Mechanism

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘mechanism’ carries a double valence that marks one of the field’s most productive tensions. On one side stands the neurobiological usage—Damasio, Schore, Solms, and LeDoux deploy the term with full technical precision to name specific brain circuits, feedback loops, and physiological cascades that underlie emotion, memory, and consciousness. Here ‘mechanism’ is not a pejorative but the very vocabulary through which soma and psyche are shown to interpenetrate. On the other side, thinkers such as McGilchrist and Sardello use the term polemically: the machine or mechanized world represents precisely what soul and organism resist. McGilchrist draws the sharpest contrast—the machine fulfils only an extrinsic purpose, while the living cell pursues its own intrinsic continuance—making mechanism the philosophical foil against which organic life defines itself. Vernant’s philological excavation of the Greek mechane situates the concept’s prehistory: closer originally to ‘trick’ or ‘expedient’ than to the post-Cartesian image of clockwork, it inhabits the domain of techne wrestling with phusis. Running through all these registers is a common question: whether the mechanisms science identifies are reducible to their material substrate or whether they participate in something irreducibly purposive and self-organising—a question depth psychology refuses to settle by fiat.

In the library 16 passages

The machine fulfils an extrinsic purpose only after abandoning its stable state, that of something naturally static. A single cell, by contrast, has no extrinsic purpose, but nonetheless is extremely active in pursuing its intrinsic purpose

McGilchrist defines mechanism against organism: the machine is constitutively oriented outward and toward stasis, while the living cell is self-directing and intrinsically purposive—a philosophical inversion of mechanistic assumptions.

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

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The machine fulfils an extrinsic purpose only after abandoning its stable state, that of something naturally static. A single cell, by contrast, has no extrinsic purpose, but nonetheless is extremely active in pursuing its intrinsic purpose

A parallel formulation confirming that mechanism names the category of the externally purposive and inert, set against the self-sustaining dynamism of living systems.

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

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The discovery of the brain-stem mechanisms that control REM sleep (Jouvet 1962; McCarley & Hobson 1975) has led to the further inference that the same mechanisms control dreaming.

Solms challenges the inference that the brain-stem mechanisms governing REM sleep are identical to the mechanisms generating dreaming, thereby distinguishing two orders of neural causation.

Solms, Mark, Dreaming and REM Sleep Are Controlled by Different Brain Mechanisms, 2000thesis

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The organon transmits and amplifies man’s force, rather than acting by virtue of its own internal structure and producing an effect through a mechanism of a type different from human exertion.

Vernant traces the conceptual threshold between tool and machine in Greek thought, locating ‘mechanism’ precisely where an instrument acts through its own internal structure rather than as an extension of bodily force.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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Mechane still has a meaning close to that of a trick or expedient; it is defined as an ingenious invention that enables a man to extricate himself from an embarrassing situation or aporia and assume the advantage over some natural force

Vernant demonstrates that in Greek thought mechane carries the connotation of a clever stratagem—a ‘dynamics of logic’—rather than the post-Cartesian image of impersonal clockwork.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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the computer is not just another technological device contributing to the mechanization of the world, but is in fact the culmination of the mechanized world, the consummate result of that world, the signal for the end of that world.

Sardello reads mechanization as a cultural pathology reaching its limit-point in the computer, deploying ‘mechanism’ as the name for a world-order from which soul has been evacuated.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis

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this developmental psychoneurochemical mechanism underlies all imprinting phenomena and explains Bowlby’s (1969) claim that imprinting represents the learning process which supports all attachment phenomena.

Schore identifies a specific neurochemical mechanism as the substrate of imprinting and attachment, grounding relational-developmental theory in biological process.

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

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since Descartes claimed: terram totumque hunc mundum instar machinae descripsi and still more since the industrial revolution, scientific thought has been haunted by the analogy of the machine and we connect the ‘laws of nature’ with machine-like regularity. But the ancients did not use machines driven by their own power

The commentary on the Timaeus locates the rupture between ancient and modern thought: the machine analogy is specifically a post-Cartesian imposition alien to Greek cosmological thinking.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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at the base of all the difficulties in mechanical problems and of the obscurity that surrounds the investigation of causes in this science lies the fact that one cannot actually see the forces at work in heavy bodies

Hero’s mechanics is shown to require logos precisely because mechanical forces are invisible—a structural epistemological problem that links mechanism to the domain of the hidden and the inferred.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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mediational testing as a 12-step specific mechanism of behavior change

Kelly imports the term ‘mechanism’ into addiction and recovery research to identify the specific psychosocial pathway through which twelve-step participation produces behavioral change.

Kelly, John F., The Twelve Promises of Alcoholics Anonymous: Psychometric measure validation and mediational testing as a 12-step specific mechanism of behavior change, 2013supporting

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The exact mechanism of action is unclear but acamprosate is thought to antagonize glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors and lead to increased activation of the GABA type A receptors.

Pharmacological usage exemplifies how ‘mechanism of action’ functions in clinical neuroscience as the explanatory hinge between molecular chemistry and therapeutic outcome.

McPheeters, Melissa, Pharmacotherapy for Adults With Alcohol Use Disorder in Outpatient Settings: Systematic Review, 2023supporting

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Fordham considered that Tinbergen’s demonstration of innate release mechanisms (IRMs) in animals may be applicable to humans, especially in infancy.

Fordham bridges ethology and analytical psychology by applying the concept of innate release mechanisms to human infancy, linking archetype theory to biological triggering structures.

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

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the productive mechanism of replication (comprising DNA-binding proteins, the enzyme DNA-polymerase, and a variety of DNA repair mechanisms) and the product (DNA molecules) are operationally different systems

Thompson distinguishes mechanism of replication from mechanism of reproduction to argue that historical biological lineage requires more than mechanistic copying—pointing toward the limits of mechanistic explanation in biology.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting

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physical and psychological traits we carry with us today are therefore mechanisms shaped by evolution to help us do things that facilitated survival and reproduction

Evolutionary psychology deploys ‘mechanism’ to denote heritable functional traits selected for adaptive purposes, extending the term from the physiological to the psychological domain.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting

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neural signals give rise to chemical signals, which give rise to other chemical signals, which can alter the function of many cells and tissues (including those in the brain), and alter the regulatory circuits that initiated the cycle itself.

Damasio’s description of neuroendocrine feedback loops illustrates the multi-level, self-modifying character of biological mechanisms that underpin emotional regulation.

Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994aside

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the formula the engineer used to adapt the proportions of his machines according to the weights and range of the projectile was arrived at not through theoretical demonstration but in an altogether empirical fashion, through successive adjustments and trial and error.

Vernant illustrates the gulf in Greek thought between theoretical science and mechanical engineering, both of which involve mechanism but one as logos, the other as mere empeiria.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside

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