Phlegm occupies a revealing, if rarely central, position in the depth-psychology corpus. It enters primarily through two distinct conduits: the ancient humoral tradition, in which phlegm constitutes one of the four bodily fluids whose balance determines temperament and disease, and the alchemical tradition, where it figures as a quality—the cold, moist, viscous—associated with the albedo, the lunar, and the sluggishness inherent even in the highest mental operations. Plato’s Timaeus, a foundational source for both lines, treats phlegm as a product of bodily corruption, generated when flesh wastes into the veins, and as the specific cause of defluxion-diseases and, crucially, of the ‘sacred disease’ of epilepsy. Hillman’s alchemical psychology reconstellates this material most provocatively, arguing that phlegm is the necessary shadow of silver’s brilliance—the ‘phlegmatic leprosy’ that accompanies intellectual activity, legitimising leisure as a structural companion to the life of the mind. Place and Miller locate phlegm within the fourfold humor-typology that Jung inherited and then critically distanced himself from, noting that Jung found the temperamental schema phenomenologically inadequate. Ruth Padel traces the medical-flux imagery that gave phlegm its cosmological weight in Greek tragic thought. The tension across the corpus is between phlegm as pathological surplus to be expelled and phlegm as a psychologically necessary, even redemptive, principle of inertia.
leisure is the phlegm of silver, its necessary leprosy, so that the sociology of leisure grows out of the seeds of the metals in both man and world.
Hillman revalues phlegm alchemically, arguing it is the constitutive inertia of silver—and therefore of intellectual and leisured life—rather than merely a pathological humour to be overcome.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
Acid and saline phlegm is the source of all disorders that occur by defluxion; they have received many different names according to the divers regions towards which the fluxion is directed.
This Platonic commentary establishes phlegm as the primary aetiological agent of defluxion-diseases, including epilepsy, grounding the humoral theory that subsequent depth-psychological authors inherit.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
phlegm, which is related to water; blood to air; black bile to earth; and yellow bile to fire. Each of these humors, in turn, was believed to be the cause of a psychological temperament: phlegm caused sluggishness.
Place maps phlegm within the classical fourfold system of elements, humours, and temperaments, noting that Jung found this inherited schema insufficient for his own psychological observations.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005thesis
from which is generated every sort of phlegm and bile. All things go the wrong way and cease to give nourishment to the body, no longer preserving their natural courses, but at war with themselves.
Plato’s Timaeus identifies phlegm as co-arising with bile from the corruption of flesh and blood, positioning it as a sign of the body’s internal warfare against its own constitution.
, Timaeus, -360supporting
contains all sorts of bile and serum and phlegm. For all things go the wrong way, and having become corrupted, first they taint the blood itself.
Plato describes phlegm as one product of the general corruption of bodily fluids, situating it within a broader pathological economy of humoral disorder and constitutional dissolution.
, Timaeus, -360supporting
“humour” is an ens, an essence of man that flows from the idiosyncratic balance of his four fundamental fluids: namely, the blood, the phlegm, the choler, and the melancholer (melancholy).
Miller draws on Ben Jonson’s dramatization of the humoral theory to argue that each humour, including phlegm, functions as a controlling archetypal metaphor shaping the whole character of a person.
, Achelous and the Butterfly: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Humor, 1973thesis
passive fantasy, a mental viscosity or laziness, accompanies the mind’s own brilliance. Hence, the long hours of waste, the phlegmatic leprosy that accompanies intellectual activity.
Hillman identifies phlegmatic inertia as an intrinsic companion to the silvery, lunar brilliance of the intellect, making passivity structurally inseparable from active imagination.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
bowels are upset by phlegm running down from the head. The idea of inner flux informed eighteenth-century humoral pathology: passions caused movement in ‘humors,’ which made patients think of things that ‘excited’ them.
Padel traces how the image of phlegm as a downward-flowing, disturbing liquid persisted from ancient medicine into Enlightenment humoral pathology as an explanation of how passion and disease intersect.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
“breaths” cause internal reumata, the throat goes rough and sore whenever phlegm prospesei, with reuma prospiptron.
Padel cites Hippocratic usage to show phlegm operating within a broader flux-and-channel model of disease, where breath and liquid interact to produce pathological states of the inner body.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
therapy may take on a moisture, not being so analytic and ‘dry,’ but rather truly archetypal, possessed by a sense of humors.
Miller invokes the humoral tradition, including the watery principle associated with phlegm, to argue that depth-psychological therapy should embrace moisture and flux rather than arid rationality.
, Achelous and the Butterfly: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Humor, 1973aside
doctors must know ‘in what seasons the humors flower, and what nosemata they create in each, and what pathemata in each cause disease.’
Padel documents the Hippocratic seasonal-humoral framework within which phlegm was understood as one of the flowering humours producing specific pathemata and disease patterns.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside