Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Idealism’ operates on at least three distinct registers that intersect without fully coinciding. First, there is the epistemological-philosophical sense inherited from Kant and elaborated by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: the tradition that grounds reality in consciousness, the transcendental ego, or spirit, and that James surveys with critical precision in the Varieties of Religious Experience, noting how Kant’s impersonal Bewusstsein überhaupt was converted by his successors into an infinite concrete self-consciousness. Second, there is the psychological-moral sense — idealism as the tendency to project onto persons or social arrangements an impossibly perfect standard. Jung is especially alert to this register, warning in The Undiscovered Self that preached idealisms ‘sound rather hollow’ and that ‘high idealism plays too prominent a role’ in humiliating human relationships. Hillman develops a related tension by tracing idealism through the puer-senex polarity: the puer’s originary idealism may degenerate through enantiodromia into cynicism unless held in dialectical relation with senex order. Third, Giegerich radicalises the critique by arguing that on the plane of rigorous psychological logic, ‘the difference between materialism and idealism has become more or less meaningless,’ since both remain positivistic orientations of the same logical type. Plato’s Meno stands as the locus classicus for the philosophical tradition’s ambivalent debt to idealism — elevating in effect yet always straining against the conditions of embodied experience.
The basis of modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception… Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories.
James traces the philosophical genealogy of modern idealism from Kant’s Transcendental Ego through its conversion by post-Kantian successors into a world-soul, and interrogates whether this tradition can supply faith with a firmer warrant than theology.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
The difference between materialism and idealism has become more or less meaningless. Both can be equally positivistic, and logically speaking, materialism is just as ‘idealistic’ as idealism itself.
Giegerich argues that on the plane of rigorous psychological logic, the classical opposition between materialism and idealism collapses, both remaining trapped in a positivistic relationship to their object rather than attending to the soul’s own logical movement.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
This is the spirit of idealism, which in the history of philosophy has had many names and taken many forms… It has often been charged with inconsistency and fancifulness, and yet has had an elevating effect on human nature.
The Meno’s introduction situates idealism as a perennial philosophical orientation — repeatedly banished and returning — that elevates human nature yet cannot sustain itself apart from experiential grounding.
, Meno, -385thesis
most of the idealisms that are preached and paraded before us sound rather hollow and become acceptable only when their opposite is openly admitted to.
Jung diagnoses preached idealism as psychologically hollow unless counterbalanced by conscious acknowledgment of its shadow, arguing that untempered idealism degenerates into bluff and becomes an instrument of suppression.
, The Undiscovered Self, 1957thesis
This humiliation may happen only too easily when high idealism plays too prominent a role.
Jung warns that excessive idealism in human relationships produces humiliation rather than connection, contrasting it with the imperfection and mutual vulnerability that genuine relatedness actually requires.
, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis
The eros and idealism of the beginning succumb to success and power… the greatest damage is done to meaning, distorted from idealism into cynicism.
Hillman charts the puer’s originary idealism as a developmental and archetypal energy that, when not integrated with senex order, undergoes enantiodromia into cynicism — the negative senex’s characteristic distortion of meaning.
, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967thesis
The tough-minded indeed have their empiricistic religion, just as the tender-minded have an idealistic one.
Jung maps James’s typological distinction between tough- and tender-minded onto two symmetrical forms of quasi-religious orientation — empiricism and idealism — arguing both represent absolute attitudinal commitments rather than neutral epistemological positions.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
They are motivated by idealism. They want to acquire precisely what the institutions they have come to offer, wisdom and righteousness. But their idealism is not welcomed with open arms. It is offended, frustrated.
Giegerich uses the threshold encounter as a phenomenological illustration that noble idealistic motivation is insufficient for genuine psychological initiation, which instead demands that idealism be submitted to a disciplinary frustration.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The spark extinguished by this ‘heroic overcoming’ leaves behind sad regrets, bitterness and cynicism, the very emotions of the negative senex.
Hillman argues that suppressing the puer archetype through premature ‘heroic overcoming’ destroys not only its idealism but converts it into the cynicism and bitterness characteristic of the pathological senex.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
not merely mounting, as he must and should, above every fixed and limited reality to absolute possibility: which is to idealize, but even transcending possibility itself: which is to fantasize.
Jung, reading Schiller, distinguishes the legitimate move of idealizing — ascending from finite reality to absolute possibility — from the pathological excess of fantasizing, which abandons reality altogether for unbounded subjective freedom.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
Fichte’s view of the mind in its primal act of knowing, any entity or condition which is external to and independent of the mind’s own constitution and activity… is an insupportable limitation which must be metaphysically eliminated.
Abrams situates Fichtean idealism as the epistemological equivalent of political revolution, in which the absolute ego’s self-positing act abolishes any external Ding an sich as a constraint upon essential human freedom.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the first man who raised a question about the being of God broke through the bounds, convulsed mankind in his deepest foundations, and set him into a conflict with himself which has not yet been settled.
Abrams traces Fichte’s speculative idealism to a mythologised moment of philosophical ‘fall,’ where the turn to reflective self-consciousness disrupts original innocence and inaugurates a circuitous journey toward redemptive reintegration.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
ideal(s)… idealism, 88, 205
Harding’s index entry signals that idealism is treated in the context of ideals, identification, and illusion within analytical psychology’s account of women’s psychological development, though no discursive elaboration is available in this passage.
, the way of all women, 1970aside