Invisibility in the depth-psychology corpus is not a single concept but a constellation of interrelated meanings that range across ontology, epistemology, and practical psychology. At its most fundamental, the term marks the boundary between what consciousness can apprehend and what exceeds or eludes it — yet the corpus refuses any simple equation of the invisible with the merely unconscious. Hillman is the most sustained voice on the subject, arguing that the invisible is not simply below or behind the visible but may surpass it: the daimon, the ancestor, the angel, the acorn are invisible not because they are repressed but because our doctrinal habits of perception have blinded us to them. Von Franz reads the fairy-tale motif of the cloak of invisibility as signifying the elimination of egocentricity in pursuit of a transpersonal goal. Corbin, drawing on Sufi cosmology, insists that the invisible must be stratified: there is both an infraconsciousness below and a supraconsciousness above the plane of ordinary awareness, and the invisibility of an object can signal either a lack of light or an excess of light the eye cannot bear. Giegerich approaches invisibility as an intrinsic quality of the soul itself — invisible, intangible, and, under positivistic knowing, unspeakable. Vernant maps the problem onto Greek image-making: how to inscribe absence in presence, to render visible those powers that belong to the other world. The term thus marks a structural tension between phenomenal appearance and transphenomenal depth that runs across nearly all depth-psychological inquiry.
They may not be invisible at all, but only seem so because declared so by our doctrinal blinding. Is it their nature or our vision that defines them as invisible?
Hillman argues that invisibility is not an intrinsic property of psychic or divine powers but a function of the perceiving consciousness’s theoretical commitments, which can be revised.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
Hillman proposes that perceiving invisible factors within visible symptoms requires a cultivated counter-sight — a deliberate blinding of the literal gaze to allow a mythic one.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
the things which make one invisible have to do with a similar fact. That is, in order to get through certain situations, one has to eliminate all egocentricity.
Von Franz reads fairy-tale invisibility as a symbol for the necessary subordination of ego to transpersonal purpose, whereby the self disappears from the social field in service of a greater goal.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis
The soul and its life is invisible, intangible, and, as long as there is a positive (positivistic) conception of knowing, also unknowable, therefore unspeakable.
Giegerich identifies invisibility as a structural property of soul itself, rendering psychology fundamentally incompatible with positivistic epistemology.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
In the physical order, the invisibility of an object may be due to a lack of light; i
Corbin, within his Sufi-inflected framework, differentiates invisibility as a stratified phenomenon: it may signal deficiency below consciousness or excess above it, requiring a vertical rather than flat topography of the psyche.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis
how is it possible to give visual presence to those powers that come from the invisible and do not belong to the space here below on earth? The task is to make the invisible visible.
Vernant identifies the paradoxical aspiration of Greek image-making as the inscription of absence within presence — a cultural labor of rendering transphenomenal powers phenomenally available.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
“Authentic tidings of invisible things!” adds William James… where he quotes Wordsworth among passages… as witnesses to the presence of the invisible.
Hillman marshals the literary tradition — Wordsworth, James, Emerson — to establish a counter-epistemology in which a softened, mythic intellect receives ‘authentic tidings’ from the invisible world.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The invisible shows no facts. The stories that myths tell cannot be documented in histories; the gods and goddesses, and the heroes and their enemies, are told about in stories inscribed in clay.
Hillman argues that the invisible domain is constitutively resistant to factual documentation, accessible only through mythic narrative rather than historical or empirical evidence.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
The essential reality of one’s image is more like an angel or a daimon, not empirical, not measurable, not visible, only imaginable.
Hillman contends that the character’s essential image — its daimonic core — is structurally invisible, apprehensible only through imagination rather than empirical observation.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
Reserves and shadows are not invisible. They show in reticence, in circumlocutions and euphemisms, in shaded, averted eyes, in slips, in hesitancies of gestures.
Hillman argues against a simple visible/invisible binary: what appears hidden is always already displaying itself through symptomatic surface phenomena available to sufficiently skilled perception.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
The light is in itself invisible, a darkness to our intellect… God is everywhere visible and nowhere visible.
McGilchrist, following Cusanus, treats divine invisibility as an epistemological paradox — the ground of all seeing is itself unseen, functioning as the condition of visibility rather than its object.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
She had no back, or her back was invisible. And he, drawn too deeply into the forest, unable to find familiar markings or get back to a clearing, lost his bearings and froze.
Through the Norse figure of Huldra, Hillman dramatizes the mortal danger of pursuing the invisible — the soul-image’s absence of a back signifies the abyss that opens when one attempts to seize the invisible directly.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
we are searching for certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible the open visibility of the land around us.
Abram, following Merleau-Ponty, situates invisibility not as metaphysical absence but as a structural feature of perceptual experience — hidden dimensions whose concealment constitutes the condition for visible presence.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
Both possessed the siddhi of transformation into a rainbow and of invisibility.
In Tibetan tantric tradition, invisibility appears as a siddhi — a yogic attainment of power over phenomenal appearance — situating the term within a broader schema of mastery over visible form.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
cloak, of invisibility, 33, 38
This index entry confirms that von Franz treats the cloak of invisibility as a recurring symbolic motif in fairy tales warranting dedicated analysis.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997aside
associates its strange invisibility with the more familiar invisibility of the soul.
Seaford notes that Presocratic philosophy maps the invisibility of monetary value onto the already familiar invisibility of the soul, suggesting a mutual reinforcement of metaphysical and economic abstraction.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside
Good feelings may evoke shame, the urge to hide, deflection of positive feedback, withdrawal into invisibility, and isolation.
Ogden employs invisibility as a clinical descriptor for a trauma-linked defensive withdrawal from positive affect and social recognition.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside