Psychic Layering

Theoretically, it should be possible to 'peel' the collective unconscious, layer by layer, until we came to the psychology of the worm, and even of the amoeba.

This passage presents Jung's foundational phylogenetic thesis: the collective unconscious is structured in strata corresponding to evolutionary history, and psychic layering is both a metaphor and a concrete biological reality requiring integration through individuation.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis

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it is not time alone that gives the feeling; it is the oldness as character, character as layering, a complexity that makes the plate unique and calls from us respect.

Hillman recasts psychic layering as the phenomenological texture of character itself, arguing that temporal accretion — not mere duration — constitutes the depth and uniqueness of a person or thing.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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avian cortex, because of its lack of cell layering (as in ancient mammals) is not as visually self-evident... the subcortical areas remain quite similarly laid out in birds and mammals.

Panksepp's neuroscientific data on cortical cell layering provides partial empirical corroboration for the depth-psychological claim that psychic strata correspond to phylogenetic levels of neural organization.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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The separation, layering, and relations of these domains appear as aspects of individuation according to its different modalities; the more fundamental notions of first information, metastability, internal resonance, energetic potential, and orders of magnitude are substituted for the notions of substance, form, and matter.

Simondon reframes layering not as geological sediment but as a dynamic structural outcome of individuation, in which the physical, vital, and psycho-social domains are differentiated modalities rather than fixed strata.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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sensing the various events of the dream as its levels or weaves. But now we begin to hear and watch the dream in its narrative or dramatic sense.

Berry's description of reading a dream through its 'levels or weaves' implicitly applies a layering model to imaginal material, treating depth of image as analogous to stratified psychic structure.

Berry, Patricia, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982aside

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scious 'thoughts' and 'insights' lie close beside, above, or below consciousness, separated from us by the merest 'threshold' and yet apparently unattainable.

Jung's threshold model of psychic contents — positioned above or below consciousness by gradients of energic intensity — implies a vertical, layered topology of the psyche without explicitly naming it as such.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside

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