The term ‘environment’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct but intersecting axes. At one pole, Hillman radically dissolves the boundary between psyche and surroundings, arguing through the lens of deep ecology that the environment is not a neutral backdrop but an ensouled, imaginatively nourishing field co-constitutive with the daimon — neither nature nor nurture alone can account for character, because the environment itself participates in soul-making. At another pole, developmental theorists — Winnicott, Schore, and the trauma literature gathered by Lanius — treat the environment as the relational matrix within which the nervous system is organized, dysregulated, or repaired; here ‘facilitating environment’ is a technical term carrying enormous clinical weight. A third axis, represented by Thompson and McGilchrist, situates organism-environment relations within enactive and autopoietic biology: the environment is not pre-given but enacted through structural coupling, rendering the organism-environment distinction perpetually approximate. Easwaran maps the Sanskrit concept of prakriti onto environmental thought, extending ‘environment’ into a spiritual-ethical register. Taken together, the corpus refuses any simple inside/outside binary, insisting instead on reciprocity, co-determination, and the irreducibility of context to mere background.
why not admit, as does deep ecology, that the environment itself is ensouled, animated, inextricably meshed with us and not fundamentally separate from us?
Hillman argues for a radical re-enchantment of environment through deep ecology, positing it as an ensouled field continuous with psyche rather than a separate external container.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
organism and environment enact each other through their structural coupling… the condition of adaptation is an invariant of life; it is necessarily conserved as long as autopoiesis and structural coupling continue.
Thompson, following Maturana and Varela, establishes organism-environment co-determination as the foundational principle of enactive biology, replacing adaptation-as-optimization with adaptation-as-structural-coupling.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Once we have opened the ecological eye, where does environment—even immediate, unshared, private, individual environment—stop?
Hillman interrogates the very boundaries of the concept, demonstrating that no environment is truly private or bounded once ecological interconnection is honestly acknowledged.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
the infant is not aware of the environment as environment, especially when the environment is good or good-enough. The environment induces reactions indeed when it fails in some important respect.
Winnicott establishes the paradox central to developmental theory: a truly facilitating environment is invisible to the infant precisely by virtue of its adequacy, becoming perceptible only through failure.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
it is a good question whether the distinction between organism and environment can ever be other than approximate.
McGilchrist, drawing on Gibson’s affordances and reciprocal biological action, argues that the organism-environment boundary is constitutively imprecise, undermining hard mechanistic distinctions.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
it is a good question whether the distinction between organism and environment can ever be other than approximate.
A parallel articulation of McGilchrist’s thesis on the irreducible porosity of the organism-environment boundary, reinforcing the same conceptual point across editions.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The nearest Sanskrit equivalent for ‘environment’ in this connection is prakriti, which adds a useful dimension because prakriti is not merely physical.
Easwaran expands the concept of environment beyond the physical by aligning it with prakriti — a continuum of matter, energy, and mind — and uses it to evaluate individual and civilizational development.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis
Evolution requires that a relationship between organisms and their environment must be established if life is to be sustained… we find the establishment of a resonance between the environment and the individual/organism and the container and the contained.
Conforti frames the organism-environment relationship as a resonant field dynamic, linking evolutionary biology to the Jungian concept of the container and contained.
, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting
because the environment is never static but always changing, natural selection will inevitably lag behind environmental change.
Thompson critiques adaptationism by emphasizing the dynamic, ever-shifting character of the environment, which resists the static optimization model central to gene-selectionist accounts.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
the imagination of children depends wholly on this contact with the environment. Imagination does not grow all by itself in the household, or even out of imaginative tales told by parents.
Hillman, citing ecologist Edith Cobb, argues that imagination is environmentally fed rather than parentally transmitted, positioning the world itself as a developmental parent.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
environment is the concept that the two major themes of this chapter, genetics and love, employ to explain the obscure grounds of difference, we can’t allow the term to go unexamined.
Hillman subjects ‘environment’ to critical scrutiny as the shared explanatory vehicle of both genetic and relational accounts of individual difference, insisting on conceptual precision.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
the intricate relationships that exist between genes, environment and development… biological, developmental and cognitive processes that can result from exposure to adverse environments.
The Lanius volume frames environment as a key variable in gene-environment-development interactions, with adverse early environments producing measurable neurobiological consequences.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting
developmental timing/duration of adverse early life events may be more important than the specific type of adverse event, which would allow for comparisons across studies measuring different types of early adverse event.
The trauma research literature identifies temporal dimensions of environmental adversity as more significant than categorical type, refining G×E models of psychopathological risk.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting
Incessant material turnover and exchange with the environment is both a reason for this concern and the only way to meet it.
Thompson, via Jonas, presents metabolic exchange with the environment as the very ground of organic identity and purposiveness — the environment is constitutive of life itself.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
the primary requirement of all life is the maintenance of a stable internal environment… without this dynamic internal stability in the face of an ever-changing external environment, we would all perish.
Levine, drawing on Claude Bernard’s physiology, frames the organism’s relation to environment as one of homeostatic tension — inner stability maintained against constant external flux.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
Don’t blow fumes into the air or dump poisons into the rivers and oceans just to make more money; and don’t fan overconsumption by buying more and more things you do not need.
Easwaran applies Gita ethics directly to environmental degradation, treating ecological harm as a symptom of spiritual greed and the forgetting of our transcendent nature.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975aside
Money is simply the coinage of our relationship to the community and environment in which we live.
Moore situates money within an ecological-communal frame, treating economic life as an expression of soul’s relationship with its lived environment.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside
the body schema continues to function in a non-conscious way, maintaining balance and enabling movement… in its ordinary, non-conscious way of dealing with its environment.
Gallagher positions the body schema as the pre-personal, non-conscious interface through which the organism continuously negotiates its environment below the threshold of awareness.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside