Movement occupies a position of remarkable conceptual density within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a physiological fact, a phenomenological datum, a metaphysical category, and a therapeutic resource. The range of treatment is correspondingly vast. At one pole, Merleau-Ponty insists that movement is not a derivative phenomenon but the very medium through which the lived body constitutes its world, arguing that genuine perception of movement cannot be separated from its apprehension as meaningful. McGilchrist, drawing on Bergson, Hegel, and contemporary neuroscience, radicalises this claim: movement is ontologically foundational, and stillness is merely its limit-case, never a prior condition from which motion departs. Buzsáki's enactivist position — that perception is grounded in motion, not the reverse — echoes this priority. In the clinical register, Ogden demonstrates how traumatic experience inscribes itself as movement restriction, showing that habitual postural and motor patterns encode relational history. Koch's embodiment framework makes explicit the bidirectionality between motor activity and affect-cognition. Aristotle and Plotinus supply the ancient architecture: the former taxonomising movement into locomotion, alteration, decay, and growth; the latter distinguishing motion from the objects moved. The Shaiva tradition introduces the paradox of the 'movement-less movement' — spanda — a pulsation without vikalpa. Across all these registers, the central tension is between movement as analysable sequence and movement as irreducible living process.
In the library
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motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it; and that motion is foundational to existence, and stillness merely the limit case of motion
McGilchrist argues that movement is ontologically foundational to existence and experience, not a secondary perturbation of an underlying stillness, and that the analytic intellect systematically obscures this primacy.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
motion is at the core of every aspect of our experience, and of our ability to make sense of it, in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it; and that motion is foundational to existence, and stillness merely the limit case of motion
McGilchrist's parallel edition restates the same foundational thesis: motion underlies all cognition, perception, and social intelligence, while analytic thought systematically fails to register this.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
An entity, Bergson would say, is never in a point in space, it is only in a movement. In fact it only is a movement. Could motion, then, be said to be in some sense foundational? Like time and space, motion cannot be derived from anything else.
Synthesising Bergson, Hegel, and Leibniz, McGilchrist asserts that movement is irreducible and constitutive of entity itself, not a property added to a static substrate.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
An entity, Bergson would say, is never in a point in space, it is only in a movement. In fact it only is a movement. Could motion, then, be said to be in some sense foundational? Like time and space, motion cannot be derived from anything else.
The parallel edition repeats and reinforces the Bergsonian ontological claim that movement, like time and space, is underivable and foundational.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
We shall think of all change, all movement, as being absolutely indivisible... such a division can apply only to the representation, not to the entity itself, whose essence is change, motion, flow.
Following Bergson, McGilchrist argues that retrospective analytical division of movement applies only to its representation, not to the living reality, whose essence is continuous flow.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
We shall think of all change, all movement, as being absolutely indivisible... such a division can apply only to the representation, not to the entity itself, whose essence is change, motion, flow.
Identical argument in the parallel edition: the essence of movement is indivisible duration, and any analytical partition misrepresents it fundamentally.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception... activity as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes
Drawing on Buzsáki's neuroscience, McGilchrist establishes the evolutionary and functional priority of movement over perception, inverting the conventional cognitive hierarchy.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
perception is founded on motion and cognition, not motion and cognition founded on perception... activity as not only interwoven with perception but prior to perception, prior both in terms of evolution and in terms of initiating processes
Parallel edition: the enactivist claim that motion precedes and grounds perception is presented as both neurologically and evolutionarily demonstrated.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
I have the experience of movement in spite of the demands and dilemmas of clear thought, which means, in defiance of all reason, that I perceive movements without any identical moving object, without any external landmark and without any relativity.
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that lived experience of movement is irreducible to intellectualist accounts demanding an identical moving object, a fixed landmark, or relative measurement.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
Perception of movement can be perception of movement and recognition of it as such, only if it is apprehension of it with its significance as movement
Merleau-Ponty insists that movement perception is not a bare sensory event but requires the apprehension of movement with its intrinsic phenomenal significance.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
We modify and learn through movement every second of our waking day whether we are active or inactive... the subtler movement adjustments to environmental and interpersonal cues are less obvious but crucial in determining action tendencies.
Ogden establishes movement memory as a continuous adaptive process through which interpersonal history becomes encoded in habitual motor patterns that shape action tendencies.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
movement feedback can be defined as the afferent feedback from the body periphery to the central nervous system and has been shown to play a causal role in the emotional experience, the formation of attitudes, and behavior regulation
Koch establishes a bidirectional model in which movement is not merely expressive of affect-cognition but causally constitutive of emotional experience and attitude formation.
Koch, Sabine C., Embodied arts therapies, 2011thesis
The patient finds in his body only an amorphous mass into which actual movement alone introduces divisions and links... he moves his body about until the movement comes.
Through a case of motor apraxia, Merleau-Ponty shows that the body is articulated into meaningful segments not by prior intellectual representation but by the enactment of actual movement itself.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
Movement, because it is spanda; 'movementless' because there is no vikalpa, there is no thought.
The Shaiva Vijnana Bhairava tradition articulates a paradoxical 'movement-less movement' (spanda) in which pure vibrational energy operates prior to conceptual thought.
Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
mind is always right, but appetite and imagination may be either right or wrong. That is why, though in any case it is the object of appetite which originates movement, this object may be either the real or the apparent good.
Aristotle locates the originating source of movement in appetite directed toward a real or apparent good, establishing the appetitive-cognitive distinction foundational to subsequent soul psychology.
There are four types of movement — locomotion, alteration, decay and growth. If, then, it has motion, the soul will move either in one of these ways, or several, or all of them.
Aristotle taxonomises movement into four irreducible types and systematically examines whether soul participates in each, establishing the classical framework for subsequent discussions of psychic motion.
if the soul is moved, it must be moved with one or several or all of these species of movement. Now if its movement is not incidental, there must be a movement natural to it
Aristotle presses the question of whether soul movement is natural or merely incidental, a distinction whose resolution has profound implications for the soul's substantiality and spatial location.
Intentional movement is accompanied, if not by an explicitly conscious sense of volition, then at least by the lack of a sense of helplessness
Gallagher distinguishes the sense of agency for movement from bodily ownership, arguing that intentional movement is defined phenomenologically by the absence of experienced helplessness rather than explicit volition.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
the way my body moves is in support of my pragmatic intentions and in response to environmental features that either afford or prevent my action
Gallagher situates movement within an affordance-response framework, showing that body-schematic movement is not purely neuromechanical but enacted in service of pragmatic and communicative intentions.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Ian's success in recovering useful movement function has depended primarily on his finite mental concentration, and, to a much lesser degree on reaccessing or relearning motor programs
The case of Ian demonstrates that voluntary motor function, when deprived of body-schematic support, must be substituted by explicit conscious attention, revealing the normally non-conscious foundations of movement.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
increased superficial tension inhibits movement from the core outward and may contribute to beliefs such as, 'I can't express myself'... The movements related to seeking connection, such as reaching out, may be experienced or initiated from the core of the body... but when they meet rigidity and tension from the periphery, they remain incomplete.
Ogden shows how peripheral muscular tension blocks movements originating in the body's core, translating somatic restriction directly into relational and self-expressive beliefs.
Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
We must avoid identifying Motion with the objects moved: by walking we do not mean the feet but the activity springing from a potentiality in the feet.
Plotinus carefully distinguishes motion as an activity actualising potentiality from the objects in which it is observed, arguing for the ontological independence of motion from substrate.
From outward movement, the doctor infers (or, it seems to us, imagines) some inward movement, which he takes to be the cause of disease. In tragedy, the audience infers... from the stage figures' outer movements... the movements of mind and feeling that supposedly caused those acts.
Padel traces the Greek analogical inference from visible bodily movement to invisible interior psychic movement as a shared principle of ancient medicine and tragic dramaturgy.
Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
Aristotle defines it as a permutation from one being into another being... motion is merely that which occurs between these two points. This does not, however, tell us anything about
Snell identifies the limitation in Aristotle's definition of motion as inter-state transition: by fixing the terminal points as static magnitudes, the definition fails to capture the nature of motion itself.
Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some phenomenon
Plotinus surveys the three ancient doctrines of time — as movement, as moved object, or as some phenomenon of movement — setting the stage for his own account of eternity and temporal descent.
Once Thomas sensed that he could quiet his hand, we brought it out from behind his back. He was able to move it with less shaking than before.
Fogel's clinical vignette illustrates how embodied self-awareness, cultivated through attunement to subtle movement cues, can reorganise pathological movement patterns within the nervous system.
Fogel, Alan, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
Democritus understands the verb-aspect of the world as passive rather than active. For, in the view of Democritus, motion is not an act of moving, but the being moved.
Snell identifies Democritus's decisive reframing of motion as being-moved rather than active self-moving, marking a shift toward the mechanistic conception that would dominate natural science.
Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Movement is a continuous thing; but let us consider... is Time the measure of any and every Movement?
Plotinus interrogates whether time can serve as an adequate measure of all movement, distinguishing regular from disconnected and lawless motion to probe the adequacy of the measure-theory of time.
movement is observed upon things and there is still a real existence of movement. But movement is not on a par with number: it is because movement is an entity that unity can be observed upon it.
In the context of a discussion of number, Plotinus affirms movement's status as a genuine entity rather than a mere attribute, distinguishing it from purely predicated qualities.