Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘potential’ operates along several distinct but intersecting axes. In its most classical register — inherited from Aristotle’s act/power distinction and elaborated by Plotinus — potential names the latent capacity of matter to receive or become form, distinct from the actualising force that drives such transformation. Simondon radicalises this thermodynamic inheritance: potential energy is not a property residing inertly in a substance but arises from heterogeneity within a system, becoming the driver of individuation whenever metastable conditions permit phase-shift. McGilchrist, drawing on Bergson, distinguishes two irreducible kinds of potential — one in which the outcome pre-exists virtually, the other genuinely open to novelty — linking the second to creativity, temporality, and the right-hemispheric orientation toward life. Winnicott migrates the concept into relational space, identifying a ‘potential space’ between infant and environment as the locus of cultural and creative life. Siegel maps potential onto a probability topology, treating the movement from maximal possibility through elevated plateau to actualised peak as the fundamental structure of energy flow in mind and brain. The neurobiological literature, by contrast, treats potential almost entirely in its electrophysiological register — resting potential, action potential, synaptic potential — as the voltage differential that underwrites all neural signalling. What unites these otherwise disparate usages is the core intuition that potential is never mere absence but an energised readiness, a charged incompleteness oriented toward becoming.
The place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment (originally the object). The same can be said of playing.
Winnicott argues that ‘potential space’ — the intermediate zone of relational trust between self and world — is the constitutive site of both play and all cultural experience.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes
McGilchrist identifies Bergson’s bifurcation of potential — between a predetermined virtual and a genuinely open creative possibility — as decisive for understanding creativity, temporality, and freedom.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes
This parallel passage reinforces that the distinction between closed virtual potential and open creative potential is central to McGilchrist’s wider argument about time, uncertainty, and life.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Whatsoever has a potentiality must first have a character of its own; and its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that character to some other.
Plotinus establishes the Neoplatonic axiom that potentiality presupposes an existing character in a substrate while designating its capacity to exceed that character toward a further determination.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
the existence of potentials, which is also the cause of the incompatibility and non-stability of this state; the negative appears initially as an ontogenetic incompatibility, but it is in actuality merely the other side of a wealth of potentials
Simondon reframes ontogenetic negativity — incompatibility and instability — as the necessary expression of a surplus of potentials in the pre-individual, making potential the engine of individuation rather than a deficiency.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
the notions of potential charge, oriented tensions, supersaturation, and phase-shift, borrowed from thermodynamics, and the notion of the resonance internal to systems, intervene.
Simondon’s methodology imports thermodynamic potential — as charged tension within a metastable system — to model the pre-individual condition from which individuation proceeds by phase-shift.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
this relativity of potential that characterizes energy becomes manifest clearly if it is supposed… that a body heated homogeneously… can manage to make a potential energy appear if it is put into contact with another body of a different temperature.
Simondon demonstrates that potential energy is irreducibly relational — it emerges only through heterogeneity between systems, not as an intrinsic property of any isolated body.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
A potential energy that is translated within the clay by the forces of pressure is actualized while the mold is being filled. The matter conveys with it the potential energy being actualized; the form… plays an informing role by exerting forces without work, forces that limit the actualization of the potential energy.
Through the clay-and-mold example, Simondon shows that form does not impose itself on passive matter but rather limits and channels an active potential energy already borne by matter.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
what has been created is a system allowing for the conversion of one form of potential energy into another form of potential energy via a certain quantity of kinetic energy equivalent to the quantitative difference between these two potential energies
Simondon analyses the pendulum as a model system in which two potential energies continuously convert into one another through kinetic intermediary, illustrating the dynamic structure of potential difference.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
potential energies linked to a structure can only be transformed and unleashed by a modification of the conditions of stability of the system that contains them; thus, they are linked to the very existence of the system’s structure
Simondon distinguishes structural potential energies — released only at thresholds of systemic destabilisation — from the continuous energetic exchanges of ordinary mechanical systems.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
a certain unity of human action… Does not this unity belong to the metacategory of being as act and as power? And does not the ontological significance of this metacategory preserve what we have already termed… the analogical unity of action
Ricoeur reappropriates the Aristotelian act/power dyad as the ontological metacategory adequate to the unity of human agency, linking potential directly to the phenomenology of the acting self.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
That is what energy flow means: the movement from possibility at A to actuality at A-1.
Siegel maps potential as the maximal-possibility state on a probability topology, framing all mental energy flow as a transition from open potential through elevated probability to actualisation.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
You reach up and pull the weight down toward you, stretching the spring and creating in it potential energy. Then as you release the spring, the weight oscillates up and down until all of the spring’s energy is discharged.
Levine uses the mechanical metaphor of spring potential energy to explain how trauma binds and subsequently discharges arousal energy held in the nervous system.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
they confirmed Bernstein’s finding that the resting potential is created by the unequal distribution of potassium ions on either side of the cell membrane.
Kandel traces the electrophysiological resting potential to ionic asymmetry across the neuronal membrane, establishing potential difference as the physical substrate of all neural signalling.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
A synaptic potential can be either excitatory or inhibitory; if sufficiently strong, an excitatory synaptic potential will trigger an action potential in the postsynaptic cell.
Kandel’s glossary entry defines synaptic potential as the graded intermediate state that bridges presynaptic chemical signalling and postsynaptic action potential generation.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
the synaptic potential is produced by a chemical, it is rapid… When sufficiently large, it produces an action potential that causes the muscle fiber to contract.
Kandel establishes that transmitter-gated channels translate chemical signals into synaptic potentials, operationalising potential as the threshold-sensitive intermediate in neuromuscular communication.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
Citing William James, Siegel invokes ‘potential forms of consciousness’ as latent states ordinarily screened from waking awareness but accessible under appropriate conditions.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
Control Potential: low/high — whether there is nothing one can do vs. something one can do about the motive-relevant aspects of negative events
In appraisal theory, ‘control potential’ designates the appraised availability of coping resources, functioning as a cognitive dimension that shapes which emotion is elicited.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018aside
our perceptual and intellectual coping potential with respect to this challenge appears to have a direct bearing on the emotional reward or frustration associated with the processing effort
Menninghaus uses ‘coping potential’ to account for how the degree of perceived mastery over aesthetic difficulty modulates the hedonic valence of engagement with demanding artworks.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
Potential alcoholic that I was, I nearly failed my law course… We see large numbers of potential alcoholics among young people everywhere.
The AA corpus deploys ‘potential alcoholic’ as a clinical-diagnostic category distinguishing those predisposed to dependence from actual sufferers, functioning as a preventive and self-recognition device.
, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside