Within the depth-psychology corpus, Materialism is not treated as a single, stable philosophical position but as a contested field of meanings whose boundaries shift depending on the context in which the term is deployed. At minimum, three distinct registers appear. The first is philosophical or scientific materialism — the ontological claim that matter is the sole substrate of reality, and that mind, consciousness, and soul are its epiphenomena. This position is subjected to sustained critique by Jung, McGilchrist, Hillman, and Aurobindo, each of whom regards it as a category error that forecloses inquiry into psychic and spiritual dimensions of existence. The second register is cultural or consumer materialism — the social valuation of things, possessions, and economic productivity over soul, meaning, and relationship. Moore, Sardello, and Trungpa address this form, the latter introducing the pivotal concept of ‘spiritual materialism,’ in which ego-reinforcement masquerades as spiritual practice. The third register, most distinctively Hillman’s, is methodological materialism — the epistemic habit of explaining psychological phenomena by reducing them to external causes, bodily processes, or prior events, a move he identifies as operative even within ostensibly depth-oriented practice. Across all three registers, materialism functions as a limiting horizon that the corpus consistently presses against, variously through phenomenological, metaphysical, spiritual, and clinical argument.
when we give an account of the dream’s images and language by referring to other influences—other persons, sense impressions, past memories—we are in a materialism, although we may never have used reductive terms.
Hillman argues that methodological reductionism in dream interpretation constitutes materialism even when no explicit materialist vocabulary is employed, making the concept a latent epistemological habit rather than a declared philosophy.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Trungpa defines spiritual materialism as ‘deceiving ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.’
Mathieu transmits Trungpa’s foundational definition of spiritual materialism as the ego’s co-optation of spiritual practice for its own fortification, establishing the term as a specific pathology of the inner life.
, Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice, 2011thesis
America has achieved an extremely sophisticated level of physical materialism. However, the potential for being involved in this kind of speed is not limited to Americans, it is universal, world-wide.
Trungpa distinguishes physical materialism as a culturally advanced, globally spreading condition of restless acquisition that creates the very disillusionment from which seekers flee into spiritual practice.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis
In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life.
Aurobindo frames materialism and ascetic renunciation as symmetrical errors — each a unilateral absolute that produces its own bankruptcy, whether of spirit or of life.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
putting the perceiving subject back into physics seems to undermine the whole materialist perspective … A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.
McGilchrist, citing Frank, identifies a logical circularity at the heart of materialism: consciousness cannot be derived from matter if matter is itself constituted through perception.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical—in other words, materialistic—on the basis of an error in judgment; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable reality.
Jung identifies materialism as the unacknowledged metaphysics of scientific positivism, a covert ontological commitment dressed as epistemological rigour.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
It designates the height of materialism, just in the fact that in it matter becomes spirit. Look at the most modern facts in science and what is matter after all? Thought is matter, and matter is thought; there is no difference any longer.
Jung observes that nineteenth-century materialism reaches its paradoxical apex when matter and thought become indistinguishable, anticipating quantum physics and dissolving the very opposition on which materialism depends.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Freud was largely influenced in his thinking by the type of materialism prevalent in the nineteenth century. One believed that the substratum of all mental phenomena was to be found in physiological phenomena.
Fromm situates Freud’s instinct theory within nineteenth-century physiological materialism, arguing that this framework prevented Freud from grasping the full human existential situation.
, The Art of Loving, 1956supporting
Education instead has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.
Sardello diagnoses modern education as having abandoned soul-formation in favour of servicing materialism’s economic imperatives, severing the connection between learning and the living cosmos.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
When combined with German materialism, as it was in the wantonly abrasive Huxley … the theory of evolution by natural selection was the hollowing knell of all that ennobling tradition of man as the purposed creation of Majestic Greatnesses.
Jaynes locates the cultural devastation of the bicameral worldview in the conjunction of Darwinian evolution with German materialism, which together eliminated any external authorizing source for human meaning.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Progress is measured in terms of material growth, value in terms of material assets. Even a person’s work is evaluated as a commodity. Finally, there is nothing like a moral order, only the principles of natural selection.
Easwaran sketches the full ideological structure of modern materialism, in which economic quantification, evolutionary naturalism, and the reduction of persons to physical organisms form a coherent and culturally hegemonic worldview.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
The danger to analysis from medicine comes less from medicine’s weakness than from its strength, i.e., its coherently rational materialism.
Hillman warns that the threat to depth analysis from medical psychiatry lies precisely in the internal coherence of medical materialism, whose very rationality makes it a powerful colonizing worldview.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
No one needs to be told that we live in a time of materialism and consumerism, of lost values and a shift in ethical standards.
Moore treats cultural materialism and consumerism as the symptomatic background condition of contemporary soullessness, against which a return to depth and value must be oriented.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
Eric Fromm … describes modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work.
McGilchrist, via Fromm, connects the left hemisphere’s orientation toward the lifeless and mechanical with a cultural materialism in which persons, life, and meaning are subordinated to objects, property, and capital.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Our own being is a sort of accident or at least a very small and minor circumstance in the universal life of Matter or the eternal continuity of the workings of material Force.
Aurobindo articulates the self-image that materialist cosmology imposes on the individual — an accidental epiphenomenon of matter — as the view that yoga and integral philosophy exist precisely to supersede.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
the craving for spirit, valid and necessary in itself, threatens a reversal of the old problem of materialism. Soul can get lost in those high regions of pure spirit.
Moore cautions that a flight into pure spirituality as a reaction against materialism risks losing soul in the opposite direction, asserting that the solution lies in spirit found within, not above, concrete life.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982aside
Searching for a ‘molecular’ explanation of consciousness is a waste of time, since the physiological processes responsible for this wholly private experience will be seen to degenerate into seemingly quite ordinary, workaday reactions.
McGilchrist marshals scientific consensus — from Sherrington to Heisenberg — to argue that molecular or neurological reductionism cannot in principle account for consciousness, undermining materialist explanation at its most basic level.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside