Bondage occupies a remarkably wide semantic field within the depth-psychology corpus, ranging from the archaic-mythological to the clinical-traumatological. At the cosmological pole, Onians traces bondage to the most concrete stratum of ancient thought: ropes, shackles, and fetters that gods, fate, and sin literally impose on mortals across Greek, Vedic, Norse, Celtic, and Iranian traditions — a physical imagery that encodes metaphysical compulsion. Jung, writing in the Red Book, inverts this topology: bondage to men and things is the consequence of ‘unlived love’ and psychic commingling, from which voluntary devotion — paradoxically through dismemberment — achieves liberation. Fromm introduces a social-psychological dimension: modernity’s ‘negative freedom’ drives the isolated individual into new bondage, structurally distinct from premodern bonds yet equally constraining. Herman’s trauma work recasts bondage as the psychodynamic core of captivity: enforced coercive relationships create paradoxical trauma bonds between victim and perpetrator that persist long after liberation. Gnostic and Indian philosophical sources locate bondage in attachment to the visible, sensory world — lust, maya, and ignorance as fetters of the soul. The Jungian-alchemical tradition treats bondage as the prima materia condition that separatio and coniunctio must resolve. What unites these readings is the central tension between bondage as dissolution of selfhood and bondage as perverse shelter from the terror of freedom.
the commingling is a bondage that takes the place of voluntary devotion… Through voluntary devotion I removed binding ties… liberation from bondage to men and things.
Jung argues that psychic commingling arising from unlived love constitutes bondage, and that only voluntary devotion — which entails dismemberment — dissolves it and achieves liberation.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
He is driven into new bondage. This bondage is different from the primary bonds… The escape does not restore his lost security, but only helps him to forget his self as a separate entity.
Fromm distinguishes archaic primary bonds from the new bondage that the freedom-fleeing modern individual chooses, arguing it sacrifices selfhood without restoring genuine security.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
it has fettered them with its chains and bound all their limbs with the bitterness of the bondage of lust for those visible things that will decay and change and swerve by impulse.
This Gnostic passage presents bondage as the soul’s enslavement to sensory desire and perishable matter, constituting an anticosmic doctrine of spiritual captivity.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003thesis
show their power by binding men with disease, ill-fortune, or death. It is one of the aims of prayer and sacrifice as of magic to remove these bonds.
Onians establishes that across Vedic, Celtic, and Indo-European traditions, divine bondage with disease, fate, and sin is a concrete mythological reality that ritual action and prayer exist to dissolve.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The masochistic bond… One surrenders one’s own self and renounces all strength and pride connected with it, one loses one’s integrity as an individual and surrenders freedom; but one gains a new security.
Fromm identifies the masochistic bond as a paradigm of voluntary bondage in which the self is surrendered to an external or internalized power in exchange for security and relief from existential doubt.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
This sense of a binding is also a sense of powers that bind and so became ‘religion’. In our own land for Britons and Angles and Saxons in Christian times sin and debt were bonds.
Onians argues that the Latin religio and the concept of sin as debt across multiple Northern European traditions derive from the concrete experience of bondage, mapping moral and spiritual obligation onto the imagery of physical restraint.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The Norse and the Vedic deities alike are conceived as setting free from bonds no less than as imposing them. Theirs is ‘power to bind and power to loose’.
Onians traces the universal divine prerogative of binding and loosing across Norse, Vedic, and early Christian cosmologies, showing bondage as inseparable from the structure of sacred power.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the spirit, refreshed by its revelation of the ‘light of heaven’, now prepares for its initiation into bondage in the name of the Father.
Greene reads the Capricorn archetype as the soul’s willing descent into material bondage, understood as a necessary initiatory phase in the cyclical Saturnian descent of spirit into matter.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting
it is not the actual suffering of pain that is sought for, but the excitement and satisfaction aroused by being physically bound, made helpless and weak.
Fromm locates the root of masochistic perversion not in pain per se but in the desire for physical bondage and helplessness, connecting it to the broader psychological flight from freedom.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
Prolonged confinement while in fear of death and in isolation from the outside world reliably produces a bond of identification between captor and victim.
Herman identifies trauma bondage as a clinically predictable outcome of coercive captivity, in which the victim’s psychology is reshaped around identification with the perpetrator.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
There is also supernatural control by binding. Thus in one of the legends of Fionn a large woman in a coracle says: ‘Fionn, I put you under bands and spells…’
Onians documents Celtic supernatural bondage through spells and bands as a form of fate-compulsion, demonstrating the cross-cultural ubiquity of binding as a metaphor for inescapable obligation.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The man under obligation for debt was described as ‘bound’ (nexus)… damnum (e.g. Plaut. Capt. 327) may be related to… Sanscrit. daman ‘bond’, and, perhaps, Latin redimio ‘bind’; and in origin meant ‘binding’ and… restriction, ill-fortune.
Onians traces Roman legal and economic concepts of debt-bondage to ancient root-metaphors of physical binding, showing that financial and moral obligation were linguistically encoded as forms of restraint.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The sense that the perpetrator is still present, even after liberation, signifies a major alteration in the victim’s relational world. The enforced relationship during captivity… becomes part of the victim’s inner life.
Herman demonstrates that traumatic bondage is internalized as a persistent psychic structure: the captor’s presence continues to organize the victim’s relational world even after physical release.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
The accounts of battered women are filled with such sacrifices, reluctantly made, which slowly and imperceptibly destroy their ties to others. Many women in hindsight describe themselves as walking into a trap.
Herman illustrates the gradualist mechanism by which coercive bondage is established in domestic abuse, as incremental isolation systematically destroys the victim’s extra-relational ties.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
binding was almost coextensive with fixation or fastening, and, when better methods were devised, the term would naturally be extended to cover them.
Onians establishes the etymological and technological primacy of binding as humanity’s original means of fixing and connecting, providing the material substrate for the metaphorical extension of bondage into moral, spiritual, and legal domains.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside