Process Psychology

Process Psychology, as the depth-psychology corpus employs it, designates not a single school but a cluster of overlapping commitments: the conviction that psychic life is fundamentally temporal, developmental, and self-transforming rather than static or purely structural. Its most consequential articulation appears in analytical psychology, where Jung’s sustained engagement with alchemy disclosed the unconscious as an autonomous process capable of producing and reorganizing its own contents — a view crystallized in Roesler’s formulation that Jung sought ‘a map of a universal transformation process’ to inform clinical work. Papadopoulos traces the genealogy of this orientation to Jung’s deepening recognition that ‘engaging the unconscious could bring about psychic change,’ culminating in the doctrine of individuation as an ongoing, open-ended movement. Giegerich presses further, arguing that a genuinely rigorous psychology must subject the discipline itself to the logic of process — the ‘vessel’ cannot remain insulated from the ‘corrupting process’ occurring within it. Hillman’s archetypal revision contests the mother-bound, developmental teleology that narrows process to ego maturation, insisting that psychology’s spiritual purposes are occluded when it reads the psyche only genetically. Bion contributes a parallel epistemology from the psychoanalytic side, privileging the process by which ideas are evolved over the static deployment of ideas already formed. The central tension running through all these positions concerns whether process is best understood as biological-teleological, dialectical-logical, or imaginal-archetypal — a debate that remains unresolved and generative.

In the library 12 passages

the idea of a universal form of a transformation process in psychotherapy is examined in more detail. It was Jung’s endeavour to create a map of this universal transformation process in order to inform psychotherapeutic work.

Roesler identifies the mapping of a universal transformation process as the operative core of analytical psychology, framing process psychology as Jung’s primary scientific ambition.

Roesler, Christian, The Process of Transformation — The Core of Analytical Psychology and How it Can Be Investigated, 2025thesis

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His study of alchemy brought him to an understanding of the unconscious as a process, and he began to clarify his view that the psyche can be transformed in a p

Papadopoulos traces Jung’s alchemical research as the turning point at which the unconscious was reconceived as an inherently processual rather than structural phenomenon, capable of genuine psychic transformation.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis

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the vessel itself is drawn into the process; it can no longer preserve its intactness as container vis-à-vis the prima materia and the corrupting process that the matter undergoes.

Giegerich argues that a thoroughgoing process psychology must dissolve the distinction between the containing discipline and its subject matter, implicating psychology itself in the transformation it studies.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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the spirit of psychology is lamed by materialism, literalism, and a genetic viewpoint toward its own subject matter, the psyche. The spiritual nature and purposes of psychology never emerge because the puer never emerges from the mother.

Hillman contends that mainstream developmental process psychology, by remaining bound to genetic and materialist models, forecloses the spiritual and archetypal dimensions proper to a genuinely psychic account of process.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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the use of ideas, and the symbols representing them, is less advanced than the process by which ideas are evolved.

Bion grounds his epistemology of psychoanalytic method in the primacy of generative process over finished conceptual products, aligning with process-psychological commitments to becoming over static structure.

Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting

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He attempted to develop a psychology of the religious-making process. Rather than proclaiming a new prophetic revelation, his interest lay in the psychology of religious experiences.

The Red Book editorial commentary situates Jung’s mature project as the construction of a process-oriented psychology of religion, focused on the dynamic movement from numinous experience through symbol formation to institutional creed.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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Our psychology takes account of the cultural as well as the natural man, and accordingly its explanations must keep both points of view in mind, the spiritual and the biological.

Jung frames analytical psychology as a dual-register process psychology that must hold biological and spiritual dimensions simultaneously rather than reducing psychic development to either pole.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954supporting

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‘the common background of microphysics and depth psychology’ is as much physical as psychic, and so is ‘neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.’

Romanyshyn locates process psychology at the boundary of physics and depth psychology, invoking Jung’s and Pauli’s search for a neutral-process substratum that underlies both psychic and physical events.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting

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what HILLMAN in fact has in mind here is not a yellowing or poisoning process at all. Rather, it is the operation of a simple substitution

Giegerich distinguishes authentic dialectical process — in which the psychological discipline itself is transformed — from Hillman’s merely substitutive expansion of focus, exposing an internal debate within post-Jungian process thinking.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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the psychology he sees is his psychology, and on top of that is the psychology of his type. He therefore supposes that there can be only one true explanation of the psychic process he is investigating

Jung’s typology argument implies that every account of psychic process is perspectivally conditioned, requiring a pluralistic rather than monolithic process psychology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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I conceived the libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy, hence as a more or less quantitative concept, which therefore should not be defined in qualitative terms.

Jung’s autobiographical account of his libido theory reveals the energic-processual model underlying his broader psychology, treating psychic life as a field of dynamic transformation analogous to physical energetics.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963aside

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In the aftermath of trauma, the integration of information processing on cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor levels is often compromised.

Ogden’s sensorimotor framework applies a multi-level process model to trauma, describing how dysregulation disrupts the hierarchical integration of somatic, affective, and cognitive processing streams.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006aside

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