The term 'Centre' occupies a position of singular importance across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a geometric metaphor, an ontological claim, and a clinical orientation. Jung deploys it most insistently as the defining property of the Self — the Self is not merely the totality of psyche but its organising centre, distinct from yet superordinate to the ego. The key formulation — that individuation shifts the personality's centre away from the ego to a 'virtual centre' midway between conscious and unconscious — recurs throughout the Collected Works and is refined by commentators such as Samuels and Papadopoulos. The mandala supplies the primary symbolic vehicle: the centre of the mandala is simultaneously the temenos to be protected, the locus of divine energy, and the structural principle of psychic order against chaos. Parallel discourses reinforce this: Govinda maps 'centre' onto the Tibetan cakra system, where each psychic centre governs a stratum of being from dense materiality to radiant consciousness; Plotinus articulates a philosophical prototype — the soul's own centre aligned with the centre of all centres — that anticipates Jung's vocabulary of coincidentia oppositorum. Tension arises between the centre as experiential core (felt selfhood) and the centre as conceptual hypothesis (wholeness-as-ideal), a distinction Samuels explicitly marks. The term thus anchors the entire individuation discourse while remaining irreducibly polysemous.
In the library
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the self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious… The idea of a centre, of having a centre, of being motivated or regulated by a centre, may be the most accurate description of what is involved in a feeling of wholeness.
Samuels establishes that the centre is the defining experiential and structural characteristic of the Jungian Self, distinguishing it from ego-identity and grounding wholeness.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
the centre of the total personality no longer coincides with the ego, but with a point midway between the conscious and the unconscious. This would be the point of new equilibrium, a new centering of the total personality, a virtual centre.
Jung, via Chodorow, articulates individuation as a structural displacement of the personality's centre from ego to a virtual midpoint between consciousness and the unconscious.
Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997thesis
the achievement of a centre of the personality which transcends the opposites; this centre is also defined as the self… a virtual centre… This would be the point of a new equilibrium, a new centering of the total personality.
Papadopoulos summarises Jung's canonical identification of the Self with the transcendent centre of personality that supersedes the ego-opposites tension.
Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
The symbol of the mandala has exactly this meaning of a holy place, a temenos, to protect the centre. And it is a symbol which is one of the most important motifs in the objectivation of unconscious images.
Jung via Chodorow defines the mandala's structural function as the ritual and symbolic protection of the psychic centre, making the centre the mandala's telos.
Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997thesis
The symbol of the mandala has exactly this meaning of a holy place, a temenos, to protect the centre… It is a means of protecting the centre of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from outside.
Jung formally defines the mandala as a psychic instrument whose primary function is the protection and stabilisation of the personality's centre.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
The centre of individuality is not necessarily in the same place as the ego centre. We should rather associate personality with persona, but we need another word for the actual individuality… the individual centre is the centre of the self.
Jung draws a decisive clinical distinction between the ego's centre and the Self's centre, arguing that individuation relocates the governing locus of the personality.
Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
We must admit a Principle in which all these centres coincide… we hold through our own centre to the centre of all the centres, just as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that of the sphere to which all belong.
Plotinus provides the Neoplatonic philosophical prototype for the depth-psychological centre: the soul's own centre is aligned with, and participates in, a universal coincident Centre.
subjective consciousness is united with an objective centre, thus producing the unity of God and man represented by Christ. The self is brought into actuality through the concentration of the many upon the centre, and the self wants this concentration.
Jung interprets the mystical union of Christ-symbol as the psychological event of concentrating multiplicity upon the psychic centre, making the centre both agent and product of self-realisation.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
the centre is symbolized by a star… The picture shows the self appearing as a star out of chaos. The four-rayed structure is emphasized by the use of four colours. This picture is significant in that it sets the structure of the self as a principle of order against chaos.
Jung's analysis of mandala imagery demonstrates the centre functioning as the self's symbolic locus — a principle of quaternary order that emerges against psychic chaos.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
the distillation had to start 'from the midst of the centre' (ex medio centri). The accentuation of the centre is again a fundamental idea in alchemy.
Jung identifies the alchemical insistence on the centre as an early symbolic expression of the psychological principle that transformation originates from within the psyche's core.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
From this fundamental image of the male-female opposites united in the centre is derived another designation of the lapis as the 'hermaphrodite'; it is also the basis for the mandala motif.
Jung traces the mandala's centre to the alchemical image of united opposites, establishing the centre as the point of coniunctio and the structural foundation of the mandala symbol.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
The intellectual Centre, in which the most immaterial qualities reside, is transformed into the organ of universal consciousness… The Heart Centre becomes the organ of the intuitive mind, of spiritualized feeling.
Govinda maps the yogic cakra centres onto a hierarchy of psycho-spiritual functions, demonstrating an Eastern parallel to the depth-psychological concept of differentiated psychic centres.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
The seven Centres of the human body represent in a certain way the elementary structure and dimensionality of the universe: from the state of greatest density and materiality up to the state of immaterial multi-dimensional extension.
Govinda presents the seven bodily centres as a cosmological map encoding the full range of existence from matter to spirit, contextualising the term within Tibetan yogic anthropology.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
the Brain-centre, sometimes called the Northern Centre, and the Heart-centre, or Southern Centre. These two constitute the two poles of the human organism. They are said to be the first centres to form in the embryo.
Evans-Wentz presents the Tibetan schema of psychic centres as a bipolar axis of the human organism, showing how the concept of centre grounds soteriological practice in embodied polarity.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
A frequent form is the mandala with Christ in the centre and the evangelists in the four corners… The design of the dreamer indicates the way in which his analysis will continue, and at the same time it is a means to concentrate him.
Jung demonstrates the mandala's clinical function as a concentrating device, with the centre serving as the orienting focal point of the therapeutic and individuation process.
Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it.
Samuels elaborates the ego-Self axis by showing that the Self's determining factors 'radiate out,' confirming the centre as an active, generative locus rather than a static point.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
the circle appears combined with the quaternity, as a silver bowl with four nuts at the four cardinal points… The centre seems to be parti[cularly significant].
Jung tracks the recurrence of centre-and-quaternity configurations in a dream series, establishing the centre's persistent psychological salience as an autonomous symbolic motif.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
Their mandala is associated with the Brain Centre, while the mandala of the peaceful or benign forms of the Dhyani-Buddhas are visualized as dwelling in the lotus of the Heart Centre.
Govinda correlates specific mandalas with specific bodily centres, showing the centre as the mediating structure between deity-form, psychic function, and contemplative practice.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
The energy of this centre is depicted as the dormant force of the goddess Kundalini — who as the Sakti of Brahma embodies the potentiality of nature, whose effects may be either divine or demoniacal.
Govinda characterises the root centre as the locus of Kundalini — an ambivalent potency whose controlled activation is the precondition for any movement towards higher centres.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
they all emphasize the centre to such an extent that they seem to have been made in order to express the importance of the central figure. In our case, however, the centre is empty. It consists only of a mathematical point.
Jung confronts the paradox of the empty centre in a dream symbol, acknowledging that the centre may be formally present yet ontologically vacant, opening onto temporal rather than substantive meaning.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
the indivisible point. This conception fully accords with that of the 'Monad' and 'Son of Man' in Monoïmos.
Jung cites Gnostic and Naassene sources to show that the 'indivisible point' — a protoconception of the psychic centre — appears across ancient traditions as a symbol of the Self.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
the choice of this symbol depends on its particular suitability for being able to act upon the properties of the cakra in question, either with a view to intensify or to sublimate them.
Govinda explains that the symbolic contents placed at a cakra's centre are chosen functionally, not arbitrarily, demonstrating the centre as a dynamic locus of psychological activation.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
Within our six-foot body we must strive for the form which existed before the laying down of heaven and earth… the thoughts should be concentrated on the yellow middle.
The Secret of the Golden Flower posits an interior centre — the 'yellow middle' — as the focus of meditative concentration, offering a Chinese Taoist cognate for the depth-psychological concept.
Wilhelm, Richard, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931aside
with eight in- and out-breathings it reaches the Navel Centre (8), with ten further inhalations and exhalations it fills the Navel Centre (18).
Govinda records the precise yogic technology by which inner fire is made to traverse and fill successive centres, illustrating the practice-dimension of the centre concept in Tibetan tantra.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960aside
in the pictorial representations of the psychic centres or cakras in the human body, in which each centre is characterized by a number of seed-syllables arranged like petals around the calyx or pericarp of a lotus.
Govinda describes how seed-syllables visually and phonetically constitute each psychic centre in tantric iconography, linking the centre to mantra, sound, and cosmic structure.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960aside
The centre of the mandala represents a combination of the principles of Amitabha and Amoghasiddhi.
Govinda specifies that the Bardo Thödol mandala's centre encodes a synthesis of two Buddha-principles, illustrating how the centre serves as the integrating point of a symbolic cosmology.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960aside