Passion As Accretion

we readily imagine that the object of our passion is the cause of this richness. 'Yesterday I was lonely and unhappy. Today I have met this person and suddenly feel so full and alive. It must be because of her.'

Welwood identifies the foundational misattribution that initiates passion's accretion: the inner fullness of unconditional resonance is projected outward and then clung to as if it belonged to an external object, generating obsessive dependency.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis

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Passion here means the activity of chasing, grasping, seducing, possessing, incorporating, or clinging to situations that confirm our identity.

Welwood defines the accreting function of passion as a skandha-level process of identity consolidation through relentless grasping, linking Buddhist psychology to the structural sedimentation of desire.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis

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Self-indulgence incites the appetite, appetite gives rise to pernicious desire, desire to the spirit of revolt, revolt to dormant recollections, recollection to imaginings, imagining to mental provocation, provocation to coupling with the thought provoked, and coupling to assent.

Gregory of Sinai charts the precise sequential accretion by which a single passion-imbued impulse progressively recruits appetite, memory, imagination, and will, culminating in full enactment.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis

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the two figures represent a disturbing accretion. The reason for their behaving in this way is that though the contents of anima and animus can be integrated they themselves cannot, since they are archetypes.

Jung employs 'accretion' precisely to describe how anima and animus accumulate as foreign psychic mass rather than assimilated content, establishing the structural vocabulary this concept inherits.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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sulfur ... also coagulates; it is that which sticks, the mucilage, 'the gum,' the joiner, the stickiness of attachment. Sulfur literalizes the heart's desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together.

Hillman's alchemical analysis shows that passion simultaneously ignites and sticks — desire's coagulative property is the archetypal mechanism by which passion accretes to its object.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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First the memory brings some passion-free thought into the intellect. By its lingering there, passion is aroused. When the passion is not eradicated, it persuades the intellect to assent to it.

St Maximos describes the temporal mechanism of passion's accretion: a neutral thought lingers, gathers passion, and compels intellectual assent — accreting layer by layer from thought to disposition.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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Passion can either uplift us or drag us down ... we can also be a force that leads us down into addiction and delusion. We can easily become obsessed and emotionally enslaved by the object of our passion.

Welwood frames the bifurcation at the heart of the concept: whether passion's initial energy accretes into addiction and enslavement or is redirected as transformative path depends on recognising its true nature.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

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Kohut asks the question, 'How does this accretion of psychological structure take place?' He then answers his own question from a self-psychology perspective.

Flores, citing Kohut, applies 'accretion' to the neutral developmental process of structure-building, providing the self-psychological counterpart to the pathological register of passion's accumulation.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting

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unconscious processes become conscious through accretion of energy, then, if unconscious acts of volition are to be possible, it follows that these must possess an energy which enables them to achieve consciousness

Jung grounds the concept energetically: accretion is the mechanism by which libidinal charge elevates unconscious processes to consciousness, making passion's buildup a matter of psychic economy.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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'Just one more' is the binding factor in the circle of suffering ... I've barely left the store before the adrenaline starts pumping through my circulation again, my mind fixated on the next purchase.

Maté's autobiographical account of addiction illustrates passion's accreting logic from a neurobiological vantage — each acquisition intensifies rather than resolves the compulsive cycle.

Maté, Gabor, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting

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Losing it — dropping old, confining personality patterns — is totally frightening and exciting at the same time.

Welwood identifies the liberatory countermovement: the dissolution of accreted passion-patterns is experienced simultaneously as threat and relief, pointing toward surrender as the corrective to accretion.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

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if one passion finds a place in you and takes root there, it will introduce other passions also into the same shrine. For even though the passions, as well as their instigators the demons, are opposed to each other, yet they are all at one in seeking our perdition.

The Philokalia teaches that a single rooted passion draws other passions into the same interior space, demonstrating accretion's self-amplifying, compounding character.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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Instead of degenerating into addiction, it ripened into pure devotion.

Welwood's account of courtly love demonstrates that unrequited passion, precisely because it cannot accumulate possessively, can be refined rather than accreted into compulsion.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

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The energy of delusion is the passion for sin, inflaming the soul with thoughts of sensual pleasure ... It nourishes itself on pleasure ... so that little by little the disposition to self-indulgence expels all grace from the person thus possessed.

Gregory of Sinai identifies how delusion's passion is self-nourishing — a paradigmatic description of accreted passion consuming the interior space it inhabits.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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suppose it to be Action in proceeding from an object, and Passion in being directly upon another — though it remains the same motion throughout.

Plotinus's metaphysical analysis of passion as the receptive mode of a single motion provides the classical ontological backdrop against which later depth-psychological accounts of passion's accumulation are implicitly framed.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270aside

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passion is a sensible activity of the appetitive faculty, depending on the presentation to the mind of something good or bad ... passion in general, is defined as a movement in one thing caused by another.

John of Damascus provides the scholastic definition of passion as receptive movement, anchoring the concept's premodern semantics before its psychological elaboration.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside

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