Contraries occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a logical category, a psychological dynamic, and a metaphysical principle. The tradition divides, broadly, into two orientations. The first, traceable through Aristotle and the Stoics, treats contraries as mutually exclusive terms within a system of predicates and transformations — food nourishes by being contrary to the organism it feeds; propositions admit contraries that formal logic must adjudicate. The second, far more consequential for depth psychology proper, treats contraries as generative poles whose tension — never their cancellation — is the condition of psychic life. Freud notes that the dream-work simply disregards contraries, collapsing them or representing them as identical, a discovery that points toward the unconscious as a domain where logical opposition loses its force. Blake, as read by Abrams, elevates the creative strife of contraries into a cosmogonic principle: not the bland mediocrity of equilibrium, but the 'intellectual war' that alone sustains imaginative vitality. Aurobindo, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pascal each wrestle with the irreducible mixture of contraries in human experience — good and evil, life and death, faith and doubt — resisting their dissolution into a false synthesis. McGilchrist, drawing on Heraclitus and Schleiermacher, insists that the Golden Mean is not a flaccid midpoint but a taut dynamic equipoise between forces that must remain contrary to remain alive. The term thus marks the fault-line between a logic that would dissolve tension and a psychology that requires it.
In the library
17 passages
The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictions is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. 'No' seems to not exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular proclivity for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as the same thing.
Freud argues that the dream-work abolishes the logical category of contraries, merging opposites into unity and thereby revealing an unconscious domain structurally indifferent to logical opposition.
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
Beulah is a peaceable kingdom only in the negative sense that it lacks conflicting contraries... dangerous, in its languor and sterility, because it can become an habitual refuge from 'intellectual war,' that creative strife of contraries in the strenuous life of intellect and of imagination.
Abrams reads Blake as positing the creative strife of contraries as the engine of mental and imaginative life, against which any pacific state lacking such tension is a form of sterility.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
The second movement of Burnt Norton reveals that this quest is also for a reconciliation of the divided and warring contraries that constitute the world of motion in time... in the union of contraries 'at the still point of the turning world' we find a new world.
Abrams identifies in Eliot's Four Quartets, as in Heraclitean metaphysics, the reconciliation of warring contraries as the central spiritual and psychological aspiration of the Romantic-modern tradition.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling, a single action.
Aurobindo presents the inextricable mixture of contraries within every human being and every event as the fundamental condition of terrestrial existence, dissolving any simplistic moral binary.
opposites require to be satisfied together: no single goal can be successfully pursued without due acknowledgment, and indeed acceptance of, its contrary... The ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution.
McGilchrist, citing William James, argues that the fulfillment of any genuine human aim requires the simultaneous acknowledgment of its contrary, a principle embedded in both ethics and religious experience.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
if the opposing forces in lyre or bow simply annulled one another, the string would go slack – no 'tonus' – and nothing, no flight of notes, no arrow's flight – could come from either.
McGilchrist uses the Heraclitean figure of the lyre and bow to argue that contraries must remain in taut tension, not be cancelled into equilibrium, for dynamic life and creative output to be possible.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
if the opposing forces in lyre or bow simply annulled one another, the string would go slack – no 'tonus' – and nothing, no flight of notes, no arrow's flight – could come from either.
McGilchrist uses the Heraclitean figure of the lyre and bow to argue that contraries must remain in taut tension, not be cancelled into equilibrium, for dynamic life and creative output to be possible.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The dynamic element in the growth of the mind in nature is a play of polarities... 'a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere in nature, in individual man and in society, [Wordsworth] saw a constant interplay of opposing forces.' Chief among the contraries in nature... are those which Wordsworth introduces: 'I grew up Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear.'
Abrams documents Wordsworth's pervasive dialectical habit of mind, in which contraries — beauty and fear, incitation and discipline — constitute the structural poles of natural formation.
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
man, acting freely by a voluntary impulse, deserted the lot that was unmixed with evil, and drew upon himself that which was a mixture of contraries. Yet Divine Providence did not leave that recklessness of ours without a corrective.
Gregory of Nyssa locates the fall of humanity in the voluntary assumption of a condition mixed with contraries, framing the entire arc of providential history as a corrective to that primordial self-division.
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 2016supporting
what serves as food to a living thing is what is contrary to it—not that in every pair of contraries each is food to the other: to be food a contrary must not only be transformable into the other and vice versa, it must also in so doing increase the bulk of the other.
Aristotle establishes a precise technical criterion for the nutritive relation between contraries, insisting that mutual transformability alone does not suffice — the contrary must also augment what it nourishes.
ambiguity is no longer a combination of complementary contraries; instead, the synthesis now involves 'contradictory' contraries. The consequences of this mental and logical change are abundantly illustrated by a second development.
Detienne marks a historical shift in Greek thought from complementary contraries held in ambiguity to contradictory contraries requiring logical resolution, tracing the emergence of a new rational episteme.
Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996supporting
death is the fundamental possibility yet cannot be experienced as such, he is but repeating the rationalist arguments that existence and death (being and not-being) are logical contraries: where I am death is not, where death is I am not.
Hillman identifies the logical treatment of existence and death as contraries as a rationalist limitation that prevents psychological engagement with death as a genuine experiential reality.
Hillman, James, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
there are a great number of truths, both of faith and morals, which seem repugnant but all exist in admirable order. The source of all heresies is the exclusion of certain of these truths.
Pascal argues that theological contraries — such as Christ's dual nature — must both be held simultaneously, and that heresy consists precisely in the logical exclusion of one contrary in favor of the other.
there is no position without its negation. Where there is faith, there is doubt; where there is doubt, there is credulity; where there is morality, there is temptation... the opposites condition one another, that they are really one and the same thing.
Jung's foreword to Evans-Wentz presents the co-inherence of contraries — faith/doubt, morality/temptation — as a universal psychological law confirmed by both Tibetan symbolism and Taoist thought.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
in order for me to be free it is not necessary that I should be indifferent as regards the choice between two contraries.
Descartes, in a philological note, distinguishes freedom of the will from indifference between contraries, marking a key point in the early modern reconfiguration of the term within voluntarist philosophy.
Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008aside
Throughout this passage, the 1874 edition had used the word 'contrary' for 'opposite' (entgegengesetzt). The revision made in 1892 seems to me preferable.
McGilchrist notes an editorial shift in the translation of Hegel's term for 'opposite,' flagging the semantic proximity and tension between 'contrary' and 'opposite' in the German idealist tradition.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
Throughout this passage, the 1874 edition had used the word 'contrary' for 'opposite' (entgegengesetzt). The revision made in 1892 seems to me preferable.
McGilchrist notes an editorial shift in the translation of Hegel's term for 'opposite,' flagging the semantic proximity and tension between 'contrary' and 'opposite' in the German idealist tradition.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside