The term 'element' traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two distinct but intersecting axes. The first is cosmological-metaphysical: tracing back through Plato's Timaeus, 'element' designates the irreducible primary bodies — fire, air, water, earth — which Plato himself refuses to treat as ultimate, preferring to derive them from prior triangular structures. This Platonic move, denying classical elements the status of true archai, resonates through alchemical traditions surveyed by Jung and von Franz, where the four elements appear as both physical constituents and psychic projections. The second axis is psychological-typological: Arroyo's astrological psychology deploys the four elements as energy categories mapping personality and temperament, while Winnicott introduces 'element' in a more abstract, clinical sense — the distilled 'male' and 'female' elements as pure relational stances underlying character. In the I Ching material, 'element' functions structurally as the yin or yang line within a hexagram, the minimal unit of symbolic meaning. Across these contexts, what unites the term is its role as the smallest meaningful constituent of a larger system — whether cosmological, psychological, or divinatory — whose interrelations generate the complexity of experience. The tensions are significant: whether elements are ultimate or derivative, literal or symbolic, material or psychic, remains contested across the traditions assembled here.
In the library
16 passages
Plato at once denies them the status of elements, and promises to 'explain their generation' from prior and simpler beginnings. He intends to construct the geometrical shapes of the four primary bodies from triangles which he takes as elementary.
This passage establishes Plato's foundational move of refusing to treat the traditional four elements as ultimate, deriving them instead from elementary triangles, a position that has profound implications for all subsequent philosophical and alchemical use of the term.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
Since the triangles, not the solids, are Plato's 'elements', this meets Aristotle's objection that not every part of a pyramid or cube is a pyramid or cube.
Cornford clarifies that in the Timaeus the true 'elements' are the constituent triangles, not the regular solids assigned to fire, air, water, and earth, thereby sharply distinguishing Platonic from Aristotelian elementalism.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
The first man, Thoth or Adam, is a divine man; his name signifies virginal earth, fiery earth, carnal earth, red earth, and bloody earth. According to the above mentioned alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis there existed a Gnostic doctrine in Egypt in the third century A. D. concerning this Adam, which Jung has already published.
Von Franz links the Gnostic Anthropos figure to the four classical elements, showing how depth psychology inherits from alchemy the idea that elemental composition is both cosmological and anthropological.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The 'element' is the half-equilateral, 'whose hypotenuse is double of the shorter side in length'. The equilateral is formed by putting together six (not, as we should expect, two) of these elements.
Cornford details Plato's geometric construction of elemental solids from sub-elemental triangles, showing the technical precision with which 'element' is redefined in the Timaeus.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Empedocles was the first to suggest that bone, sinew, flesh, and blood were composed of the four elements in definite proportions. Bone, for example, contained four parts of fire, two of earth, one of air, and one of water.
This passage traces the pre-Platonic Empedoclean model in which biological tissues are quantitative combinations of the four elements, a tradition Plato inherits and transforms.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The earth element tends to be cautious, premeditative, rather conventional, and unusually dependable. They are generally suspicious or dubious about more lively, agile-minded people, and they react to the air signs with some degree of reserve.
Arroyo translates the classical four elements into psychological typologies of temperament, extending their use from cosmology to characterology within astrological depth psychology.
Stephen Arroyo, Astrology, Psychology, and the Four Elements: An Energy Approach to Astrology and Its Use in the Counseling Arts, 1975thesis
I wish to say that the element that I am calling 'male' does traffic in terms of active relating or passive being related to, each being backed by instinct... by contrast, the pure female element relates to the breast (or to the mother) in the sense of the baby becoming the breast.
Winnicott reappropriates 'element' as a psychoanalytic term denoting distilled, irreducible relational orientations — male and female — that underlie character structure prior to instinctual development.
air forcibly compressed cannot be resolved by anything save into its elements, and when not so compressed, is dissolved only by fire.
This passage demonstrates the Platonic doctrine of elemental resolution and transformation, in which each primary body can be broken down into its constituent triangular elements under sufficient force.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the construction 'in each case originally produced its triangle not of one size only, but some smaller, some larger'. The editors take 'construction' in the passive sense, 'structure', which the word often bears elsewhere.
Cornford examines the textual difficulty in Plato's account of how elemental triangles come in multiple sizes, a point crucial for explaining the variety of compounds produced from the four primary bodies.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Three cases of resolution are described, the principal agent being fire, the most active, mobile, and penetrating of the four solids. We are told how it acts on earth, water, air, breaking down the less mobile figures, so that their elementary triangles are set free to recombine.
This passage expounds the dynamic interplay of the four elements as processes of dissolution and recombination, with fire serving as the principal agent of elemental transformation.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
there are several varieties of fire: flame; that effluence from flame which does not burn but gives light to the eyes; and what is left of fire in glowing embers when flame is quenched. And so with air.
Plato's acknowledgment that each of the four primary elements has internal varieties, distinguished by particle size and grade, complicates any simple identification of 'element' with a single homogeneous substance.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
impulse (hormē) is generated in the animal (zōion) sometimes on the one hand upon the movement of the soul's emotional element, instead of upon the judgement of the rational element.
Sorabji's account of Posidonius uses 'element' to denote discrete functional parts of the soul — emotional and rational — whose interaction or conflict constitutes the Stoic analysis of passion.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
These are the 'traces of the elements' (Ta LXVTJ TWV aTOtXEtwv — a reference to LXVTJ at 53B). In the case of fire there is (1) the form (eidos), an indivisible nature, the image of the cause of fire.
Proclus's commentary identifies 'traces of the elements' as pre-cosmic vestiges present in the Receptacle before ordered creation, linking the elements to the metaphysics of Form and participation.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
This being a good-enough purveyor of female element must be a matter of very subtle details of handling... the mother has a breast that is, so that the baby can also be when the baby and mother are not yet separated out in the infant's rudimentary mind.
Winnicott grounds the 'female element' in the concrete micro-details of early maternal handling, showing how abstract elemental categories are rooted in the earliest relational experience.
Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
Six at the second place is a yin element at a yin place, central and correct. It corresponds to the yang element at the fifth place. These two elements, yin and yang, are a perfect match.
In the I Ching interpretive framework, 'element' designates the individual yin or yang line within a hexagram, whose positional correctness and correspondence determines the divinatory and psychological meaning.
Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
it may be at least possible for us to state certain basic axioms which could serve as the principal indicators of the message of this Gnosis. In the following we shall present a brief summary of these elements.
Hoeller uses 'elements' loosely to mean constituent axioms of Gnostic-Jungian teaching, a rhetorical rather than technical deployment of the term that nonetheless situates it within depth-psychological systematization.
Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982aside