Ontology occupies a privileged and contested site within the depth-psychology corpus. The term arrives already charged with its Heideggerian freight: the fundamental inquiry into the meaning of Being, distinct from the merely ontical concern with particular entities. Heidegger’s sustained demolition of the Greek and Cartesian inheritance — wherein being collapses into presence, substance, or res extensa — sets the horizon against which later depth-psychological and hermeneutical writers position themselves. Hillman draws the term directly into clinical territory, arguing that psychotherapy requires what he calls ‘an ontology of analysis,’ a foundational account of what analysis is, not merely what it does. Ricoeur prosecutes the ontological question most systematically, asking whether a hermeneutics of selfhood can sustain an ontological commitment — whether ipseity, attestation, and narrative identity carry genuine being-claims or merely epistemological ones. He negotiates between analytic event-ontology (Davidson, Parfit) and the phenomenological tradition, seeking an ontology of act and potentiality that honours Aristotelian polysemy without collapsing into substantialism. Simondon introduces an ontology of individuation in which being is understood as pre-individual, processual, and phase-transitional rather than substantial. Thompson raises the question of ontological emergence in relation to biological mind. Across these voices, the central tension is between substance ontology and process or relational ontology, with depth psychology consistently favouring the latter.
the challenges of analysis have been focused most pointedly. These challenges and the response which the analyst has had to develop out of his own experience lead inevitably to formulating an ontology of analysis.
Hillman argues that genuine depth-psychological practice demands its own foundational ontology — a grounding account of what analysis essentially is — rather than borrowing its self-understanding from medicine, priesthood, or philosophy.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
The second question concerns the ontological bearing of the distinction between selfhood and sameness… The third question… concerns the specific dialectical structure of the relation between selfhood and otherness.
Ricoeur frames his entire philosophical anthropology around three ascending ontological questions: the commitment entailed by attestation, the being-status of ipseity versus sameness, and the ontological structure of selfhood-and-otherness as such.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the ontology of act and of potentiality will in turn open up variations of meaning difficult to specify because of their multiple historical expressions.
Ricoeur proposes recovering the Aristotelian ontology of act and potentiality as a corrective to the substantialist reduction of being, making this move the ontological ground for his hermeneutics of the self.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Ontology stands guard on the threshold of ethics. Heidegger hammers out his demands: first, inquire in principle into Dasein’s being-guilty (being-in-debt); hence, first of all, into a mode of being.
Ricoeur identifies Heidegger’s strategy of grounding guilt ontologically prior to ethics as the defining move by which ontology asserts its priority over — and conditions the possibility of — any normative discourse.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
ontical inquiry is concerned primarily with entities and the facts about them.
Heidegger establishes the foundational distinction between ontological inquiry (concerned with Being as such) and ontical inquiry (concerned with particular entities), which structures the entire analytic of Dasein.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
The problematic of Greek ontology, like that of any other, must take its clues from Dasein itself… Dasein, man’s Being, is ‘defined’ as the ζῷον
Heidegger argues that all ontology — Greek or otherwise — must be anchored in Dasein’s self-understanding, exposing the anthropological presuppositions concealed within the tradition.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
the substantialist ontology that goes along with the biologic argument prevents the formulation of an ontology of development capable of situating prudent judgment in a typically ‘intermediary’ domain.
Ricoeur argues that a substantialist ontology forecloses the richer ontology of development needed to adjudicate ethical questions about personhood in liminal or transitional states.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the notion of narrative identity… owes to its relation (even if it is one of conflict) with the notion of personal identity coming from analytic philosophers a sharpened sense of the ontological bearing of affirmations about the self.
Ricoeur credits the encounter with analytic philosophy for sharpening his awareness of the ontological commitments embedded in claims about selfhood, even as he ultimately parts ways with its physicalist and substrantialist tendencies.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Descartes not only evades the ontological question of substantiality altogether; he also emphasizes explicitly that substance as such — that is to say, its substantiality — is in and for itself inaccessible from the outset.
Heidegger’s critique of Cartesian ontology identifies the evasion of the substantiality question as the source of modernity’s failure to think Being, substituting mathematical extension for genuine ontological inquiry.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Must one make presence the fundamental nexus between being oneself and being-in-the-world?
Ricoeur presses a pointed question against Heidegger: whether ‘presence’ can bear the ontological weight assigned to it as the link between selfhood and world, doubting that Heideggerian facticity adequately reinterprets Aristotelian energeia.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
The old identification between being and substance, which Descartes in no way questioned, rests on an exclusive privilege accorded to quasi-visual representation, which transforms things into a spectacle.
Ricoeur traces the substantialist ontological prejudice to an epistemology of visual representation and spectacle, contrasting it with an act-based apperception that escapes the substance-subject reduction.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
consider individuation as a phase of being. This phase, moreover, cannot exhaust the possibilities of pre-individual being, such that a first individuation gives birth to beings that still carry virtualities and potentials with them.
Simondon proposes a processual ontology in which being is understood as phase rather than substance, with individuation marking a transition that never exhausts the pre-individual charge of potentiality.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
We have learned to be wary, however, of what the surface of language suggests, especially when it comes to ontology.
Citing Davidson’s caution, Ricoeur flags the persistent risk that linguistic surface structure misleads ontological inquiry, requiring a vigilant separation of grammatical form from genuine ontological commitment.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
If one criterion of ontological emergence is that it not be an artifact of our theories or models, and if quantum mechanics is supposed to be the best case of ontological emergence, then it would seem a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is being assumed.
Thompson interrogates the conditions under which emergence qualifies as genuinely ontological rather than merely epistemological or model-relative, situating the question at the intersection of philosophy of biology and phenomenology.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
On the basis of the Greeks’ initial contributions towards an Interpretation of Being, a dogma has been developed which not only declares the question unnecessary.
Heidegger diagnoses the history of Western ontology as a progressive trivialization of the question of Being, from its Platonic-Aristotelian origin to the dogmatic suppression of the question in modernity.
, Being and Time, 1962aside