Quasi Physical Subjectivity designates a liminal ontological register in which imaginal or psychic contents present themselves with the compelling force and sensory texture of material reality without being reducible to it. Within the depth-psychology corpus the concept crystallises most sharply in Robert Bosnak’s phenomenology of embodied imagination, where the dreaming environment is characterised as ‘quasi-physical’: it elicits genuine somatic responses — altered heartbeat, respiration, muscular tension — yet dissolves upon waking, revealing its nature as something neither fully material nor merely mental. This formulation challenges the Cartesian absolute split between body and mind by locating dream and hypnagogic experience in a tertiary zone that generates bodily states as effectively as external stimuli. Adjacent theoretical pressures arrive from Jung’s concept of the psychoid — processes that are ‘quasi-psychic’ rather than properly psychic — and from phenomenological neuroscience (Damasio, Thompson) where subjectivity is shown to be inextricably bodily yet irreducible to classical physicalism. The central tension running through these accounts concerns ontological status: is quasi-physical subjectivity a methodological convenience, an epistemological horizon, or a genuine stratum of reality? The stakes are clinical as well as philosophical, since the capacity to re-enter quasi-physical dream environments therapeutically depends on granting them sufficient ontological weight to produce somatic and psychological transformation.
the image is of a quasi-physical nature, presenting itself as if it were physical. This quasi-physical environment creates strong responses in the body, embodied states.
Bosnak establishes the foundational definition: imaginal environments present with physical force sufficient to generate genuine somatic responses, yet their physicality proves contingent and evaporates upon waking.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
usually experienced as more flimsy than are the solid quasi-physical presences of dream worlds. This relative flimsiness is partly due to our dual state of consciousness in the waking hypnagogic state.
Bosnak develops a graduated phenomenology in which the density of quasi-physical presence correlates with the singularity or duality of the consciousness attending it, grounding therapeutic amplification technique.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
We help the dreamer flashback into the quasi-physical hospital environment… Now in a full flashback with the accompanying hypnagogic state, the dreaming ambience re-establishes itself.
Bosnak illustrates the clinical operationalisation of quasi-physical subjectivity through induced flashback, demonstrating how the imaginal environment can be deliberately re-entered and inhabited somatically.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
The mixture of the unconscious identifying activity and the presence with which it identifies gives rise to the experience of subjectivity.
Bosnak locates personal subjectivity in an unconscious identificatory activity, showing how quasi-physical subjectivity arises from a habitual — and revisable — binding of consciousness to a particular embodied position.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
Psychoid processes lie between somatic life-energy and sheer bodily processes on the one hand and true psychic processes on the other.
Stein clarifies Jung’s psychoid concept as an exact structural parallel to quasi-physical subjectivity: a threshold region that is neither purely somatic nor fully psychic, occupying an intermediate ontological stratum.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
the psychoid unconscious, as this includes things which are not capable of consciousness and are only ‘quasi-psychic.’
Jung’s own formulation of the quasi-psychic provides the theoretical antecedent for the quasi-physical: contents that shadow somatic and psychic processes without belonging fully to either domain.
, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955supporting
The problem of what it is for mental processes to be also bodily processes is thus in large part the problem of what it is for subjectivity and feeling to be a bodily phenomenon.
Thompson frames the hard problem of consciousness in terms that directly contextualise quasi-physical subjectivity: subjectivity cannot be separated from its bodily substrate, yet that substrate exceeds classical physical description.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
there is no way to step outside, as it were, of experiencing subjectivity, so as to reduce it entirely to physiological processes.
Thompson, following Merleau-Ponty, argues that the transcendental status of subjectivity resists any purely objectivist account, lending philosophical support to the irreducible ‘as-if-physical’ character of imaginal experience.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Precisely this external, nonsubjective view of the world now needs to be reworked… we have first to recollect the idea of reality that generally operates throughout depth psychology.
Hillman calls for a revision of the concept of external reality within depth psychology, implicitly demanding the kind of intermediate ontological category that quasi-physical subjectivity supplies.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Subjectivity, the hallmark of consciousness, is the ability to own one’s mental experiences and endow those experiences with an individual perspective.
Damasio’s account of subjectivity as perspectival ownership of mental content provides a neuroscientific framework within which quasi-physical subjectivity can be understood as the first-person perspective generated by imaginal rather than externally-sourced sensation.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
One of the main contributors to the building of subjectivity is the operation of the sensory portals within which we find the organs responsible for generating images of the outside world.
Damasio shows that subjectivity is constituted through perspectival sensory portals — a point that illuminates how quasi-physical imagery can commandeer the same mechanisms to generate a felt bodily perspective.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Dreaming was the cause for the proclamation of the absolute split between body and mind in western philosophy. It began with a thought experiment.
Bosnak places the quasi-physical problematic within its philosophical genealogy by noting that the Cartesian mind-body split itself originated from reflection on the deceptive physicality of dreaming experience.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007aside
A supraphysical fact may impinge on the physical world and produce physical results; it may even produce an effect on our physical senses and become manifest to them.
Aurobindo argues for a supraphysical order that can produce genuine physical effects, providing a comparative metaphysical context for the quasi-physical status of imaginal experience.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside
depersonalization abstracts the ego to its barest dictionary definition… the personal sense of being, subjective interiority, the sense of ‘me-ness,’ is gone.
Hillman’s account of depersonalisation illuminates by contrast what quasi-physical subjectivity provides: the felt sense of embodied me-ness that anchors imaginal experience as one’s own.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985aside