Instinctual Nature

Instinctual nature occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as the foundation of psychic life, the locus of pathology when suppressed, and the source of archetypal patterning. Jung articulates the governing tension most precisely: the very achievement of civilization — the supremacy of logos and conscious will — necessarily severs the individual from instinctual nature, producing a split between conscious and unconscious that becomes pathological when the instinctual side can no longer be neglected. This separation is not merely personal but collectively constitutive of the modern neurosis. Hillman, working from a mythopoeic angle, grounds instinctual nature in the figure of Pan: when Pan is alive, nature and instinct are personified and animated; when suppressed, both outer ecology and inner psyche suffer comparable degradation. Estés approaches the same territory through the imagery of the wild woman, locating injury to basic instinct as a primary wound of feminine psychology. Levine, from a somatic-neuroscientific perspective, relocates instinctual nature in the reptilian brain and argues that cortical override of instinctual responses is the mechanism of trauma. Von Franz introduces a corrective note, warning that instinct is not uniformly adaptive. What unites these voices is the shared conviction that instinctual nature cannot be dismissed as mere biology: it carries archetypal weight, ecological consequence, and pathological cost when denied.

In the library 20 passages

Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.

Jung identifies estrangement from instinctual nature as the generative cause of the modern psychic split, rendering the suppression of instinct structurally pathogenic for civilization as a whole.

Jung, C.G., The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

These tales tell us that instinctual nature itself desires figures and fantasies to make it aware of itself. No new principle is introduced, no corrective of compulsion from above or outside the configuration of Pan himself.

Hillman argues that instinctual nature is not blind compulsion but carries an intrinsic longing toward self-awareness through image and soul, a claim that revises purely biological readings of instinct.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil merge.

Hillman demonstrates that the cultural suppression of instinctual nature produces a demonization of Pan, collapsing the distinction between natural vitality and evil.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If Pan is suppressed there, nature and instinct will go astray no matter how we strain on rational levels to set things right. In order to restore, conserve, and promote nature ‘out there,’ nature ‘in here’ must also be restored.

Hillman contends that ecological restoration is inseparable from the psychological restoration of instinctual nature in the inner world, linking outer and inner ecology through the figure of Pan.

Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In humans, trauma occurs as a result of the initiation of an instinctual cycle that is not allowed to finish. When the neo-cortex overrides the instinctual responses that would initiate the completion of this cycle, we will be traumatized.

Levine grounds trauma etiology directly in the cortical suppression of instinctual nature, proposing that incomplete instinctual discharge — not the event itself — produces traumatic fixation.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Instinct is a difficult thing to define, for its configurations are invisible, and though we sense they have been part of human nature since the beginning of time, no one knows.

Estés frames instinctual nature as an irreducible but elusive substrate of the psyche, and identifies injury to basic instinct as the central consequence of capture and cultural famine for women.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This denial of the instinctual life is also shared by strange bedfellows, many modern behavioral scientists. The rejection of our animal nature is understandable as we have become (overly) socialized.

Levine diagnoses the disavowal of instinctual nature as a shared pathology of religious moralism and behaviorist science alike, both enforcing a split between reason and the animal body.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

How is it possible for man’s instinctual nature to drive him into separation from his kind, into absolute isolation from humanity, into an aloofness from the herd upheld by loathing?

Jung complicates the conventional view of instinct as socially unifying by showing that instinctual nature encompasses the will to power and self-preservation as well as species-preservation drives.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away a man’s gods, but only to give him others in return.

Jung argues that the religious impulse is itself an expression of instinctual nature, such that its suppression does not eliminate it but merely displaces it onto secular objects charged with numinous energy.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Instinctual patterns are not only positive. If a lemming could ask itself what it was doing and reflect that it did not want to drown, and could go back.

Von Franz introduces a necessary corrective to idealizations of instinctual nature, demonstrating that instincts are not uniformly adaptive and that ego-reflection can serve as a check on maladaptive instinctual drives.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The yucca moth must carry within it an image, as it were, of the situation that ‘triggers off’ its instinct. This image enables it to ‘recognise’ the yucca flower and its structure.

Samuels illustrates Jung’s claim that instinctual nature is inseparable from an inner image that triggers the behavioral response, establishing the conceptual bridge between instinct and archetype.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Active imagination intends to do: submerge modern man again into nature for this is what he has lost — the archaic, instinctual response. And this response of nature appears as the archetypal image.

Hillman reads active imagination as a deliberate reimmersion in instinctual nature, confirming that archetypal images are the form through which instinctual nature becomes psychically visible.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Problems belonging to the masculine, logos side of life will give way to the basic questions of instinctual nature, which belong to the realm of Eros, the feminine principle.

Nichols maps instinctual nature onto the Eros-feminine polarity in Jungian psychology, positioning it as the domain that reasserts itself once the heroic-logos phase of development is completed.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The combination of raw instinct and artful shaping is also found in human mating rituals… the steps lose their vitality and credibility… Seen simply as formalized movements, devoid of their primal sexual rooting.

Levine illustrates how instinctual nature provides the energetic substrate of cultural form, arguing that vitality in human expression depends upon rootedness in primal instinctual patterning.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The conflict between ethics and sex today is not just a collision between instinctuality and morality, but a struggle to give an instinct its rightful place in our lives.

Jung reframes the ethics-instinct conflict not as repression of something dangerous but as the challenge of according instinctual nature its legitimate place within the moral economy of modern life.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The question of human instinct is a far from simple matter, we shall probably not be wrong in assuming that the learning capacity.

Jung acknowledges the irreducible complexity of instinctual theory, noting that the number, boundary, and conceptual definition of instincts remain genuinely contested within analytical psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Undiscovered Self, 1957aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

His training directs his medical interest beyond the conscious personality to the world of unconscious instinct dominated by sexuality and the power drive.

Jung describes the analyst’s task as attending to the unconscious instinctual world beneath the persona, aligning clinical practice with a foundational acknowledgment of instinctual nature’s determining role.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Instincts are usually taken to mean deeply embedded drives that do not have to be learnt, are not pursued as conscious aims, and find their fulfilment directly in their expression.

McGilchrist offers a working definition of instinct as unconscious, non-teleological, and self-fulfilling, providing a philosophical-neuroscientific frame that contextualizes depth-psychological usage of the term.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms