Passivity occupies a contested and multi-dimensional position across the depth-psychology corpus. Far from functioning as a simple antonym of activity, it emerges as a philosophically loaded term whose valence shifts dramatically depending on the theoretical register in which it is deployed. In Aurobindo’s integral metaphysics, passivity and activity are co-equal poles of a single Brahman-power — Tapas held in reserve versus Tapas released — neither reducible to the other, neither privileged above the other. In Plotinus, the distinction between Passion (paschō) and Action resists easy demarcation: motion remains the same whether in agent or patient, and the ontological status of passivity becomes genuinely problematic. Ricoeur, drawing on Spinoza and phenomenology, reads passivity as structurally woven into lived experience — in bodily selfhood, in affect, in the passions as ancient philosophers understood them — such that the conquest of activity is itself dependent on recognising prior passive conditions. In clinical depth psychology, Horney maps passivity onto neurotic resignation: the withdrawal from active wishing, striving, and planning that masquerades as wisdom or serenity. Abraham identifies passivity as a libidinal position, a retreat from full masculine activity into the pleasures of passive reception. Bly frames enforced passivity as a historically gendered wound. Peterson’s philological analysis of paschō — conjugated in the active voice — challenges the very grammatical assumption that suffering must be passive. Taken together, these voices reveal passivity as a site of profound ontological, clinical, and cultural contestation.
there is not a passive Brahman and an active Brahman, but one Brahman, an Existence which reserves Its Tapas in what we call passivity and gives Itself in what we call Its activity.
Aurobindo argues that passivity and activity are not separate ontological entities but two poles of a single dynamic reality, Tapas held inward versus Tapas released into motion.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
In the present tense, paschō is conjugated in the Active Voice… Modern logic dictates that ‘suffering’—the state of having something done to you—should be Passive by nature.
Peterson’s philological analysis reveals a structural paradox: the Greek verb for suffering and undergoing is grammatically active, challenging the modern equation of passivity with victimhood.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026thesis
since there is a passivity in Existence and in Nature as well as an activity, immobile status as well as kinesis, what is the place and role of this Force, this power and its concentration in regard to a status where there is no play of energy
Aurobindo raises the fundamental question of how conscious force or Tapas relates to a purely passive, immobile status of existence where no energy is visibly in play.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
there is still a gulf, an unrealised unity or a cleft of consciousness between the passive and the active Brahman… We have to preserve the inner silence, tranquillity, passivity as a foundation
In the Yoga of Works, Aurobindo designates inner passivity as an indispensable foundation that must coexist with — rather than be abandoned for — conscious participation in the active Brahman.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
instead of eliciting the degree of lived passivity proper to these various levels of experience and, hence, of identifying the kind of otherness that corresponds to each on the speculative plane.
Ricoeur frames passivity as a constitutive and graduated feature of lived experience — bodily, narrative, ethical — where each level of passivity discloses a corresponding form of otherness.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
in these three contexts, a certain passivity does seem to cor-relate with the action of doing something.
Ricoeur demonstrates that affect, drive, and emotion — the ancient category of passion — involve a structural passivity that is inseparable from active agency.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Passion in being directly upon another—though it remains the same motion throughout… an agent cannot be passive to the operation it performs upon another.
Plotinus interrogates whether Passion (passivity) is genuinely distinct from Action, arguing that the same motion underlies both and that the agent cannot itself be passive to its own operation.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Will all activities be related to passivity, or will some—for example, walking and speaking—be considered as independent of it?
Plotinus raises the categorical question of whether all action necessarily implies a corresponding passivity or whether certain activities are ontologically independent of it.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Brahman the Supreme Being must be aware both of the passivity and the activity and regard them not as his absolute being, but as opposite, yet mutually satisfying terms of his universalities.
Aurobindo insists that the supreme consciousness holds passivity and activity as mutually satisfying universals, neither of which exhausts the absolute.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
hyperactive intensification leads to an abrupt switch into hyperpassivity; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus without resistance.
Han argues that the compulsive hyperactivity of the performance society dialectically produces hyperpassivity — a complete surrender to stimuli — which is the very opposite of sovereign contemplative action.
, The Burnout Society, 2010thesis
The very essence of this solution is with-drawing from active living, from active wishing, striving, plan-ning, from efforts and doing.
Horney identifies neurotic passivity as the structural core of the resignation solution — a systematic withdrawal from striving that presents itself as equanimity.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
Analysis he feels should rid him of disturbing symptoms… whatever he hopes for should come easily, without pain or strain. The analyst should do the work.
Horney illustrates how the resigned patient’s passivity extends into the analytic relationship itself, expecting transformation to arrive without personal effort or active engagement.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
Unable to attain the highest pleasure through a full masculine activity, they have turned to what is to them the most intense pleasure—to the passive one of allowing bodily products to flow out.
Abraham locates passivity in libidinal development, reading it as a regressive retreat to infantile pleasure when the demands of active masculine sexuality prove unattainable.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Women are coming out into activity just as the men are passing them going the other way, into passivity. (The passivity of the ‘soft male’ of the first chapter is often a great surprise to women.)
Bly frames contemporary male passivity as a cultural-historical reversal, a gendered softening that mirrors and follows the historical enforced passivity once imposed on women.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990supporting
whenever he became too much aware of his passivity by contrast with other, energetic people, he used to correct reality with the help of his imagination and picture himself as a very active man
Abraham documents how consciousness of one’s own passivity generates compensatory fantasies of activity, revealing passivity as a source of shame and narcissistic injury in clinical neurosis.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
the retreat of passivity tied to inadequate ideas… This conquest of activity under the aegis of adequate ideas makes the work as a whole an ethicus.
Ricoeur, reading Spinoza, identifies passivity with inadequate ideas and the conquest of activity with the movement toward adequate understanding — passivity thus signals epistemic and ethical deficiency.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Their chief desire is to attain sexual gratification without taking any active part in it.
Abraham characterises the passive-neurotic orientation as a pervasive wish to receive pleasure without expenditure of agency, extending from sexuality into all domains of motor and social life.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
I no longer radiate things out but absorb them.
A patient’s phenomenological description of a trance-like passive state — reversing the usual outward direction of bodily and psychic energy into an absorptive inward pull — illustrates Abraham’s clinical concept of passive libidinal orientation.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
The technical operation that imposes a form on a passive and undetermined matter isn’t just an operation considered abstractly by the spectator
Simondon critiques the hylomorphic schema — the imposition of form on passive, undetermined matter — as a socially conditioned representation that naturalises the master/slave relation rather than describing actual individuation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside
activity/passivity in, 143, 173, 354, 356
Nussbaum’s index registers the activity/passivity distinction as a recurrent analytical axis within her treatment of sexual desire and the ethics of vulnerability in Greek thought.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside