Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Human’ functions not as a settled category but as a contested horizon — the site where psyche, body, soul, nature, and culture collide and negotiate their claims. Hillman’s archetypal psychology most radically displaces the human from its privileged position: rather than soul residing within the human being, the human being is set within the field of soul, subordinating anthropocentric psychology to a wider psychic field. Gallagher’s phenomenology recovers the body as the very medium through which human experience is constituted, echoing the Aristotelian conviction that the human soul is an expression of the human body. Snell traces the historical discovery of humanitas through Greek and Roman rhetoric, locating the distinctively human in speech, paideia, and self-reflexive culture. Theological voices — Bulgakov, John of Damascus — negotiate the human through Christology, exploring how divine and human natures coexist without confusion or separation. Tarnas charts the modern wound: the radical subject-object split that defines modernity as the estrangement of the human self from the encompassing world. Taoist and Buddhist sources introduce further tension, contrasting the unstable, conditioning-prone ‘human mind’ with the mind of Tao or with consciousness that transcends the human form across rebirths. Across all these registers, ‘Human’ marks the threshold between finitude and transcendence, embodiment and soul, individual limitation and archetypal depth.
The human being is set within the field of soul; soul is the metaphor that includes the human… A humanistic or personalistic psychology will always fail the full perspective of soul that extends beyond human, personal behavior.
Hillman’s archetypal psychology fundamentally inverts the humanist assumption by placing the human within psyche rather than psyche within the human, making every human act a psychological statement answerable to soul.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
The human being is set within the field of soul; soul is the metaphor that includes the human… This move, which places man within psyche (rather than psyche within man), revisions all human activity whatsoever as psychological.
A near-identical formulation confirming Hillman’s central methodological reversal: the human is not the container but the contained, and all human behavior carries irreducible psychological content.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
nothing about human experience remains untouched by human embodiment… Before you know it, your body makes you human, and sets you on a course in which your human nature is expressed in intentional action and in interaction with others.
Gallagher argues for a radical bodily constitution of the human, claiming that from perception and emotion to language and cultural creation, embodiment is the necessary ground of all human experience.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
what sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world.
Tarnas identifies the defining feature of modern human self-understanding as the subject-object split that severs the human from the world, contrasting it with the porous boundaries of primal world views.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
disenchantment enhances the human being’s capacity to view the natural world as primarily a context to be shaped and a resource to be exploited for human benefit.
Tarnas shows how the disenchantment of the modern world view simultaneously expands human autonomy and reduces the natural world to an object of instrumental control, reshaping the conditions of human existence.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
With the mind of Tao buried away and the human mentality taking charge of affairs, the influence of habit becomes one’s nature… Without the human mind, you don’t see the mind of Tao; without the mind of Tao, you cannot know the human mind.
Taoist alchemy presents the human mind as the unstable, habituated aspect of consciousness whose very recognition is the necessary passage to recovering the transcendent mind of Tao.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
The mind of Tao is in this text associated with ‘celestial’ yang, in contrast to the ‘human mind,’ or human mentality, associated with ‘mundane’ yin. The human mentality is regarded as lacking stability and being subject to acquired conditioning.
Liu I-ming’s commentary systematically contrasts the conditioned, unstable human mentality with the celestial mind of Tao, framing human consciousness as an obstacle to be transcended through inner cultivation.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
The mind of Tao is in this text associated with ‘celestial’ yang, in contrast to the ‘human mind,’ or human mentality, associated with ‘mundane’ yin. The human mentality is regarded as lacking stability and being subject to acquired conditioning.
The Taoist I Ching establishes a structural opposition between the stable, luminous mind of Tao and the acquired, conditioning-prone human mind, locating the human as the mundane pole of a vertical cosmological axis.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
the Church, in the Fourth General Council at Chalcedon, produce the fundamental dogma of the God-human and Divine-humanity… there is in Christ but one person, existing in two natures, the divine and the human.
Bulgakov’s sophiology situates the human within the Chalcedonian paradox of the God-human, where the human nature of Christ must be neither absorbed into the divine nor severed from it.
, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937supporting
Isocrates… tries to decide wherein man differs from the animals… and he seizes in the main upon the power of speech and persuasion, to which the cities, the laws, the arts and skills, in short, all aspects of culture owe their origin.
Snell traces the Greek discovery of humanitas to Isocrates’ definition of the human through logos and paideia, establishing speech and culture as the differentia of the human against the animal.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
The Isocratean and Ciceronian view of humanity that man is a being capable of speech could not but capture the hearts of the Romans… from Cicero through Petrarch and Erasmus to the age of the baroque, all European culture has borne the impress of this humanitas.
Snell identifies the rhetorical-humanist tradition as the vector through which a speech-centered conception of the human passed from Greek antiquity into the whole of European culture.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
In supporting his self-assurance upon so fragile a foundation as the human being, Isocrates was encouraged to do so by the society in which he lived; it gave him a clear and dynamic concept of the potentialities of human existence.
Snell reads Isocrates’ humanism as historically situated and socially contingent, grounding his confidence in human perfectibility in the living cultural example of cultivated Athenian life.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
perfection can be found only beyond the human, at least beyond the individual self, and… an essential part of being human consists in the self’s cooperation in, seeking of, or at least openness to that fulfillment.
Kurtz’s religious-psychological analysis locates the human at the intersection of limitation and transcendence, where acknowledgment of human finitude opens the self to fulfillment from beyond itself.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010supporting
even as the constituents of the physical man thus transmigrate throughout all organic and inorganic kingdoms and the mind remains unchangedly human during the brief cycle of one life-time, so, normally, it likewise remains human during the greater evolutionary cycle.
The esoteric Buddhist reading in the Bardo Thödol frames human consciousness as a relatively stable stream that persists through transmigration until Nirvanic dissolution, situating the human within a vast evolutionary cosmology.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
not in a merely human way did He do human things: for He was not only man, but also God… nor yet did He energise as God, strictly after the manner of God, for He was not only God, but also man.
John of Damascus articulates the paradox of Christ’s two-nature existence by showing that neither human nor divine energy operates in pure isolation, each qualifying and interpenetrating the other.
, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021supporting
Speech harbours the seeds of the structure of the human intellect; the growth of human language, and finally the effort of philosophical thinking are necessary to allow that structure to unfold itself fully.
Snell argues that the structure of the human intellect is latent in language itself, requiring the historical development of speech and philosophy to actualize its full form.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Epimetheus, not being altogether wise, didn’t notice that he had used up all the capabilities on the non-rational creatures; so last of all he was left with the human kind quite unprovided for.
Nussbaum reads the Protagoras myth to argue that what makes the human kind distinctively human is precisely the absence of fixed natural endowments, leaving the human constituted through the arts and culture rather than given nature.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Every human being has complexes, and these are not in themselves the cause of psychological illness — only under certain circumstances. They are part of the normal psychic makeup.
Von Franz extends Jung’s revision of pathology by normalizing the complex-structure of the psyche, locating archetypes as the universal inborn complexes that constitute the psychological dimension of being human.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
for most of human history, despite a large brain and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactorily without language as we understand it.
McGilchrist uses paleontological evidence to unsettle the identification of the human with language, arguing that for most of human evolutionary history sophisticated communication preceded symbolic language.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Unlike Isocrates, Menander does not relate the dignity of his men to their paideia, their ability to speak, which distinguishes them from the animals; he is much too refined to deem it necessary to make an exhibit of his education.
Snell contrasts Menander’s more refined, less rhetorical humanism with the Isocratean programme, noting a shift in Greek culture toward a subtler, less speech-centred understanding of human dignity.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside
We simply cannot take our place within any community of human speakers without ordering our sensations in a common manner, and without thereby limiting our spontaneous access to the wild world that surrounds us.
Abram argues that human community and language, while constitutive of shared experience, simultaneously enact a perceptual boundary between the human speaker and the wider sensuous world.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside
It is… not so much man, as an individual, who is in the image of God, but man, as summing up the unity of mankind, as Adam.
The Orthodox theological tradition represented here relocates the image of God from the individual human to the collective unity of humanity summed up in Adam, grounding ecclesial union in this anthropological vision.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentaside