The Seba library treats Psychological Mutation in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including Neumann, Erich, Aurobindo, Sri, Alexander, Bruce K.).
This psychological mutation with its symptomatology and symbolism Jung has described as the individuation process, and he has amplified it with a wealth of material in his works on alchemy.
Neumann identifies psychological mutation as Jungian technical nomenclature for the individuation process, specifically the decisive personality reorganization of midlife in which centroversion becomes conscious and the self displaces the ego.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever mutation is needed for the body.
Aurobindo argues that in the current evolutionary phase, psychological mutation is primary and causally prior to any somatic change, reversing the earlier biological logic of evolution.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
I offer the hypothesis that an actual mutation of the human condition is happening right under our eyes, in our societies. This mutation is not a mere hypothetical construct; on the contrary, I think it is observable in a whole parade of changes.
Alexander, citing Dufour, frames psychological mutation as an empirically observable socio-cultural phenomenon in which free-market post-modernity is producing a new, destabilized human psychological type.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis
A felt shift happens, but this is more than the ‘content mutation’ that Gendlin describes as the result of reflective unfolding.
Welwood distinguishes a deeper structural transformation of presence from Gendlin’s narrower ‘content mutation,’ implying that genuine psychological mutation involves a shift in the ground of being rather than merely a change in felt meaning.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones.
James describes a sudden reorganization of psychic energy in which peripheral ideas become central — a phenomenological account of transformation that anticipates the structural logic later named ‘psychological mutation’ by Neumann.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
Every part of mine then will by mutation be disposed into a certain part of the whole world, and that in time into another part; and so in infinitum; by which kind of mutation.
Marcus Aurelius employs ‘mutation’ in its classical cosmological sense of continuous material transformation, providing a philosophical ancestor to the psychological usage without directly theorizing the concept.
, Meditations, 180aside