Falling occupies a remarkably varied conceptual territory across the depth-psychology corpus. Heidegger’s ontological analysis in Being and Time furnishes the most technically rigorous treatment: ‘fallenness’ (Verfallenheit) and the ‘downward plunge’ (Absturz) name Dasein’s constitutive tendency to lose itself in the ‘they-self,’ plunging into groundlessness while remaining concealed from itself by public interpretation. This existential structure underlies much of what psychotherapy encounters as inauthenticity, avoidance, and the tranquillizing comfort of everydayness. Alongside Heidegger, Hillman’s corpus treats falling-apart as an initiatory process—a necessary dissolution that need not destroy, demanding that one ‘begin where we have fallen, flat on our backs.’ Von Franz reads falling in dreams as regression into the mother complex, a descent toward psychic stagnation that threatens individuation. The I Ching tradition (via Huang and Ritsema) transforms falling into a cosmological and ethical category: the Gorge hexagram commands ‘venture and fall,’ insisting that willing engagement with the dangerous abyss is the only adequate response to unavoidable peril. Hollis, reading Rilke, elevates universal falling to a contemplative image of attachment and loss held by a sustaining mystery. Kurtz’s spirituality of imperfection reclaims falling short as the irreducible human condition from which humility and renewal arise. Epstein’s Buddhist-psychotherapeutic frame reframes falling to pieces not as catastrophe but as the condition of wholeness. Across these positions, falling names both a danger and a vocation.
This ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own Being, we call its ‘downward plunge’ [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness.
Heidegger defines falling as Dasein’s constitutive ‘downward plunge’ into groundlessness and inauthenticity, concealed from itself by tranquillizing public interpretation.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
Epstein’s central thesis reframes the experience of falling apart not as psychic catastrophe but as the very condition of wholeness, integrating Buddhist and psychotherapeutic perspectives.
, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, 1998thesis
All of us are falling. See this hand now fall. And now see the others; it is part of all. And still there is one who in his hands gently Holds this falling endlessly.
Through Rilke’s poem, Hollis frames universal falling as the encompassing experience of loss and attachment held within a sustaining mystery that transcends the ego’s need.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
“we must begin where we have fallen, flat on our backs,” … “RP was very much about his process of falling apart.”
Hillman’s work treats falling apart as an initiatory and potentially transformative condition rather than mere failure, demanding that psychological work begin precisely at the point of collapse.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
To be in accord with the time, you are told to: venture and fall! … Action: Venture falling, HSIEN HSIEN: risk falling until a bottom is reached, filling and overcoming the danger of the Gorge.
The I Ching’s Gorge hexagram constitutes falling not as catastrophe but as the ethically required response to unavoidable danger — one must risk descent fully in order to pass through.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
spirituality, as the ancients reminded over and over again, involves a continual falling down and getting back up again. That is why humility—the knowledge of our own imperfections—is so important.
Kurtz locates falling short at the structural center of spiritual life, arguing that the cycle of falling and rising constitutes the very movement of humility and renewal.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis
he was slowly falling into the big split within the earth … he saw fields, as one sees them from an airplane, and then a gray and dirty stagnant pool of water which was like ice, but did not reflect.
Von Franz reads a client’s dream of slow falling as regression into the mother complex, a descent toward psychic stagnation that endangers individuation.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
he was slowly falling into the big split within the earth. First, you will remember, he saw the stars in the heavens below, then an explosion of light … a gray and dirty stagnant pool of water.
This parallel account from the Puer Aeternus lectures reinforces von Franz’s reading of falling as an oneiric descent into the devouring mother complex, threatening psychic death.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
Kan is a pit. It can also be interpreted as falling. Wilhelm translates Kan as Abysmal and Blofeld as Abyss.
The I Ching identifies the gua Kan etymologically and symbolically with falling, locating the concept within a cosmological framework of dangerous but necessary descent.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
Third Six. Falling Away alternates to Keeping Still (52) … One at this place refuses to go along with evil persons and prefers to associate with the wise person at the top place.
The I Ching’s hexagram on ‘Falling Away’ frames strategic disengagement from corrosive forces as a form of moral steadfastness rather than defeat.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down … The contrast between youth and age shows clearly in the shift from ascending to declining … the pull of gravity takes over.
Hillman treats the gravitational sag of aging as the body’s enactment of falling, reframing physical decline as a meaningful downward turn that replaces the upward ambitions of youth.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
she jumped into the well to get the shuttle. She lost her senses; and when she awoke and came to herself again, she was in a lovely meadow where the sun was shining.
Greene’s fairy-tale commentary treats the girl’s fall into the well as an initiatory descent into an underworld that paradoxically opens onto renewal and a transformed reality.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside