Within the depth-psychology corpus, morality is never treated as a settled or self-legitimating domain but is subjected to genealogical, psychological, archetypal, and phenomenological interrogation that consistently destabilizes its foundational claims. Nietzsche’s forensic dismantling of moral valuation — exposing the slave-revolt, the bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal as its hidden engines — provides the indispensable provocation to which nearly every subsequent depth-psychological position responds. Jung receives this provocation most directly: he insists that morality is not delivered from Sinai but is ‘a function of the human soul,’ an instinctive regulator immanent to collective life, while simultaneously warning that conventional morality fosters compartment psychology and impedes genuine individuation. Neumann extends this into a programmatic call for a ‘new ethic’ adequate to the shadow. Hillman displaces the question further still, arguing that morality is rooted in psychic images and that archetypal psychology must look at moralities mythically rather than at myths morally. Ricoeur engages the predicates ‘good’ and ‘obligatory’ as mediations along the path of selfhood. Aurobindo regards ethical standards as uncertain, relative, and symptomatic — treating only surfaces while ignorant of deeper causes. What unites these otherwise divergent voices is the conviction that received moral frameworks are insufficient to the depths of the psyche, and that a genuinely psychological ethics must reckon with unconscious motivation, shadow, and the irreducible relativity of moral judgment.
morality was not brought down on tables of stone from Sinai and imposed on the people, but is a function of the human soul, as old as humanity itself. Morality is not imposed from outside; we have it in ourselves from the start
Jung grounds morality in the psyche itself rather than in external legislation, positioning it as an instinctive regulator coextensive with collective human life.
, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953thesis
Rather than looking at myths morally, archetypal psychology looks at moralities mythically. By considering morals as the claims of the imaginal powers, morality itself becomes imaginal. Morality is rooted in psychic images and psychic images are moral powers.
Hillman inverts the conventional relation between myth and morality, treating ethical stances as archetypal enactments rather than rational prescriptions.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite — into me — that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.
Nietzsche frames the Genealogy’s project as the self-dissolution of prevailing morality — specifically Christian-decadent morality — through the rigorous exercise of its own highest value, truthfulness.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
human good and evil are relative and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative… an amalgam of all these view-points is the determining heterogeneous idea, constitutes the complex substance, of morality
Aurobindo diagnoses conventional morality as a heterogeneous and self-contradictory amalgam that treats symptoms without penetrating to the psychological or spiritual root of human suffering.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
There is thus revealed through this engagement a morality of the image. Psychological morality which derives from the imaginal is no longer a ‘new ethics’ of shadow integration by means of that same old Kantian ego and its heroic wrestlings with abstract dualisms.
Hillman proposes an image-based psychological morality that supersedes both conventional ethics and Neumann’s ego-centered ‘new ethic’ by locating moral authority in the imaginal encounter itself.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
The ethical problems that cannot be solved in the light of collective morality or the ‘old ethic’ are conflicts of duty, otherwise they would not be ethical.
Neumann identifies genuine ethical conflict as precisely what collective or conventional morality fails to resolve, laying the ground for his concept of a new, depth-psychologically informed ethic.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
Conventional morality is exactly like classical physics: a statistical truth, a statistical wisdom… to regard our judgments as absolutely valid would be nonsensical; it would mean wanting to be like God.
Jung relativizes moral judgment by analogy with statistical law in physics, arguing that absolute moral pronouncements exceed human epistemic capacity and usurp a divine prerogative.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
To force practice into the mold of preaching as did the old morality, or to let preaching be led and limited by the facts of practice as would the new morality, only subdues conflict without resolving it.
Hillman argues that neither traditional nor permissive morality can resolve the psychic split between conscious intention and shadow, since both merely suppress the tension rather than holding it.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting
the ever spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister
Nietzsche diagnoses the morality of pity — Schopenhauer’s supreme value — as a pathological symptom of cultural decline and a covert will-to-nothingness.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
The more you investigate the crime, the more you feel into it, the less you are capable of judging it, because you find when you go deep enough, that the crime was exceedingly meaningful, that it was inevitable in that moment.
Jung demonstrates through the psychology of crime that depth of psychological understanding erodes rather than reinforces confident moral judgment.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting
There is no development under the law of conventional morality. It leads to compartment psychology, and how can a man develop when he forgets what his compartments contain?
Jung warns that conventional morality actively obstructs psychological development by encouraging the compartmentalization that prevents integration of unconscious contents.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
one kind of morality facilitates doing evil whereas other kinds battle against it. That is the main part of Arendt’s complex story.
Kateb’s reading of Arendt reveals her central insight that morality is internally differentiated — mores can enable evil, while Socratic and political moralities constitute its proper resistance.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
evil as embodied in murderous totalitarianism necessarily offends every version of morality that Arendt discusses.
Arendt’s typology of five distinct versions of morality — mores, Socratic, divine command, Christian goodness, political — finds its negative unity in totalitarian evil, which violates all of them.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Christian morality has been the Circe of all thinkers so far — they stood in her service. Who before me climbed into the caverns from which the poisonous fumes of this type of ideal — slander of the world — are rising?
Nietzsche claims priority as the first thinker to diagnose Christian morality as a world-denying enchantment that has subjugated all prior philosophy.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
inasmuch as it is the motive and intent initiating an act which determines its character, no act, in itself, can be either good or evil… Good and Evil, like all dualities, are hallucinatory concepts of the sangsārically constituted mind
The Tibetan Buddhist standpoint presented by Evans-Wentz dissolves moral absolutes into relative, mind-dependent constructs, situating genuine liberation beyond the good-evil duality altogether.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
the use of force, even where punishment is deserved, is still a far cry from true morality; the same is true of the kind of just doing which springs from fear of punishment, and of mere obedience to the law in general.
Snell distinguishes genuine morality from legally enforced justice, arguing that virtue transcends the coercive apparatus of the state and cannot be reduced to law-abidance.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
INTRODUCTION: A MORALITY OF EVOLUTION
Horney frames her entire account of neurosis and self-realization within an explicitly evolutionary conception of morality, suggesting that psychological growth itself carries normative, not merely therapeutic, stakes.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any… analytic retrospection misleads us as to the nature of what we are seeing, since it reconstructs the world according to left-hemisphere principles
McGilchrist argues that the analytic reconstruction of moral values misrepresents their actual neurological and experiential character, which is right-hemisphere, relational, and pre-reflective.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
Dual prehistory of good and evil. — The concept of good and evil has a dual prehistory; first, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. Whoever has the power to repay good with good, evil with evil… is called good
Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis traces the concept of ‘good’ to an aristocratic economy of reciprocity and power rather than to any altruistic or metaphysical ground.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887supporting
The ethical and moral determinations of action will be treated here as predicates of a new kind, and their relation to the subject of action as a new mediation along the return path toward the self.
Ricoeur positions ethical and moral predicates as constitutive mediations through which the self comes to know itself, integrating practical philosophy with his hermeneutics of selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Evil as a system issues from the readiness of the many to abandon one set of mores (acted on as if it were the sole content of morality) for another set, but resistance to evil includes the practice of genuine morality
Arendt’s analysis, as read by Kateb, identifies the malleability of social mores as the mechanism through which systemic evil operates, contrasting this with genuine Socratic morality as its antidote.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
War, being an abrogation of ethical and cultural systems, recognizes no standard of good and evil. If, as the Gurus teach, men would seriously consider these things, the illogical and impracticable nature of the moral standards of the unenlightened multitude would b
Evans-Wentz uses the double standards of wartime to expose the contingency and incoherence of conventional moral systems as understood by the unenlightened mind.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
there are large numbers of persons who carry on elaborate crusades designed to bring this dead morality back to life.
Hoeller, reading Gnostic and Jungian sources, characterizes inherited collective morality as a psychic corpse whose periodic resuscitation through social crusades reflects an unresolved tension between repression and liberation.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting
Arendt had a great distaste for distinctions between morality and immorality, while at the same time a fascination with questions of evil and responsibility.
Kateb identifies in Arendt a characteristic tension between suspicion of moralistic discourse and deep engagement with evil — a tension that marks a distinctive existential rather than moral orientation.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
a superior Nature transcends the duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature falls below it. The question may begin to assume a different aspect if we go behind physical knowledge and accept the conclusions of an occult inquiry
Aurobindo situates conventional moral dualism between two trans-moral domains — a superior spiritual nature beyond good and evil and a neutral material nature beneath it.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside
Sittlichkeit would then no longer denote a third agency, higher than ethics and morality, but would designate one of the places in which practical wisdom is exercised
Ricoeur reinterprets Hegel’s Sittlichkeit not as a supersession of abstract morality but as a locus — among others — in which practical wisdom must navigate institutional and political mediations.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
The meaning of these cults — Christianity and Mithraism — is clear: moral subjugation of the animal instincts.
Jung reads the historical spread of redemptive cults as collective psychological responses to the need for instinctual regulation — morality here functioning as the cultural container for libidinal energy.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside
She seems suspicious of morality, as if she had an allergy to it. Perhaps evil blots out all other phenomena of wrongdoing?
Kateb diagnoses Arendt’s characteristic reticence on general questions of morality as a quasi-temperamental aversion, possibly produced by the overwhelming singularity of totalitarian evil in her thinking.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside