a model for consciousness’s seamless confabulation, arguing that awareness actively conceals its own lacunae just as the visual field suppresses its structural gaps.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside
imaging has been performed in blindsight patients to examine the brain activity in conditions when they say they do and do not ‘see.’
LeDoux uses blindsight neuroimaging data to argue that prefrontal and parietal cortices are necessary conditions for conscious visual awareness rather than for visual processing per se.
, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety, 2015aside
The sister-daughter ‘who served my naked eyepits as their eyes’ has given him a different vision.
Hillman reads Oedipus at Colonus to argue that physical blinding, mediated through the feminine Antigone figure, transforms heroic self-will into a deeper form of soul-guided seeing.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside
civilised blindness 336–7
Alexander catalogues ‘civilised blindness’ as one of the social mechanisms preventing recognition of the connections between dislocation, addiction, and free-market society.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside