Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Nature' functions as a contested, multi-layered term that simultaneously denotes the external biological world, the instinctual substrate of the psyche, the Stoic-alchemical principle of self-ordering process, and the Romantic locus of spiritual encounter. Jung and his heirs—Edinger, von Franz, Hillman—inherit the Stoic-alchemical axiom that 'nature rejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules nature' (Ostanes, via Jung), treating Nature as an autonomous dynamic whose telos resides in perfectibility and whose products are indistinguishable from the unconscious. Hillman adds a post-Romantic critical inflection: the sentimental idealization of Nature as God's veil or nurturing Mother is, for him, culturally 'pretty well gone,' yet devotion to the actual biosphere extends soul beyond individualism. A second, empirical register—represented by Bratman, Bettmann, Anderson, and Annerstedt—treats nature exposure as a measurable psycho-physiological dose with demonstrable effects on attention, mood, stress, and clinical mental illness. Estés bridges the registers by homologizing the endangered wilderness with the endangered feminine instinctual psyche. Tarnas, meanwhile, maps the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex onto Western civilization's adversarial objectification of Nature, revealing the ideological wound underneath the ecological crisis. The central tension of the corpus is thus between Nature as healer-of-psyche and Nature as image-of-psyche—between an environmental-health paradigm and an imaginal-animistic one.
In the library
22 passages
"nature" is already pretty well gone, except in our sentimental nostalgia … We can distinguish between the attack on actual soil and wetlands, actual species and forests, and the attack on the Romantic idea of nature as locus of Beauty, as God's veil, or as a nourishing Mother.
Hillman distinguishes the destruction of literal ecology from the collapse of the Romantic idealization of Nature, arguing that protecting the biosphere requires neither moralism nor sentimentality but devotion, practicality, and the extension of soul.
The products of the unconscious are pure nature. 'If we take Nature for our guide, we shall never go astray,' said the ancients … Jung is reminding us that the ego is not a piece of nature. It is, in fact, contra naturam to a very large extent.
Edinger, glossing Jung, argues that Nature provides the raw symbolic material of the unconscious but cannot serve as the ego's unaided guide, because the ego's development is inherently a work against purely natural process.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources.
Estés draws a structural homology between the ecological destruction of wild nature and the psychological suppression of the feminine instinctual nature, treating both as simultaneous and causally linked losses.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
'nature' itself as a distinct substantive noun, a defined and objectified entity that is at some level essentially separate from and antagonistic to 'man,' with the unconscious image of a powerful and threatening Mother Nature lurking in the background.
Tarnas diagnoses the Western objectification of Nature as an expression of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex, showing how its rigid man/nature boundary encodes fear, compensatory control, and the projection of a threatening maternal archetype.
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
'Nature rejoices in nature: nature subdues nature: nature rules over nature.' … Resistance of any thing is given with its essential nature. 'The power or endeavor, wherewith each thing endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the given or actual essence of the thing in question.'
Hillman mobilizes the alchemical axiom of Ostanes—nature acting upon itself—to show that resistance to transformation is not a personal failing but an ontological property of any substance's essential nature.
nature enjoys nature, and nature overcomes nature … wheat creates wheat, and a man begets a man, and thus also gold will harvest gold, like produces like. Now I have manifested the mystery to you.
Von Franz traces the alchemical principle of like-producing-like through the Isis-Horus tradition, establishing Nature as a self-generative, self-regulating process whose mystery is the basis of the opus.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
we have to broaden the notion of environment in terms of 'deep ecology,' the hypothesis that the planet is a living, breathing, and self-regulating organism. Since anything around can nourish our souls by feeding imagination, there is soul stuff out there.
Hillman argues that the classical concept of providentia—the world's care for human beings—requires accepting nature as ensouled and co-extensive with psyche, dissolving the boundary between inner and outer environment.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
authority emanates from his horned head and fiery glance that knows nature from within the fire of his own nature … a figure who embodies Ostanes's ever-quoted maxim for the alchemical process: 'Nature enjoys nature; nature wars with nature; nature rules nature.'
Hillman reads Michelangelo's Moses as an alchemical image whose authority derives not from law alone but from embodied participation in wild, instinctual nature—exemplifying the Ostanes maxim in sculptural form.
The power of nature to both heal and inspire awe has been noted by many great thinkers. However, no study has examined how the impact of nature on well-being and stress-related symptoms is explained by experiences of awe.
Anderson et al. establish awe as the mediating mechanism by which nature contact improves well-being and reduces stress symptoms, providing empirical grounding for nature's therapeutic power.
Anderson, Craig L., Awe in Nature Heals: Evidence From Military Veterans, At-Risk Youth, and College Students, 2018thesis
I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines of nature are powerful and straightforward.
