Dominance in the depth-psychology corpus is not a simple behavioural fact but a node where etymology, social structure, intrapsychic dynamics, neurophysiology, and erotic life intersect and contest one another. Hillman excavates the Latin root — dominus, domus, despotes — to argue that Western agency is structurally sedimented with lordship: to act at all, in the inherited language, is already to dominate. Fromm reads the sadistic drive to dominate as a compensatory response to existential powerlessness, inseparable from its masochistic twin. Yalom treats dominance hierarchies as a permanent and productive tension within the therapy group, one that can either be metabolised or calcify into pathology. Perel locates domination and submission in erotic fantasy as a culturally subversive inversion of egalitarian ideology, while Panksepp grounds social dominance in opioid-mediated affect states measurable across species. Ricoeur distinguishes domination as the constitutive, troubling underside of legitimate political power. McGilchrist extends the concept into neuropsychology by demonstrating that attentional dominance lateralises even more strongly to the right hemisphere than speech does to the left. Taken together, these voices reveal dominance as something simultaneously archaic and structurally reproduced — in the brain, in the consulting room, in the bedroom, and in the very grammar of power.
In the library
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Dominus (our dominate, dominant) is the lord, the master, the possessor, and Roman slaves called their master dominus as slaves in Greece called their master despotes… hierarchy and subordination, even despotism, are built into this idea of power.
Hillman argues that the very etymology of 'dominance' encodes hierarchy and lordship so that, within the Western linguistic inheritance, any act of agency already carries a structural disposition toward domination.
Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
Throughout the life of the group, the members are involved in a struggle for position in the hierarchy of dominance. At times, the conflict around control and dominance is flagrant; at other times, quiescent. But it never vanishes.
Yalom contends that dominance struggle is a permanent, structuring dynamic in group psychotherapy that must be actively explored lest it harden into irreparable conflict.
Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008thesis
One is to make others dependent on oneself and to have absolute and unrestricted power over them, so as to make of them nothing but instruments, 'clay in the potter's hand.'
Fromm identifies the drive to dominate as the first and most fundamental sadistic tendency, linked constitutively to the symbiotic character structure and the flight from individual freedom.
rituals of domination and submission are a subversive way to put one over on a society that glorifies control, belittles dependency, and demands equality.
Perel argues that the contemporary proliferation of erotic domination and submission rituals constitutes a collective fantasy that subverts the very egalitarian norms Western culture officially endorses.
Perel, Esther, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007thesis
on the basis of this gap between domination and power, constitutive of the political as such, we can define the political as the set of organized practices relating to the distribution of political power, better termed domination.
Ricoeur distinguishes domination from power as such, arguing that domination names the irreducible vertical asymmetry — the force-form nexus — that constitutes the political field.
attentional dominance lateralises even more strongly to the right hemisphere than speech does to the left; and left-handers still display right-hemispheric attentional dominance in 81% of cases.
McGilchrist demonstrates that attentional dominance is a neurophysiological fact, lateralising to the right hemisphere even more robustly than language lateralises to the left, with profound implications for theories of consciousness and perception.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The very dynamics of power and control that can be challenging in an emotional relationship can, when eroticized, become highly desirable.
Perel shows that dominance dynamics which are problematic in relational life are transformed, through eroticisation, into sources of excitement, illustrating the psychic plasticity of power.
Perel, Esther, Mating in captivity sex, lies and domestic bliss, 2007supporting
Our consciousness is still secretly coupled with these two tendencies for domination, and knowledge is generally combined with them.
Von Franz argues that the power drive toward domination operates covertly within knowledge-seeking itself, manifesting as the prestige drive of intellectual and academic culture.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
it is hard to see how men's lesser verbal ability leads to their being better 'fitted' for political life and to their dominant role there.
Samuels, via Sayers, critiques sociobiological accounts that naturalise male political dominance, exposing the logical incoherence of deriving social hierarchy from contested biological data.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
without brain opioids an animal tends to feel psychologically weaker, causing it to lose because it is more prone to experience negative feelings such as separation distress.
Panksepp grounds social dominance in opioid-mediated affect, demonstrating that the capacity to achieve dominance in play-fighting depends on neurochemical states that regulate psychological strength.
Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
expressions of symbolic dominance, it is little wonder that they are accorded such high esteem in our society, even by administrators of so many universities.
Panksepp notes that symbolic dominance displays are socially rewarded in human institutions, linking affective neuroscience to broader cultural patterns of prestige and hierarchy.
Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
the terms 'centrality,' 'similarity,' and 'absence of domination' found in Anaximander's cosmology… are also clearly linked together there in the same way as they were in political thought.
Vernant traces how Greek cosmological thought modelled the earth's stability on the political ideal of non-domination, revealing how concepts of dominance and its absence structured both physical and civic imagination.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
nor did we take power along the roads analyzed by George Santayana (in a late work of his old age, Dominations and Powers), by Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power).
Hillman's aside situates his own inquiry into power in relation to major philosophical and sociological treatments of domination, implicitly acknowledging the breadth of the concept's intellectual genealogy.
Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside
The sadist wants to dominate his object and therefore suffers a loss if his object disappears.
Fromm distinguishes the sadistic drive to dominate from destructiveness proper, arguing that domination requires the survival of the object, revealing its fundamentally relational and symbiotic character.
Are the speech areas of the right nondominant hemisphere activated in spontaneous possession… And are the contorted features due to the intrusion of right hemisphere control?
Jaynes raises the possibility that episodes of possession involve the activation of the neurologically non-dominant hemisphere, linking hemispheric dominance to altered states and archaic forms of bicameral experience.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside