Counter Vortex

The term ‘Counter Vortex’ does not appear as an explicit, coined technical term across the depth-psychology corpus surveyed here; rather, it emerges as a latent structural concept distributed across several authors who engage the vortex as a natural-philosophical and psychological figure. McGilchrist’s extended treatment of turbulence and vortical dynamics in The Matter With Things provides the most sustained relevant context: he details how vortices inherently contain contrary motions — opposing directions coexisting within a single rotating structure — such that any vortex implies its own counter-motion as a constitutive feature. This physical reality becomes, in his hands, a metaphor for the dialectical creativity of resistance and opposition. Bloom’s reference to Crane’s vortex ‘playing against’ the one created by the sinking Pequod gestures toward a specifically literary counter-vortex logic: competing, antagonistic rotational forces generating meaning through their tension. Plato’s Timaeus introduces the ancient precursor — the ‘apparent counter-revolution’ of planetary motion against the primary cosmic vortex — as an early cosmological formulation of the same principle. The recurring depth-psychological implication, visible across these usages, is that psychic and natural systems generate stabilising or transformative counter-movements in direct response to primary vortical forces, and that these counter-rotations are not mere opposites but creative complements.

In the library 13 passages

A tornado is a typical vortex: it contains contrary motions, cold air pushing down on the outside and hot air spiralling up on the inside. Vortices of all kinds both arise from and perpetuate such contrary motions.

McGilchrist establishes that the vortex is definitionally constituted by contrary, counter-directional motions, making the counter-vortex an intrinsic structural feature of all vortical phenomena rather than an external opposition.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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A tornado is a typical vortex: it contains contrary motions, cold air pushing down on the outside and hot air spiralling up on the inside. Vortices of all kinds both arise from and perpetuate such contrary motions.

McGilchrist establishes that the vortex is definitionally constituted by contrary, counter-directional motions, making the counter-vortex an intrinsic structural feature of all vortical phenomena rather than an external opposition.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Crane’s vortex plays against the one created by the Pequod as it sinks and the whirlpool in the Death by Water section of The Waste Land.

Bloom identifies a counter-vortex logic in Crane’s poetic imagination, whereby one vortical force is deliberately set in antagonistic tension against rival vortices drawn from Melville and Eliot, constituting a form of agonistic creative counter-rotation.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis

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Earlier cosmologies, based on the notion of the vortex, had supposed that all the heavenly bodies were carried round by the cosmic eddy in one direction only. The apparent backward move — Here, as at Laws 898, it is clearly stated that every planet, like the other heavenly gods, is a living creature with a body.

Plato’s Timaeus records the ancient philosophical recognition of a counter-revolution within cosmic vortical motion, wherein planets move against the primary directional sweep of the cosmic eddy, anticipating the depth-psychological figure of the counter-vortex as cosmological necessity.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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From a straight flow in a rigid linear channel meeting a simple, smooth straight-edged obstruction such as a rod placed at right angles to the flow, the most extraordinary richness of design can emerge.

McGilchrist argues that resistance to flow generates complex vortical patterns, providing the physical basis for understanding counter-rotational structures as products of obstruction rather than mere negation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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From a straight flow in a rigid linear channel meeting a simple, smooth straight-edged obstruction such as a rod placed at right angles to the flow, the most extraordinary richness of design can emerge.

McGilchrist argues that resistance to flow generates complex vortical patterns, providing the physical basis for understanding counter-rotational structures as products of obstruction rather than mere negation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Fig. 44 Vortices in stream caused by uniform perpendicular obstruction … Fig. 51 Vortices and contrary motion (Coats 2001)

McGilchrist’s figure catalogue documents the visual taxonomy of vortices and contrary motions in streams, providing the empirical iconographic grounding for the concept of counter-vortical dynamics within natural and psychological discourse.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Fig. 44 Vortices in stream caused by uniform perpendicular obstruction … Fig. 51 Vortices and contrary motion (Coats 2001)

McGilchrist’s figure catalogue documents the visual taxonomy of vortices and contrary motions in streams, providing the empirical iconographic grounding for the concept of counter-vortical dynamics within natural and psychological discourse.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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A double movement is observable: first, the usual clockwise movement, cumulative and expanding as time goes on … second, an opposite, backward movement, folding up and contracting as time goes on, through which the seeds of the future take form.

The I Ching’s commentary articulates a cosmological double movement — one expansive and one contractive — that structurally parallels the counter-vortex principle, framing opposed rotational forces as the basis for temporal and transformative intelligibility.

Richard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting

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Whitehead believed there was a close identification of rhythm with ‘the causal counterpart of life; namely, that wherever there is some rhythm there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.’

McGilchrist, citing Whitehead, situates rhythmic alternation — the structural precondition for counter-vortical motion — as constitutive of life itself, reinforcing the depth-psychological significance of opposed cyclical dynamics.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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Whitehead believed there was a close identification of rhythm with ‘the causal counterpart of life; namely, that wherever there is some rhythm there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.’

McGilchrist, citing Whitehead, situates rhythmic alternation — the structural precondition for counter-vortical motion — as constitutive of life itself, reinforcing the depth-psychological significance of opposed cyclical dynamics.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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