Landscape in the depth-psychology corpus is no simple scenic backdrop; it functions across at least four distinct registers, each illuminating a different facet of psyche’s relationship to world. First, landscape serves as visionary correlate: Huxley documents its recurrence as a stable feature of altered states, arguing that certain natural representations are intrinsically vision-inducing, while von Franz reads dream landscapes as symbolic terrain through which unconscious complexes—stagnant water, barren fields—declare themselves. Second, landscape operates as phenomenological structure: Merleau-Ponty insists that the shared landscape is not numerically identical between perceivers yet is nonetheless intersubjectively inhabited, making it a locus where perception, embodiment, and intersubjectivity converge. Third, landscape becomes metaphor for selfhood: Brazier’s direct formulation—‘a person is like a landscape’—captures the depth-psychological intuition that a life, like terrain, bears the marks of erosive histories yet retains something of eternity. Fourth, landscape carries therapeutic and cognitive significance: the empirical literature assembled by Bratman and Annerstedt demonstrates measurable attentional and affective restoration through nature exposure. McGilchrist crowns the edifice by linking the Romantic valorization of landscape art to right-hemisphere modes of knowing. Across these traditions, landscape is never neutral ground but always a relational field between psyche and world.
Landscapes, as we have seen, are a regular feature of the visionary experience. Descriptions of visionary landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and religion; but paintings of landscapes do not make their appearance until comparatively recent times.
Huxley establishes landscape as a structurally recurrent element of visionary consciousness, distinguishing its lived occurrence from its comparatively late representation in visual art.
, The Doors of Perception, 1954thesis
A physical landscape has a history. Here frost has sculpted a slope of scree… Yet in this natural landscape we can also experience the spirit of eternity. A person too has a history and a varied personal landscape produced by exposure to adv
Brazier’s explicit analogical thesis equates the person with a landscape shaped by historical forces yet capable of disclosing an eternal dimension, grounding a depth-psychological model of selfhood in geomorphic metaphor.
, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, 1995thesis
The great art of the period is landscape art, and the chief influence on landscape art in the period was undoubtedly Claude Lorrain… one can see in him a route direct from the Renaissance to Romanticism, a sort of high road of the right hemisphere which the Enlightenment left untouched.
McGilchrist argues that landscape art is the signature form of Romantic right-hemisphere consciousness, tracing its genealogy through Claude Lorrain as a vehicle for depth, intuition, and incarnate reality.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
the landscape is not numerically the same for both of us and that it is a question only of a specific identity? When I consider my perception itself, before any objectifying reflection, at no moment am I aware of being shut up within my own sensations.
Merleau-Ponty deploys the shared landscape as the paradigm case for demonstrating that lived perception is always already intersubjective, not enclosed within solipsistic sensation.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
If you imagine the view from this window as a landscape, the body ‘structure’ is analogous to object shapes in a space, while the body ‘state’ resembles the light and shadow and movement and sound of the objects in that space.
Damasio employs landscape as an explanatory metaphor for somatic self-mapping, with bodily structure and state corresponding to the spatial and dynamic qualities of a visual scene.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
the distant horizon seems to hold open the perceivable landscape, binding it always to that which lies beyond it… The visible horizon… a kind of gateway or threshold, joining the presence of the surrounding terrain to that which exceeds this open presence.
Abram reads the perceptual horizon of the landscape as a structural analogue for Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, making landscape itself the sensuous index of time’s openness.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
The experience that comes from viewing or being present within natural landscapes allows attentional reserves to replenish, which in turn can benefit performance on other tasks, delay of gratification, and perhaps even levels of depression and stress.
Bratman summarizes Attention Restoration Theory’s claim that immersion in natural landscape restores directed-attention capacities, linking landscape encounter to measurable cognitive and emotional benefits.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
we are searching for modes of absence which, by their very way of being absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the open landscape.
Abram argues that the open landscape is constitutively structured by invisible absences—hidden regions—whose concealment is necessary to the very visibility of the terrain.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
he is again in the same landscape. There is stagnant water at the bottom of the valley. It is gray, and dirty, and does not reflect.
Von Franz reads the dream landscape—airborne fields without trees, stagnant unreflective water—as direct symbolic disclosure of the analysand’s mother complex and psychic stagnation.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
There is stagnant water at the bottom of the valley. It is gray, and dirty, and does not reflect… It is like ice at the bottom of the valley and it does not mirror.
This parallel passage extends the dream-landscape reading, with the non-reflective, icy water at the valley’s base signifying an unconscious mother complex that fails to mirror psychic life.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
a large percentage of these studies has been conducted within a small range of landscape types, and many involve similar durations and frequencies of time spent in nature.
Bratman identifies methodological limitations in the empirical study of landscape and cognition, noting insufficient coverage of landscape type, duration, and the psychological influence of attitudes toward nature.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
the degree or amount of ‘nature’ that a landscape contains can be culturally or personally defined. Additionally, cultures and individuals differ with respect to what are considered to be the attractive and natural components of landscapes.
Bratman foregrounds the cultural and subjective variability in defining what constitutes a ‘natural’ landscape, complicating any fixed typology for therapeutic or restorative purposes.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
The incorporation of nature into the estates of the rich is another example of the extent to which people have been willing to invest resources in aesthetically pleasing landscapes throughout history.
Bratman situates the therapeutic value attributed to landscape within a long historical pattern of resource investment in aesthetic and restorative natural environments.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
Studies categorized by three different degrees of exposure: passive viewing of representations (‘images’); views of natural landscapes themselves (‘window views’); and presence within landscape or environment (‘physically present’).
Bratman’s typology of landscape exposure—image, window view, physical presence—provides an empirical framework for scaling the psychological effects of nature contact.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
Everyone knows that we can be deeply affected by the things of nature. A certain hill or mountain can offer a deep emotional focus to a person’s life or to a family or community.
Moore’s care-of-soul perspective frames specific landscape features—hills, mountains—as emotional and communal anchors capable of organizing a life’s psychic geography.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
An oral Dreaming cycle, practically considered, is a detailed set of instructions for moving through the country, a safe way through the arid landscape.
Abram shows that Aboriginal Dreaming cycles encode landscape as sacred navigational and mnemonic text, integrating mythological, ecological, and practical knowledge into the terrain itself.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
Vast distances evoked by visual depth, grand objects and perspectives, become of great significance, because of their metaphoric power to express a sense of ineffability, which is experienced physically and emotionally as much as conceptually.
McGilchrist links the Romantic sublime—figured through the visual depth of landscape—to an embodied sense of ineffability and self-expansion rather than to merely conceptual wonder.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
the service takes place within the mind and body of a person as he or she experiences an environment. These types of phenomena may seem hard to define, but a growing body of research has attempted to identify the consistent benefits that experiences of nature may provide.
Bratman frames ecosystem services as mind-body events contingent on the experiencing subject’s engagement with a specific landscape or seascape, grounding environmental benefit in phenomenological encounter.
, The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012aside