Interconnection

Interconnection, as it appears across the depth-psychology corpus, is not merely a descriptive term for relatedness but a structural claim about the constitution of mind, self, and reality. The passages gathered here reveal a spectrum of positions ranging from the neurobiological — where synaptic interconnection among differentiated neural circuits is the very substrate of mental function (Schore; Siegel) — to the experiential and contemplative, where participants in meditative practice report presence, interconnection, and love as inseparable phenomenological givens (Siegel, 2020). Jung’s treatment of synchronicity frames interconnection as acausal, a category of meaningful coincidence that exceeds ordinary mechanistic linkage. McGilchrist theorizes a fundamental ontological distinction between architective and connective modes of interaction, arguing that connective, wave-like merging characterizes the right hemisphere’s fluid apprehension of reality. Herman invokes Erikson’s pairing of integrity and trust to argue that the interconnection of these values is the developmental telos of mature personhood. Siegel’s integrative neurobiology positions interpersonal and neural interconnection as co-arising: mind is ‘embodied and relational,’ never merely enskulled. Across these registers, interconnection is not opposed to individuation but is its necessary complement; the tension between differentiation and linkage — between the architective and the connective, between segregation and integration — defines the central organizing problem of both psyche and cosmos.

In the library 15 passages

participants in the Wheel of Awareness workshops report that in the hub, they have three sensations that arise: presence, interconnection, and love… love and interconnection repeatedly arise as an essence of reality in our human experience.

Siegel presents first-person phenomenological evidence, corroborated across cultures, that interconnection is not a cognitive construct but a direct experiential datum at the heart of human consciousness.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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the interconnection of meaningfully coincident factors must necessarily be thought of as acausal.

Jung establishes that the interconnection manifest in synchronistic phenomena operates outside causal law, demanding a fundamentally different ontological category for relatedness.

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

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Connective interactions, by contrast, allow the merging of entities, and are infinitely resolvable — waves being an example — where architectives are not. Connectives are ‘fluid, highly susceptible to change, and do so in a smooth, unstepped motion.’

McGilchrist distinguishes connective from architective physics to argue that fluid, wave-like interconnection — characteristic of the right hemisphere’s mode — represents an irreducible ontological category distinct from discrete, bond-based structure.

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

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Connective interactions, by contrast, allow the merging of entities, and are infinitely resolvable — waves being an example — where architectives are not. Connectives are ‘fluid, highly susceptible to change, and do so in a smooth, unstepped motion.’

This parallel passage reinforces McGilchrist’s connective ontology, grounding the concept of interconnection in physical theory as the complement to fixed architectural binding.

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

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The mind is embodied, not just ‘enskulled.’ And the mind is also relational, not a product created within a body or its brain in isolation… we don’t ‘own’ our minds — that we, our individual ‘selves,’ are interdependent.

Siegel grounds interconnection in a foundational definition of mind as both embodied and relational, arguing that selfhood itself is constitutively interdependent rather than bounded within a single organism.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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Two differentiated individuals can become linked as a part of a resonating whole. This is interpersonal integration… ‘I’ was the forest. The experience went from one of being

Siegel describes the dissolution of bounded selfhood into a resonating whole as the phenomenological pinnacle of interpersonal interconnection, linking neuroscience to direct contemplative experience.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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it is this interconnection that is responsible for nervous system function. Yet before such events can occur, a microvascular system must be created that can deliver and remove

Schore locates the neurobiological substrate of mind in the synaptic interconnection among differentiated neuronal processes, establishing that psychological development depends on the formation of this material substrate.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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the differentiation and linkage of aspects of the connectome. In connectome language, such states might be referred to as revealing the ‘interconnectivity of the connectome.’

Siegel maps the concept of interconnection onto the emerging science of connectomics, showing that metastable brain states depend on the dynamic balance between neural segregation and integration.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson turns to Webster’s dictionary to illuminate the interconnection of integrity and basic trust: ‘Trust… is here defined as the assured reliance on another’s integrity.’

Herman draws on Erikson to argue that integrity and basic trust form an indissoluble developmental interconnection — the severing of which by trauma constitutes a fundamental wound to the self.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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The body and its head-located brain are a complex system of interconnected parts… we have neural networks around both the intestines and the heart, which preceded, in our evolutionary history, the emergence of the extensive networks of interlinked neurons inside the skull.

Siegel extends interconnection beyond cortical networks to include enteric and cardiac neural systems, arguing for a distributed, whole-body model of psychological life.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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We are connected to people and the planet, not separate from these sources of sharing energy and information flow. This energy flow is not ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of being beyond (meta) the physical world.

Siegel naturalizes cosmic-scale interconnection by grounding it in the physics of energy flow, refusing the metaphysical dualism that would treat relatedness to nature as spiritually exotic.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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the individual can itself be seen as a whole… nonetheless not itself separate from a greater whole to which it belongs, and which is reflected in it… individual entities are distinguished, but only within a union which supervenes, and qualifies that distinction.

McGilchrist articulates the right-hemisphere vision of individuality as grounded within, rather than opposed to, a supervening interconnection with the whole — the philosophical foundation of his connective ontology.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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gnosis, as the term signifying ‘knowledge of spiritual mysteries,’ is then translated as seeing beyond eyesight (‘the invisible’) and living with connection, meaning, and purpose.

Siegel aligns the experiential dimension of interconnection with the gnostic tradition, suggesting that awareness of invisible relational bonds constitutes a form of higher knowing central to the Wheel of Awareness practice.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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By joining, they become part of a larger system, a we, that develops its own self-organizational processes and coherent life history… connections within ourselves and with others are the essence of living vital lives.

Siegel frames dyadic and collective interconnection as generative of new self-organizational processes, arguing that vitality arises from integration across inner, interpersonal, and broader relational domains.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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