Openness in the depth-psychology corpus operates across at least three distinct registers that together reveal its centrality to psychological and philosophical inquiry. In the empirical personality literature, Openness to Experience—most rigorously treated by Johnson, Williams, and their collaborators—functions as a measurable Big Five trait with demonstrable relationships to aesthetic engagement, awe proneness, adaptive stress regulation, and post-traumatic growth. Here the term is highly operationalized, its facets (Aesthetics, Ideas, Feelings, Fantasy, Actions, Values) yielding differential predictive power across outcomes from physiological resilience to dispositional wonder. A second register, represented by Trungpa’s Tibetan Buddhist perspective, treats openness as a spiritual and ethical imperative: authentic openness to oneself is the precondition for genuine compassion toward others, and its absence constitutes self-deception. Hillman and Nussbaum introduce a third, more ambivalent reading, wherein openness is simultaneously a virtue—Nussbaum’s ‘guilelessness’ as the condition of noble character and trust—and a vulnerability, the ‘unstoppered vessel’ susceptible to dissolution or manipulation. Hillman’s Suicide and the Soul frames analytic objectivity as a form of openness that places the practitioner outside collective moral consensus. Across these registers the corpus sustains a productive tension: openness as adaptive strength, openness as spiritual prerequisite, and openness as existential risk.
The more we open to ourselves, completely and fully, then that much more openness radiates to others. We really know when we are fooling ourselves, but we try to play deaf and dumb to our own self-deception.
Trungpa argues that genuine openness is an inside-out process: radical self-honesty is the foundation from which openness toward others naturally radiates, and any outward openness unsupported by inner transparency is self-deception.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis
Objectivity means openness; and openness about suicide is not easily gained… Openness to suicide means more than taking an individual stand against collective moral opinion.
Hillman identifies analytic objectivity with openness, arguing that genuine openness on culturally taboo subjects necessarily places the analyst in opposition to collective morality.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
The noble person is not constantly suspicious, skeptical… this ‘openness’ will be ‘laughed down’. But with the departure of openness comes a loss of goodness.
Nussbaum, reading Thucydides, establishes openness (euethes—guilelessness, simplicity) as a constitutive condition of virtuous character, arguing that its socially enforced destruction entails a genuine moral loss.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
Studies of momentary and dispositional awe suggest that this emotional experience may be uniquely related to openness—a supposition with initial empirical support.
Williams synthesizes empirical evidence that dispositional awe is more strongly and specifically correlated with Openness than with any other Big Five personality factor, establishing a privileged relationship between the two constructs.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022thesis
individual differences in aesthetic engagement—the propensity to be moved by art, nature, and beauty and a facet of the personality factor Openness to Experience—are associated with adaptive stress regulation.
Johnson frames aesthetic engagement as a measurable facet of Openness and proposes a growth-oriented hypothesis linking it to adaptive appraisal and stress regulation.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021thesis
Openness predicted lower levels of behavioral disengagement and denial, and higher levels of acceptance, planning, problem-solving confidence, and approach-orientation.
Empirical review establishes that Openness consistently predicts a cluster of adaptive coping behaviors, including acceptance and proactive problem-solving, particularly in stress contexts.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021supporting
the findings of the current study clearly suggest that openness/aesthetic engagement associations with awe are more specific and wide-ranging.
Williams concludes that Openness and its aesthetic engagement facet have a more specific and consistent relationship to awe than agreeableness, consolidating openness as the primary personality correlate of awe proneness.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
Bivariate correlations of dispositional awe proneness with NEO factors revealed significant positive associations with Openness and Extraversion; however, the association with Openness was significantly greater.
Quantitative findings confirm that among Big Five factors, Openness is the dominant correlate of dispositional awe proneness, outpacing Extraversion in both bivariate and regression analyses.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
The components of openness most strongly associated with awe have not been fully examined. It is hypothesized that aesthetic engagement is the aspect of openness most strongly related to the experience of awe.
Williams targets aesthetic engagement as the specific facet of Openness most proximally linked to awe, motivating a facet-level investigation rather than treating the domain as monolithic.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
Both Openness (B = .02, b = .20, p = .002.) and Agreeableness (B = .06, b = .19, p = .001) retained significant associations with change in awe from baseline.
Regression analyses demonstrate that Openness independently predicts awe induction even when controlling for Agreeableness and baseline affect, confirming its unique explanatory role.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Awe, 2022supporting
Both Openness and Aesthetics were negatively associated with Self-Defense (rs = −.24, −.27, ps < .05), indicating that individuals higher in Openness and aesthetic engagement were less likely to be coded as striving to correct an unfair situation.
Behavioral coding reveals that higher Openness predicts reduced defensive striving in stressful contexts, suggesting that openness attenuates reactive and retaliatory motivational tendencies.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021supporting
The virginal Yes that is both continual renewal and indiscrimination, all wet. Wide eyes, open mouths, ready laps.
Hillman’s psychopoetic analysis treats indiscriminate openness as a danger of the puer psychology—an inability to close the vessel leading to dissolution, suggestibility, and loss of discernment.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
we can rationalize this not just as openness but as spiritual openness… unwittingly encouraging a bypassing of what really needs attention.
Masters identifies ‘spiritual openness’ as a rationalization through which sloppy relational or sexual boundaries are reframed as virtue, illustrating how the rhetoric of openness can serve defensive bypassing.
, Spiritual Bypassing When Spirituality Disconnects Us From, 2012supporting
We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is.
Trungpa posits openness as inseparable from fundamental wisdom and compassion, contrasting it with the grasping security-seeking that characterizes ordinary relational patterns.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973supporting
a higher-order cognitive construct involving flexible problem solving and perspective taking, growth-oriented reappraisal, and maintenance of a coherent narrative and sense of self in the context of adversity.
Johnson’s structural model situates Openness-related aesthetic engagement within a higher-order construct of stress-related growth orientation, linking it to cognitive flexibility and narrative coherence.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021supporting
instead of dialing Rachel’s number, I decided to give it a try. And I decided, even if it kills me, that I would just lay there and feel the pain. And I did.
Epstein’s clinical vignette illustrates bare attention as a practice of remaining open to painful experience without acting it out, implicitly linking therapeutic openness to Buddhist non-reactivity.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995aside