Negativism enters the depth-psychology corpus principally through Eugen Bleuler’s foundational 1911 monograph on dementia praecox, where it is developed as a cardinal and technically precise clinical concept distinct from ordinary obstinacy, deliberate refusal, or delusional motivation. For Bleuler, negativism is an instinctual, intelligence-independent phenomenon rooted in the schizophrenic patient’s autistic withdrawal from an outside world experienced as hostile intrusion; it is constitutively irrational, resistant to post-hoc justification, and inseparable from the broader pathology of autism, ambivalence, and affective dissociation. Its theoretical importance lies precisely in what it resists: it cannot be reduced to motility disturbance, to the influence of ‘voices,’ or to normal willful opposition. Bleuler insists that the hostile relationship to external reality is primary, rendering all stimuli unwelcome disturbances. The concept ripples into adjacent territory when other voices in the corpus—Hillman, Giegerich—treat negation not as pathology but as a structural-logical operator of psychic life: Freud’s equation of negation with repression, Giegerich’s ‘accomplished negation’ as the soul’s own dialectical movement, and Hillman’s senex principle of contradiction all invoke a broader philosophical register for ‘the negative.’ The clinical and the speculative senses of negativism thus stand in productive tension throughout the corpus, marking the term as both a symptom-description and a conceptual hinge.