Psychoid

Psychoid for Jung is a term that describes processes that are psyche-like or quasi-psychic but not properly so. The term is used to distinguish psychic functions from vitalistic ones. Psychoid processes lie between somatic life-energy and sheer bodily processes on the one hand and true psychic processes on the other.

Stein provides the most precise structural definition in the secondary literature, locating psychoid processes in the transitional zone between bodily energy and genuine psychic function.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis

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The psychoid process is not the unconscious as such, for this has a far greater extension. Apart from psychoid processes, there are in the unconscious ideas and volitional acts, hence something akin to conscious processes; but in the instinctual sphere these phenomena retire so far into the background that the term ‘psychoid’ is probably justified.

Jung himself demarcates the psychoid from the broader unconscious, confining it to the instinctual-somatic extreme where volitional and ideational processes are absent.

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

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Maybe this comparison could be extended to the psyche in general, which would not be an impossibility if there were ‘psychoid’ processes at both ends of the psychic scale. In accordance with the principle ‘natura non facit saltus,’ such an hypothesis would not be altogether out of place.

Jung proposes that psychoid processes bound the psychic spectrum at both poles — infrared instinct and ultraviolet spirit — preserving continuity without collapsing the distinction between psyche and matter.

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

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The confusion obviously springs from the organological standpoint, still observable in Bleuler, which operates with concepts like ‘cortical soul’ and ‘medullary soul’ and has a distinct tendency to derive the corresponding psychic functions from these parts of the brain, although it is always the function that creates its own organ.

Jung distinguishes his use of ‘psychoid’ from Bleuler’s organ-anchored conception, insisting that function precedes organic substrate and that psychoid cannot be reduced to neuroanatomy.

Jung, C. G. and Pauli, Wolfgang, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955thesis

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The psychoid boundary defines the gray area between the potentially knowable and the totally unknowable — the potentially controllable and the totally uncontrollable. Spirit and instinct are by nature autonomous and both limit in equal measure the applied field of the will.

Stein articulates the psychoid boundary as the epistemological and volitional limit of the psyche, beyond which neither knowledge nor will can reach.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis

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With respect to the psychoid, reflex-instinctual state, therefore, the psyche implies a loosening of bonds and a steady recession of mechanical processes in favour of ‘selected’ modifications. With the explicit exception of the psychoid unconscious, as this includes things which are not capable of consciousness and are only ‘quasi-psychic.’

Jung formally excludes the psychoid unconscious from the domain of the properly psychic, defining it as intrinsically incapable of consciousness and therefore only quasi-psychic.

Jung, C. G. and Pauli, Wolfgang, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955thesis

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Speaking of the psychoid archetype, Jung says it is a transcendent reality that is inconceivable in itself. A science of soul cannot know, or name as if it knew, the transcendent, but it can remember in its speaking that it cannot.

Romanyshyn reads the psychoid archetype as imposing a fundamental epistemological humility on psychology, requiring it to treat its own language as necessarily approximate and provisional.

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

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Although, therefore, the psychoid unconscious is unknowable in its own right, its existence for Jung cannot be dismissed or denied. What it does require, as we saw in the first chapter, is an attitude toward language that is always provisional.

Romanyshyn affirms the ontological reality of the psychoid unconscious while insisting that its radical unknowability demands a permanently provisional psychological language.

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

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During that preconscious time, a psychoid process with which a physical event meaningfully coincides. Here the meaning cannot be recognized because there is as yet no consciousness. It is through the archetype that we come closest to this early, ‘irrepresentable,’ psychoid stage of conscious development.

Edinger situates the psychoid process at the pre-conscious origins of both cosmos and psyche, linking it to synchronicity and to the archetype as the closest available intimation of that irrepresentable ground.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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The crisis of language that the psychoid archetype introduces is no less challenging today than the crisis of language introduced with the original notion of the unconscious more than a hundred years ago.

Romanyshyn frames the psychoid archetype as generating a contemporary crisis of psychological language analogous in scope to Freud’s original introduction of the unconscious.

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

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There is no conscious content which is not in some other respect unconscious. Maybe, too, there is no unconscious psychism which is not at the same time conscious. Besides, there are processes with regard to which no relation to the conscious ego can be demonstrated and which yet seem to be ‘represented’ or ‘quas[i-psychic]’.

Jung prepares the ground for the psychoid concept by arguing that consciousness and unconsciousness are not absolute categories, leaving space for processes that are quasi-represented but not properly psychic.

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

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Archetypes: and psychoid unconscious, 29–30; as psychosomatic entities, 27, 35.

Samuels indexes the direct theoretical connection between archetypes and the psychoid unconscious in post-Jungian discourse, confirming the concept’s foundational role in discussions of the archetype-instinct polarity.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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Psychoid unconscious, 68.

Wiener’s index entry places the psychoid unconscious within the clinical context of the psyche’s neurological-mental interface and its relation to soma, indicating its relevance to clinical transference theory.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting

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‘Psychoid,’ 176f., 183f., 436, 505, 513.

The index of Jung’s own Collected Works volume confirms the distribution of the psychoid concept across discussions of instinct, psyche, and synchronicity, indicating the concept’s structural centrality to that volume.

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

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Jung maps the psyche as a spectrum, with the archetype at the ultraviolet end and the instinct at the infrared end. In practice and actual experience, instincts and archetypes are always found in mixed and never in pure form.

Stein’s spectral model implicitly describes the psychoid zones at either pole of the archetype-instinct axis, where psychic processes shade into their quasi-psychic infrared and ultraviolet limits.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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Psychoid, 68; repressed, 13, 30.

Wiener’s index distinguishes the psychoid unconscious from the repressed unconscious, reflecting Jung’s own insistence that the two concepts are theoretically discrete.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting

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Psychoid form, 272.

The passing reference to ‘psychoid form’ in Jung’s early psychogenesis volume indicates the term’s reach into his clinical and alchemical writings beyond its primary theoretical elaboration.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907aside

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Psyche 219, 268, 277–8, 282, 283, 287, 313; anatomy of the 275, 276; and the anima/animus 115; collective 78; and the collective unconscious 66, 67, 68, 71, 75, 76; dissociability of the 21, 24.

The Handbook’s index co-locates psyche with the collective unconscious and dissociability in ways that implicitly frame the territory within which the psychoid concept operates, though it is not directly named here.

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

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