Enactivism

the outward situation releases a psychic process in which certain contents gather together and prepare for action. When we say that a person is ‘constellated’ we mean that he has taken up a position from which he can be expected to react in a quite definite way.

Jung’s concept of ‘constellation’ anticipates an enactivist logic, locating psychic readiness not in abstract representation but in an organismic-situational coupling that orients the person toward action.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing — not a logical stillbirth in accordance with the principle tertium non datur but a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation.

Jung’s transcendent function describes psychic transformation as emergent and generative — a dynamic enactment arising from lived tension rather than a representational or computational resolution.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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action, as a response to events, is, you might say, always a second step rather than a first: If we can never quite lose our capacity to act altogether, this is because there never ceases to be a fund of doings and happenings — beginnings — in the world to which we might respond.

Arendt’s account of action as structurally responsive — always already embedded in a prior world of events — converges with enactivist claims that agency is relational and world-constituted rather than self-originating.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting

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the confrontation with the unconscious must be a many-sided one, for the transcendent function is not a partial process running a conditioned course; it is a total and integral event in which all aspects are, or should be, included.

Jung characterizes psychic transformation as a total, integral event rather than a modular cognitive process, aligning with enactivism’s emphasis on whole-organism engagement with environment.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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Consciousness is primarily an organ of orientation in a world of outer and inner facts. First and foremost, it establishes the fact that something is there.

Jung frames consciousness as fundamentally oriented toward a world rather than enclosed in representation, resonating with enactivism’s core claim that cognition is world-directed orientation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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The method of ‘active imagination,’ hereinafter described, is the most important auxiliary for the production of those contents of the unconscious which lie, as it were, immediately below the threshold of consciousness.

Active imagination as a method presupposes embodied, performative engagement with unconscious contents rather than passive introspection, bearing a structural resemblance to enactivist practices of sense-making.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

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whereas ‘I’ — one person alone — can help a few individuals at best, we have the knowledge and power to bring addiction under control, by acting together. Concerted social action can domesticate today’s globalising free-market society.

Alexander locates the locus of transformation in collective embodied action rather than individual cognition, paralleling enactivism’s insistence that mind and change are enacted in shared, material practice.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008aside

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all that matters is that the opportunity for genuine activity be restored to the individual; that the purposes of society and of his own become identical, not ideologically but in reality; and that he apply his effort and reason actively to the work he is doing.

Fromm’s demand for genuine activity — reason and effort applied materially, not merely represented ideologically — echoes enactivism’s insistence that authentic cognition is always already practical and world-engaging.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941aside

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