Centrality in the depth-psychology corpus is not a simple geometric metaphor but a multi-valent symbol registering the psyche’s most fundamental orientations: cosmic, political, moral, and soteriological. The term appears across several distinct registers. In the Graeco-philosophical tradition traced by Vernant, the center is simultaneously the mythic hearth (Hestia), the political commons of the polis, and the mathematical pivot of rational cosmology — a convergence that discloses how spatial organization mirrors social and psychological order. In Chinese thought mediated through Wang Bi’s I Ching commentary, centrality (zhong) is an ethical-ontological virtue: to occupy the ‘middle position’ is to embody impartiality, rectitude, and moral authority; to lose centrality is to lose one’s capacity for governance of self and world. The cosmological dimension appears in Plotinus, Plato’s Timaeus, and von Franz, where the center of the sphere becomes a figure for the soul’s relationship to the One — a rest within motion. Rank and Eliade extend centrality into sacred geography: the omphalos, the navel of the earth, the axis mundi as projections of psychological needs for orientation. Singer’s narrative-identity research invokes centrality in a modern empirical register, arguing that narrative is central to identity formation. What unites these voices is the shared intuition that centrality names the condition of psychological and cosmic ordering: wherever a true center is found or lost, the stakes are those of the soul.
In making claims for the centrality of narrative to ongoing identity formation, these researchers follow in the tradition of psychobiography
Singer and his contributors assert that narrative occupies a constitutive, not merely illustrative, role in identity formation, positioning ‘centrality’ as the organizing concept for an empirical research programme on life-story and selfhood.
, Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
In this way, he thus can ‘succeed in being worthy of the practice of centrality [the Mean].’ … ‘Practice of centrality’ refers to the fifth line [i.e., the middle line in the upper trigram].
Wang Bi’s commentary identifies centrality with the Mean (zhong) as a moral-positional virtue intrinsic to the ruler who is free of partiality, directly linking cosmic position with ethical practice.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
Although Second Yin possesses the virtues of centrality and rectitude, it is unable to follow them… As Second Yin cannot manage to use its Dao of centrality and rectitude to rescue Third Yang from its lack of centrality, it must force itself to follow Third Yang.
Wang Bi dramatizes centrality as a normative standard against which individual hexagram lines are measured, showing that the failure to embody centrality disables moral agency and relational efficacy.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
But as this one is an embodiment of ‘centrality and perseverance,’ he is capable of not persisting in the error of his ways.
Centrality paired with perseverance constitutes the psychological resource enabling a figure in crisis to reverse course, making it a dynamic virtue rather than a static position.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
Cheng Yi interprets this as… zhongde (the virtue of centrality). His reading of Fifth Yin would seem to be… preserve his ‘virtue of centrality.’
Cheng Yi’s gloss formalizes centrality as an inner ethical virtue (zhongde) whose preservation constitutes the core moral task at a moment of existential danger.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
The complementary characteristics of centrality were publicity and common sharing. This institutional context and mental framework help us grasp the essential features of dialogue-speech.
Detienne identifies centrality in archaic Greek culture as inherently public and communal, linking spatial placement at the center with political speech, transparency, and collective legitimacy.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996thesis
As a political symbol, hestia defines the center of a space in which relationships are reversible. Thus the center, in its political sense, was able to act as an intermediary between the ancient, mythical view of the center and the new, rational idea of the center.
Vernant traces the center from mythic hearth to mathematical abstraction, showing how the political symbol of Hestia mediates between archaic sacred cosmology and rational isonomic space.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
The center expressed in spatial terms no longer the notions of differentiation and hierarchy but rather those of homogeneity and equality.
Vernant marks the transformation of the center’s symbolic function from hierarchical cosmological axis to emblem of political equality, reflecting a shift in Greek social psychology.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
God is seen mainly as the nondimensional center, but also as the all-embracing circular periphery of all Existence… ‘Deus est sphaera infinita, cuius centrum est ubique circumferentia nusquam.’