Estés testifies from clinical and mythopoetic experience that simple encounters with natural phenomena possess healing power sufficient to break the dissociation and restore psychic vitality.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
in our natural state, we are endowed with passions that guide us to truth, equality, justice, and the reduction of suffering—our moral compass. We sense these intuitions in music, art, and, above all, being in nature.
Keltner situates Rousseau's Romanticism as the philosophical origin of the empirical project linking nature experience to moral intuition and awe, framing nature as humanity's primary school for the sublime.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
How might we make the case that we have a biological need for wild awe, a need that is on par with our needs for protein-rich food, thermoregulation, sleep, oxygen, and water?
Keltner argues that encounters with nature satisfying the biophilia drive constitute a biological need as fundamental as physiological survival requirements, grounding the therapeutic value of nature in evolutionary necessity.
Keltner, Dacher, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
The overall effects of nature exposure for participants with diagnosed mental illness and symptoms of mental illness are positive and significant. These findings from our study suggest robustly that nature exposure has a significant positive impact on individual mental health.
Bettmann et al.'s meta-analysis confirms a dose-dependent, clinically significant benefit of nature exposure for adults with mental illness, lending rigorous quantitative support to the therapeutic claims of the wider corpus.
Bettmann, Joanna Ellen, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Effect of Nature Exposure Dose on Adults with Mental Illness, 2025supporting
The definition of what makes an environment 'natural' changes across time, space, and the individual engaged in the defining. Debates span the humanities and natural sciences over whether nature is a social construction or if it exists on its own in an independent and constant form.
Bratman acknowledges the epistemological instability of the concept of nature itself, noting that its definition is culturally mediated and contested across disciplines, even as empirical studies proceed with working definitions.
Bratman, Gregory N., The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
We examine the aspects of these benefits that are relevant to cognitive capacities (including attention, memory, and impulse inhibition), emotional states (mood), and stress.
Bratman frames nature experience as a cognitive and emotional resource, surveying its documented positive effects on attention, memory, mood, and stress within the paradigm of evolutionary psychology.
Bratman, Gregory N., The impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health, 2012supporting
three main kinds of public health effects have been identified: short-term recovery from stress or mental fatigue, faster physical recovery from illness, and long-term overall improvement on people's health and well being.
Annerstedt identifies three distinct empirical pathways through which nature contact produces health benefits, establishing the scaffolding for the clinical use of nature as a therapeutic intervention.
Annerstedt, Matilda, Nature-assisted therapy: Systematic review of controlled and observational studies, 2011supporting
The naturalistic fallacy is common because it requires least effort on the part of an interpreter … Naturalism soon declines into materialism, a view which regards the way things are in the perceptual world of things, facts and sense-realities to be the primary mode.
Hillman critiques the 'naturalistic fallacy' in psychological interpretation—the default reduction of imaginal phenomena to literal natural processes—arguing that psychic reality operates by different laws than physical nature.
Sequitur ut doceam omnia subiecta esse naturae eaque ab ea pulcherrime geri … ahi naturam esse censent vim quandam sine ratione cientem motus in corporibus necessarios, ahi autem vim participem rationis atque ordinis.
Cicero presents the Stoic debate between nature as blind mechanical force and nature as rational, ordered power, establishing the philosophical antecedents of the depth-psychological tension between instinct and logos.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
Some argue that passive nature exposure is beneficial while others suggest that being in nature while engaging in physical activity shows greatest benefits.
Bettmann surveys the empirical debate over the relative efficacy of passive versus active modes of nature engagement, indicating that the healing properties of nature are modulated by the form of contact.
Bettmann, Joanna Ellen, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Effect of Nature Exposure Dose on Adults with Mental Illness, 2025supporting
when participants reported at least 120 total minutes of interval-delivered nature exposure over a week, they had greater likelihood of reporting good health and well-being.
Bettmann establishes a threshold dosage figure—120 minutes per week—as the empirically supported minimum for nature exposure to produce measurable well-being effects.
Bettmann, Joanna Ellen, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Effect of Nature Exposure Dose on Adults with Mental Illness, 2025aside
living in accordance with virtue, in living in agreement, or, what is the same, in living in accordance with nature.
The Stoics identify moral virtue with living according to nature, providing the ancient philosophical foundation from which depth psychology's ambivalent relationship to 'following nature' descends.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside
the planet and star … To the mother in her highest form, Mater Ecclesia, he remained faithful all his life … everything that embraces, protects, nourishes, and helps assumes maternal form.
Jung reads Paracelsus's identification of the mother with planet and star as an expression of the archetype that constellates nature, cosmos, and nourishment into the maternal image at the root of religious and scientific devotion alike.