The term ‘phenomenon’ occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, carrying substantially different valences depending on whether the author approaches from phenomenological philosophy, empirical psychology, religious studies, or natural science. Heidegger establishes the rigorous ontological baseline: the phenomenon in the ‘genuine primordial sense’ is precisely that which shows itself from itself, distinguished sharply from mere appearance or semblance — a distinction that reverberates through Thompson’s integration of biology and phenomenology, and through Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perceptual constancy. James, by contrast, treats the phenomenon as the irreducible unit of religious experience: events that ‘defy expression’ yet carry overwhelming noetic authority. Eliade insists that religious phenomena must be encountered as religious phenomena — not dissolved into psychological or sociological surrogates — and thus sets the methodological stakes for the historian of religions against the phenomenologist. Jung’s school extends the term into clinical territory: transference, hysterical cough, repetition in word-association — all are named ‘phenomena’ whose significance lies not in surface behavior but in the unconscious complexes they betray. Sardello, Ulanov, and Sardello each press further, asking whether the compelling agency felt within a phenomenon belongs to the individual psyche or to something genuinely transpersonal. The unresolved tension between phenomenological immanence and depth-psychological transcendence makes this term indispensable to the concordance.
what thus shows itself (the ‘phenomenon’ in the genuine primordial sense) is at the same time an ‘appearance’ as an emanation of something which hides itself in that appearance
Heidegger draws the foundational distinction between the phenomenon as self-showing and appearance as the concealed announcing itself through what shows itself, establishing the ontological grammar for all subsequent phenomenological usage.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
it is the historian of religions who will make the greatest number of valid statements on a religious phenomenon as a religious phenomenon — and not as a psychological, social, ethnic, philosophical, or even theological phenomenon
Eliade argues that the religious phenomenon must be granted its own irreducible category of interpretation, resisting reduction to adjacent disciplinary vocabularies.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
the vertical nature of the call, equal to its interiority, that creates the enigma of the phenomenon of conscience. The authenticity of this phenomenon can only be reconquered with difficulty
Ricoeur identifies conscience as a phenomenon whose authentic structure is systematically obscured by moralizing interpretation, requiring a hermeneutics of suspicion to recover its genuine disclosive power.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Inevitably, we feel that the phenomenon’s compelling effect is due to some agency of the phenomenon itself. It feels like it’s alive, like there’s ‘somebody home’ in it.
Ulanov identifies the phenomenological experience of agency inherent to compelling phenomena as the crux of the debate between psychological projection and genuine transpersonal presence.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971thesis
the phenomenon of constancy is not preserved, as if constancy and the structure lighting-lighted object could occur only in things and not in the diffuse space of after-images
Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that perceptual constancy as a phenomenon is structurally dependent on the organized field of perception rather than on isolated sensory data.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
The original phenomenon was nothing less than a nature deity, a tremendum pure and simple, which is morally neutral. But the secondary phenomenon implies an act of discrimination
Jung distinguishes a primary, undifferentiated numinous phenomenon — the nature daemon — from the secondary phenomenon that emerges through the differentiation of consciousness, mapping the phenomenology of the sacred onto developmental psychology.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
it came to him, of course, in the form of an interest in a phenomenon in the world; but the word void carried all the mythic connotations of the great abyss out of which all creation comes
Sardello illustrates how a concrete physical phenomenon can simultaneously carry mythic depth, collapsing the boundary between empirical observation and archetypal imagination.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
Freud, who was the first to recognize and describe this phenomenon, coined the term ‘transference neurosis.’
Jung acknowledges transference as a clinically recognized phenomenon with its own internal structure, one whose therapeutic significance exceeds mere technical management.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954supporting
it always leads to a better understanding of a thing’s significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere
James argues that a religious phenomenon is most precisely understood through comparative study of its pathological variants, establishing the empirical-genetic method for phenomenological evaluation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
If you were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it.
James, drawing on al-Ghazali, insists that prophetic and mystical phenomena are empirically real yet inaccessible to those without the relevant experiential faculty, affirming the ineliminable primacy of direct experience.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
the hysterical hiccough is, to my mind, a rather serious phenomenon of bad prognosis. It points to a great hysteria; the hysterical cough, which is almost like it, is a more commonplace and less serious phenomenon.
Janet deploys the term phenomenologically in clinical nosology, differentiating hysterical phenomena by severity and prognostic weight within a graduated taxonomy of dissociative disorders.
, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting
In principle it is the same phenomenon as the additions to the reaction.
Jung identifies repetition of the stimulus-word in word-association as structurally equivalent to other adaptive-defensive phenomena, integrating diverse clinical observations under a single functional concept.
, Experimental Researches, 1904supporting
An important philosophical task is to show how there can be an account of the lived body that integrates biology and phenomenology, and so goes ‘beyond the gap’
Thompson situates the phenomenological project as the necessary mediator between biological description and the lived experience of the body, reframing the mind-body problem as a body-body problem requiring phenomenological resolution.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
he lives in the sky and is manifested in meteorological phenomena — thunder, lightning, storm, meteors, and so on. This means that certain privileged structures of the cosmos constitute favorite epiphanies of the supreme being
Eliade demonstrates that natural phenomena function as hierophanies — privileged structural disclosures of the sacred — rather than mere physical events, grounding his phenomenology of religion in cosmological symbolism.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
the setting up of a concept or system of concepts (and hence also of a law of nature) is a psychical reality of decisive importance
Pauli argues that the constitution of natural phenomena through conceptual frameworks is itself a psychical act, bridging the physics of observation with depth-psychological accounts of the knowing subject.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994supporting
phenomena, both living and created, are animated by qualities that unite their disparate elements according to a unifying purpose
Keltner proposes a systems-level phenomenology of awe in which phenomena are holistically apprehended through intuition and metaphor rather than reductive analysis.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
people who feel more everyday awe are less likely to engage in what is called teleological reasoning; they are less likely to attribute phenomena to the narrow purposes they might serve
Keltner’s empirical research suggests that awe modifies the interpretive stance toward phenomena, loosening teleological attribution and opening perception to systemic complexity.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside
These differences in treatment approaches and effectiveness point phenomenologically to basic core differences in the nature of addictions (both psychologically and physiologically) and other mental/emotional disorders.
Schoen employs ‘phenomenologically’ to signal that clinical distinctions between addiction, neurosis, and psychosis are grounded in the qualitative structure of the phenomena themselves rather than in theoretical classification alone.
, The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020aside