Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘concern’ operates across at least three distinct registers that intersect yet resist simple unification. Winnicott establishes the term’s most technically precise psychoanalytic meaning: concern is the developmental achievement whereby the infant integrates love and aggression, recognizes the mother as a whole person, and assumes responsibility for the destructive content latent in instinctual life. For Winnicott, concern is the affective foundation of guilt, reparation, constructive play, and all subsequent ethical life — a capacity that emerges prior to the Oedipal triangle and whose failure marks serious psychopathology. Heidegger deploys ‘concern’ (Besorgen) in an entirely different key: as the ontological term for Dasein’s characteristic manner of Being-in-the-world alongside ready-to-hand entities, grounded ultimately in the temporal structure of care (Sorge). This existential register treats concern not as an emotion but as the constitutive mode through which world discloses itself to a being whose Being is always already at issue. A third, biological register appears in Thompson’s reading of Jonas and Spinoza, where the organism’s minimal ‘concern’ to persist in being is identified with conatus — life’s immanent purposiveness. The tensions among these registers — developmental, ontological, biological — illuminate why ‘concern’ proves indispensable to any psychology that takes seriously the relationship between selfhood, world, and the claims of others.
Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels and accepts responsibility… a capacity for concern is at the back of all constructive play and work.
Winnicott establishes ‘concern’ as the developmental achievement through which the individual integrates caring with responsibility, grounding constructive activity in the integration of love and aggression.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
the expression ‘concern’ will be used in this investigation as an ontological term for an existentiale, and will designate the Being of a possible way of Being-in-the-world.
Heidegger formally designates ‘concern’ (Besorgen) as an existentiale — an ontological structure of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world — distinguishing it sharply from any merely ontic or psychological usage.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
the object-mother has to be found to survive the instinct-driven episodes, which have now acquired the full force of fantasies of oral sadism and other results of fusion.
Winnicott situates the developmental conditions for concern in the infant’s aggressive fantasy life and the mother’s survival of those attacks, showing how concern depends on the mother’s continued existence as a whole object.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting
The constructive and creative experiences were making it possible for the child to get to the experience of her destructiveness. And thus, in the treatment, conditions were present that I have tried to describe.
Winnicott demonstrates clinically that the capacity for concern requires the co-presence of constructive experience and acknowledged destructiveness, the two sides of the developmental integration he theorizes.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965supporting
The constant regenerative activity of metabolism endows life with a minimal ‘concern’ to carry on being. Spinoza called this concern conatus, the effort and power of life to preserve itself.
Thompson, via Jonas and Spinoza, extends ‘concern’ into biology: the organism’s conatus — its minimal self-preserving purposiveness — is identified as the proto-form of concern at the level of metabolism itself.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
concern can in turn be conceived explicitly in terms of either care or temporality… the ready-to-hand things with which we concern ourselves are not the causes of our concern.
Heidegger clarifies that Dasein’s concern with ready-to-hand entities is grounded in care and temporality, not caused by those entities — reversing the naïve ontic explanation of concernful engagement.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The temporality of this concern makes it possible for circumspection to be modified into a perceiving which looks at things, and the theoretical cognition which is grounded in such perceiving.
Heidegger traces the genesis of theoretical perception from the temporality of circumspective concern, showing how contemplative cognition is a derivative modification of the more primordial concernful engagement with the world.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
This growth is growth of soul as I described soul… it makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.
Hillman distinguishes ‘religious concern’ from dogmatic or theological concern, locating it in the soul’s capacity to make meaning — a usage that connects concern to depth-psychological notions of soul-making rather than ethical responsibility.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting
Starting with the person’s own concerns rather than those of the counselor will ensure that this does not happen. Very often, exploring those things that are of concern to the person will lead back to the topic that is of concern to the counselor.
Miller treats ‘concerns’ as the client’s own motivational horizon, arguing that therapeutic engagement must begin from the client’s frame rather than the clinician’s agenda if resistance is to be avoided.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
a matter of such concern in so far as Dasein calculates time in reckoning with itself, then the kind of behaviour in which ‘one’ explicitly regulates oneself according to time, lies in the use of clocks.
Heidegger briefly notes that world-time becomes an object of explicit concern when Dasein regulates itself through clock-use, connecting concern’s temporal structure to the existential origins of public time-measurement.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
concern for his own reputation… other-regarding behaviour is often motivated in this way is a particular Euripidean theme.
Cairns notes that in Euripidean ethical psychology, concern for reputation functions as a motivating force that can align self-regarding and other-regarding behavior, illustrating concern’s ambiguous moral valence in classical literature.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993aside
concern for individual honour can conflict with the duty of loyalty to the polis or the army… concern for the honour of the city, as fostered by Tyrt., actually leads to disloyalty.
Cairns demonstrates that in archaic and classical Greek ethics, ‘concern’ for honor generates irreducible tensions between individual, community, and political obligation — a precursor to later psychological accounts of the divided self.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993aside