Von Franz traces the theological paradox of a center that is simultaneously everywhere, connecting Neoplatonic emanationism to depth-psychological notions of the Self as a center that cannot be located.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
perfectly straight roads shall lead to it, converging towards the very center, and as from a star which is itself round, there will be straight rays leading off in every direction.
Vernant cites Meton’s urban plan as evidence that the rational-geometric center, with its radial symmetry, expresses a psychological and philosophical drive toward order emanating from a fixed point.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
the earth becomes humanized by the aid of the Omphalos idea; that is to say, this heavenly geography was followed by a human geography… the earth’s navel counted at first only as the centre of a particular country.
Rank demonstrates that sacred centrality (the omphalos) is the psychological mechanism by which humanity transforms abstract cosmic space into habitable, meaningful territory.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
the symbolism of the ‘Center’ (Mountain, Pillar, Tree, Giant) is an organic part of the most ancient Indian spirituality. Mount Gerizim, at the center of Palestine, was doubtless invested with the prestige of the ‘Center,’ for it is called ‘navel of the earth.’
Eliade establishes centrality as a universal sacred-geography motif, in which the ‘Center’ — axis mundi — organizes religious experience across cultures by grounding the vertical cosmic axis in a singular sacred locus.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
to confer the kratos upon the apeiron is indeed to make this kratos a xunon, to set it down at the center. So the rule of the apeiron is not comparable with a monarchia.
Vernant shows that Anaximander’s apeiron functions as a political-cosmological center — a common law rather than a monarch — anticipating the democratic resonance of centrality in Greek thought.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
the centre of a circle [and therefore of the Kosmos] is distinctively a point of rest… it cannot coincide with the centre, for then there would be no circle; since this may not be, it whirls about it.
Plotinus articulates the center as a principle of rest toward which the soul perpetually tends without fully coinciding, establishing centrality as a dynamic asymptote structuring cosmic and psychic life.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Center too is a geometrical notion. It is not a geography, for the word comes directly from kentron, the Greek for that prick point made by a compass in tracing a circle.
Hillman deconstructs the urban fantasy of ‘center city’ by recovering the etymological root of kentron as a goad or stimulus, arguing that the center is not a place of rest but a compulsive acceleration.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
God himselfe who had that omni-sufficiency in himselfe, conceived a conveniency for his glory, to draw a Circumference about the Center, Creatures about himselfe.
McGilchrist, quoting Donne, illustrates how the center-circumference figure encodes theological and psychological models of relation between the divine and creaturely, linking right-hemisphere holism to spherical imagery.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
he also nourishes virtues of centrality and righteousness within, so he comes to perfect fruition and displays perfect beauty.
Wang Bi presents the inward cultivation of centrality and righteousness as the precondition for an outward flourishing that unites aesthetic and moral excellence in the ruler.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
the government of the city was bound up with a new conception of space: the institutions of the polis were designed and embodied in what may be called a political space.
Vernant establishes that the emergence of Greek rational thought reorganized social space around a central, publicly visible point, demonstrating how political psychology and spatial centrality are co-constitutive.
, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982supporting
in the ordered world the four bodies are arranged… in a definite order: fire round the circumference… and earth at the centre.
Plato’s Timaeus, as interpreted by Cornford, grounds cosmological centrality in the natural tendency of like toward like, placing earth at the center as the heaviest and most stable element.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
we are dealing with a symbiotic representation of uterus, grave, navel-cord, and navel, while at the same time taking into consideration the elevation-tendency which gives the navel a conical form.
Rank’s analysis of the omphalos as a symbolic condensation of uterus, navel, and tomb situates sacred centrality within a psychoanalytic economy of birth, death, and rebirth.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932aside
each household will be attached to two half-portions of land whose mean distance from the center is exactly the same as that of all the others.
Vernant describes Plato’s ideal city as a spatial arrangement in which equidistance from the center mathematically enforces civic equality, illustrating the normative function of geometric centrality in political planning.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside