Hierarchy, as encountered across the depth-psychology corpus, operates on at least three distinct registers that seldom collapse into one another: the neurophysiological, the socio-ritual, and the cosmological. In the polyvagal literature — chiefly Dana and Porges — hierarchy names the phylogenetically ordered sequence of autonomic circuits (dorsal vagal, sympathetic, ventral vagal) that govern self-regulation and social engagement. This evolutionary hierarchy is not a static rank but a dynamic ladder traversed moment to moment; befriending it becomes a therapeutic act. Turner’s ritual-process work inverts the sociological valence: structural hierarchy is precisely what communitas dissolves and then reconstitutes, purified, at the year’s turning. Neumann, drawing on Jungian archetypal theory, locates hierarchy in the totem’s formative authority over collective life — hierarchy as the social expression of an archetype. The Stoic and Aristotelian background surveyed by Inwood positions hierarchy within a scala naturae in which higher powers entail lower ones, and deliberate human action stands at the apex. Jung and Kerényi add the Olympian register: the divine hierarchy of Homer fixes each god’s relations, yet the childhood of the gods — and figures like Hermes — persist outside it, marking a more archaic, fluid stratum. Van der Hart’s trauma theory contributes a clinical hierarchy of action tendencies, where traumatization is understood as fixation at unduly primitive levels. Across these registers, hierarchy is less a rigid taxonomy than a living, contested structure whose disruption — through ritual, neurological dysregulation, or trauma — simultaneously threatens and regenerates meaning.
The hierarchy begins with the most simple and automatic actions that commonly emerge from one action system. It ends with the most difficult and creative ones that integrate many action systems.
Van der Hart defines a hierarchy of action tendencies in which traumatization constitutes pathological fixation at lower levels, making ascent through the hierarchy the measure of therapeutic recovery.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
structure, scoured and purified by communitas, is displayed white and shining again to begin a new cycle of structural time.
Turner argues that social hierarchy is not abolished by communitas but cyclically dissolved and renewed through it, the Ashanti new-year rite serving as his paradigm case.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
As you engage in the process of designing hierarchies, you are engaging in an act of befriending. STEPS Draw a vertical line, divide it in thirds, and mark the three states (ventral, sympathetic, dorsal…)
Dana operationalizes the autonomic hierarchy as a visualizable vertical continuum whose conscious mapping is itself a therapeutic act of befriending the nervous system.
, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection A Guide for, 2018thesis
the various kinds of movement can be correlated with various levels of the hierarchy of nature. The ability to set oneself in motion in pursuit of something… is only present when the animal in question has the powers of perception and local motion.
Inwood shows that Aristotelian-Stoic philosophy grounds ethical hierarchy in a scala naturae where each ascending level of self-movement presupposes all powers below it.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
The state of genuinely mythological fluidity… is only possible outside the Olympian hierarchy. The childhood of the gods is outside the hierarchy altogether.
Jung and Kerényi identify the Olympian hierarchy as a Homeric systematization that suppresses an older, more fluid mythological stratum in which gods like Hermes retain archaic, pre-hierarchical character.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis
the social hierarchy established by the totem… is the formative principle of all primitive life, since all conduct, rites, and festivals are determined by it.
Neumann reads totemism as the projection of group wholeness onto an archetype, making social hierarchy the institutional expression of an archetypal formative principle.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
hierarchy autonomic see autonomic hierarchy autonomic nervous system through lens of, 4 befriending, 51–53, 208–9… evolutionary, 10–15
Dana’s index entry consolidates the book’s central conceptual architecture, equating the autonomic hierarchy with an evolutionary sequence that the therapeutic work proceeds to befriend.
, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection A Guide for, 2018supporting
autonomic hierarchy, 22–28… earliest roots of, 22–24 protected by movement, 24–26
Dana’s index entry locates the autonomic hierarchy at the structural center of polyvagal therapy, tracing its phylogenetic roots and its clinical management through movement and co-regulation.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting
adaptive response patterns, 17–34 autonomic hierarchy in, 22–28. see also autonomic hierarchy homeostasis, 31
Dana situates the autonomic hierarchy as the organizing principle of adaptive response patterns, linking it directly to homeostasis and the vagal brake.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting
adaptive response patterns, 17-34 autonomic hierarchy in, 22-28. see also autonomic hierarchy homeostasis, 31 introduction, 17-22 vagal brake, 28-31
Porges frames the autonomic hierarchy as the foundational organizing structure of polyvagal theory’s account of adaptive survival responses and emotional regulation.
, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting
arousal increases are triggered up this limbic neuraxis that ultimately affect the highest hierarchical levels of cortical information processing and response systems.
Schore employs a neurobiological hierarchy of cortical and subcortical systems to explain how affect amplification propagates upward from visceroendocrine circuits to the highest levels of cortical processing.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
the grades of priests (distinguished by particular styles of liturgical vestments) conformed to the status of their scriptures in the hierarchy… the codifiers also relegated levees to the same tiers in the hierarchy as the scriptures and ordinations.
Kohn documents how Daoist ordination systems constructed an explicit ritual hierarchy in which priestly rank, scriptural status, and liturgical investiture were isomorphic tiers of sacred order.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000supporting
the chiefs, the priests; the people, the herds; the fields, the products of the earth; three groups of two words or, one might say, three successive dvandva.
Benveniste reconstructs the hierarchical triadic structure of Indo-European social organization through Umbrian liturgical formulae, revealing chiefs/priests, people/animals, and land/produce as the foundational ranked categories.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside
What dem- and weik- once signified in the Indo-European organization, namely the divisions at different levels of society, are in languages of the historical period designated by new terms.
Benveniste traces how Indo-European hierarchical social divisions were lexically reconstituted as institutions evolved, demonstrating that terminological change indexes transformations in the lived hierarchy of kin and civic groupings.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside