Flow occupies a remarkably capacious position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ontological description, psychological metaphor, and normative ideal. Its most philosophically ambitious deployment comes from Iain McGilchrist, who draws on James, Bergson, Heraclitus, Schelling, and von Bertalanffy to argue that flow is not merely a feature of mind but the fundamental structure of reality itself — biological organisms are ‘stable metabolic flows of energy and matter,’ consciousness is a stream, and even matter at the subatomic level is better described as flow than as substance. This ontological reading has direct hemispheric implications: the right hemisphere apprehends flux, continuity, and becoming, while the left hemisphere freezes flow into static representation. A complementary and important tension runs through the corpus: resistance to flow is not its negation but its creative condition, generating complexity, beauty, and enduring form. Daniel Siegel deploys flow in a systems-theoretic register, identifying the FACES flow — flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, stable — as the hallmark of psychological integration, with chaos and rigidity as its twin pathological banks. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Edinger treat flow as the natural state of creative and psychic life, susceptible to blockage by destructive internal forces (a negative animus, a poisoning factory on the river). The Heraclitean panta rhei runs as a subterranean current beneath nearly all of these treatments, giving flow its ancient philosophical warrant.
Whatever else organisms may be, what cannot be denied at an ontological level is that they are stable metabolic flows of energy and matter.
McGilchrist establishes flow as the defining ontological characteristic of living organisms, arguing that biological structure is not a static thing but a persisting pattern within a continuous metabolic flux.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
REALITY FLOWS, CONSCIOUSNESS FLOWS James saw the entire universe as a seamless flow: ‘its members interdigitate with their next neighbours in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere.’
McGilchrist, via William James, proposes that flow is co-extensive with both cosmic reality and consciousness, with the ‘stream of consciousness’ metaphor reflecting a deep structural identity between mind and universe.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
James’s canonical formulation of the stream of consciousness, cited by McGilchrist as evidence that the structure of awareness and the structure of reality share the property of continuous, unjoinable flow.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real. This change is indivisible, it is even substantial.
Drawing on Bergson, McGilchrist argues that flow and flux — not fixed states — constitute genuine reality, and that the left hemisphere’s atomisation of time and space misrepresents this fundamental dynamism.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real. This change is indivisible, it is even substantial.
Parallel passage reinforcing the Bergsonian claim that flow is ontologically substantial and that stasis is a derivative, secondary abstraction imposed upon the real.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
there needs to be a degree of architective resistance within the connective flow. In this the right hemisphere and left hemisphere are, as ever, complementary.
McGilchrist argues that resistance to flow is not merely obstructive but creatively necessary, generating enduring form and conceptual thought, and that this resistance is the proper contribution of the left hemisphere to a fundamentally flowing reality.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
there needs to be a degree of architective resistance within the connective flow. In this the right hemisphere and left hemisphere are, as ever, complementary.
Parallel passage: the complementary interplay of flow and resistance maps onto the right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere division, with resistance — not negation of flow — enabling structures to arise and persist.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
resistance to flow and just how creative it is in its very nature. No obstruction in the path of a flow is required for it to become turbulent; any inequality in speed or viscosity within the flow itself can lead to turbulence.
McGilchrist demonstrates that turbulence and creative complexity emerge from within flow itself, not only from external obstruction, making resistance an intrinsic and generative property of dynamic systems.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
resistance to flow and just how creative it is in its very nature. No obstruction in the path of a flow is required for it to become turbulent; any inequality in speed or viscosity within the flow itself can lead to turbulence.
Parallel passage developing the same argument that creative complexity is an internal product of flow’s own differential dynamics.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
This central flow of the river has the quality of harmony, the harmonious flow of an integrative system. Outside of that harmonious integrative movement, the characteristics diverge sharply from those of the FACES flow: One bank outside of this River of Integration is chaos, and the other is the bank of rigidity.
Siegel maps flow onto psychological integration, proposing a River of Integration whose FACES flow — flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, stable — defines mental health, flanked by the pathological extremes of chaos and rigidity.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
to enter that more harmonious FACES flow we discussed in the Introduction of being flexible, adaptive, coherent (resilient over time), energized, and stable — we need to differentiate and link the present moment’s flow of energy.
Siegel specifies that achieving the integrative FACES flow requires active differentiation and linkage of energy streams, grounding flow in the neurobiological mechanics of self-organization.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
this embodied flow takes various forms and oscillates in various frequencies, sweeping into a state in the moment in a varied set of bodily regions. At the same time, this flow can also be seen to involve the sharing of energy patterns from outside the body.
Siegel extends his concept of flow beyond the skin boundary, arguing that energy and information flow is both embodied and relational, connecting individual to environment and other persons.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
Heraclitus was also well known for his doctrine of flux, panta rhei, which means ‘all things flow’; everything is in a state of becoming; nothing is static and fixed.
Edinger frames the Heraclitean panta rhei as the ancient psychological foundation for understanding flow: all becoming, nothing static, with direct implications for distinguishing ego-derived from Self-derived standpoints.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
‘all things flow’. Stability in the experiential world is always stability provided by a form through which things continue to flow: ‘As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them … One cannot step twice into the same river’.
McGilchrist reads Heraclitus’s panta rhei as a formulation of dynamic equilibrium: stable identity is always a form persisting through continuous flow, not a static fixity, directly anticipating his broader thesis about hemispheric asymmetry.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
in biology there is no rigid organic form as a bearer of the processes of life; rather there is a flow of processes, manifesting itself in apparently persistent forms.
Von Bertalanffy’s formulation, cited by McGilchrist, argues that biological form is an appearance generated by an underlying flow of processes, dissolving the substance/process dichotomy at the level of living matter.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Be wild; that is how to clear the river. In its original form, the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it.
Estés treats flow as the normative, wild condition of creative life, arguing that its obstruction is always a human imposition — through censorship, inhibition, or cultural constraint — and that restoration requires a release into uncensored becoming.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
This ‘something’ — usually somehow slitty-eyed, misunderstood, or misappropriated — clots the river, clogs thinking, jams the pen and the brush, locks the joints for an interminable period of time.
Estés uses flow and its blockage as the central metaphor for creative vitality, diagnosing a damaged or destructive animus as the psychic agent that interrupts the natural creative river.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
when understood as a metaphor for the deterioration of the creative flow, it causes everyone — women and men alike — to shiver with knowing aplenty.
Estés frames narrative as a mirror for the weakening of creative flow, positioning the story’s destructive arc as a diagnostic tool for recognizing and countering the dwindling of a woman’s creative process.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
Schelling clearly intuited that water was a potent metaphor or symbol for the nature of reality, as indeed it is in Oriental philosophy, especially Taoism, which constantly recurs to the image of flowing water.
McGilchrist situates Schelling’s and Taoism’s recourse to flowing water as converging philosophical traditions that recognize flow as the most adequate symbol for the dynamic, self-disturbing equilibrium of reality.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Schelling clearly intuited that water was a potent metaphor or symbol for the nature of reality, as indeed it is in Oriental philosophy, especially Taoism, which constantly recurs to the image of flowing water.
Parallel passage: the cross-cultural convergence on flowing water as metaphor for reality supports McGilchrist’s broader claim that flow is the most philosophically adequate model of dynamic, relational existence.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
concentrate your mind on your knowledge when it is about to flow out. When it has flown out, then nothing will come, nothing will happen, you won’t achieve anything. Just at that very point when it flows out, put your awareness there.
The Vijñāna Bhairava frames meditative awareness as the precise apprehension of the liminal moment before knowledge or desire flows outward — a practice that depends entirely on the dynamic of flow for its soteriological efficacy.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
there is a flow of identical cognitions, each one succeeding the other, and thus the Buddhist concept of concentration should be understood as keeping this mental flow of point moments sequencing on the same thought.
Bryant documents the classical Indian philosophical debate over whether the mind is an enduring concentrating agent or a flow of momentary cognitions, revealing how the concept of mental flow structures divergent theories of meditation and selfhood.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
fish are able to remain motionless in a flowing stream, without apparently consuming energy: they utilise the effect of vortices in the stream, often created behind rocks or stones, acting on their streamlined bodies.
McGilchrist uses the fluid dynamics of fish movement as an empirical illustration of how living organisms navigate and exploit turbulent flow, concretizing the philosophical argument about creative resistance and vortex formation.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
both share a subjective sense of decreased self-salience and an increased sense of connectedness with other people and one’s environment.
Yaden implicitly contextualizes flow-adjacent self-transcendent states by emphasizing decreased self-salience and increased environmental connectedness as their shared family resemblance, positioning flow within the broader taxonomy of self-transcendence.
, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017aside