Few terms in the depth-psychology corpus carry as much contested weight as ‘Reality.’ The passages assembled here reveal not a single agreed referent but a field of competing ontologies, each with profound consequences for how the psyche is understood. Jung’s foundational move — refusing to restrict reality to sensorily-perceived objects and insisting on esse in anima, the psyche’s own reality-generating activity — opens a space that subsequent thinkers variously inhabit, challenge, or refine. Neumann extends this into a developmental claim: psychic reality is primary; the discovery of an ‘objective’ external world is a secondary, historically contingent achievement. McGilchrist argues from neuroscience and philosophy that reality is constitutively relational, an encounter rather than a fixed substrate, and that the left hemisphere’s reductive model systematically impoverishes it. Aurobindo and the Vedantic tradition introduce a vertical hierarchy — phenomenal appearance, cosmic manifestation, and ultimate Brahman — that renders all lesser realities provisional. Pauli bridges physics and depth psychology, noting that the very etymology of ‘reality’ (res versus agere) points toward two incommensurable registers. Nhat Hanh foregrounds Buddhist epistemology: conceptual overlays distort a living, streaming reality. Barrett’s constructionist account adds a social dimension: emotion categories possess ‘social reality,’ neither purely natural nor merely illusory. What unites these otherwise disparate voices is the recognition that how one delimits the real determines everything else in psychological and metaphysical inquiry.
Reality contains every— This limited picture of the world is a reflection of the one… everything that acts upon me is real and actual… Hence I can make statements only about real things
Jung refuses to restrict ‘reality’ to sensory data alone, arguing that anything capable of acting upon the psyche is real, thereby grounding the psychological reality of inner experience.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
Living reality is the product neither of the actual, objective behaviour of things nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both in the living psychological process, through esse in anima.
Edinger, drawing on Jung, defines living reality as the psyche’s active synthesis of sense-impression and idea — neither pure matter nor pure concept — an ongoing creative act the psyche performs through fantasy.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
the discovery of the objective, external world is a secondary phenomenon… we must not forget that the primary reality of man, which is the reality of the psyche.
Neumann argues that psychic reality — archetypes, mana, magical efficacy — is ontologically primary, and that the scientific construction of an ‘objective’ world is a late, derivative achievement of ego-consciousness.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
That which we come upon, which is beyond our power of choice, and with which we have to reckon, is what we designate as real… The more abstract concept derived from ‘agere’ or ‘wirken’ is closer to the one used in science.
Pauli offers a dual etymology of reality (res versus agere/Wirklichkeit) and argues that physical reality cannot be defined by isolating perception from rational ordering principles, pointing toward a participatory account.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis
truth, like reality, is an encounter… there is much evidence that the left hemisphere is less veridical, more ready to embrace denial and more likely to be taken in by an illusion than the right.
McGilchrist posits reality as constitutively relational — an encounter between subject and world — and grounds hemispheric asymmetry in differential fidelity to this encounter.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
truth, like reality, is an encounter… there is much evidence that the left hemisphere is less veridical, more ready to embrace denial and more likely to be taken in by an illusion than the right.
McGilchrist posits reality as constitutively relational — an encounter between subject and world — and grounds hemispheric asymmetry in differential fidelity to this encounter.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The Brahman, the supreme Reality, is That which being… a supreme experience which affirms and includes the truth of all spiritual experience, gives to each its own absolute, integralises all knowledge and experience in a supreme reality.
Aurobindo identifies Brahman as the supreme Reality that encompasses and integrates all lesser realizations, arguing against any exclusive Illusion-doctrine and for a hierarchically inclusive ontology.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Reality in itself is a stream of life, always moving. Images of reality produced by concepts are concrete structures framed by the concepts of space/time, birth/death, production/destruction, existence/nonexistence, one/many.
Nhat Hanh distinguishes reality-in-itself as a living flux from conceptually mediated images, arguing that conceptual overlays distort and fragment a prior, undivided stream of experience.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988thesis
simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled… complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling.
McGilchrist argues that our simplified models systematically occlude the irreducible complexity and richness of reality, which is always larger than any representation of it.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled… complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity.
McGilchrist argues that our simplified models systematically occlude the irreducible complexity and richness of reality, which is always larger than any representation of it.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
if universe and ourselves are an unreal reality… Maya and cosmos and ourselves are both real and unreal — but the reality is an unreal reality, real only to our ignorance, unreal to any true knowledge.
Aurobindo critically examines the Māyā doctrine’s paradox of ‘unreal reality,’ arguing that once any reality is conceded to the cosmos, it must be a true reality within its limits rather than a mere cognitive illusion.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
we become aware in all of them of the one omnipresent Reality; there need be no perception of an illusionary Maya, there is only an experience of the passage from Mind to what is beyond it.
Aurobindo argues that spiritual awakening into higher states reveals one omnipresent Reality rather than confirming any doctrine of cosmic illusion.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
this objective world is now viewed as the only reality… under the continual tutelage of the discriminative, masculine spirit, ever searching for laws and principles, the ‘reality principle’ comes to be represented by men.
Neumann traces the cultural-historical narrowing by which masculine, discriminating ego-consciousness came to identify external objectivity as the exclusive reality, marginalizing the primary psychic reality.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
The only world that any of us can know, then, is what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is… both parties evolve and are changed through the encounter: it is how we and it become more fully what we are.
McGilchrist argues that knowable reality is not a pre-given substrate but emerges through an ongoing, mutually transformative encounter between perceiver and world.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
our primary evidence of the objects of the universe consists of a structure of sense images, these are completed, validated, set in order by an automatic intuition in the consciousness which immediately relates the image with the thing imaged.
Aurobindo acknowledges the image-mediated character of experience while insisting that an intrinsic intuition anchors images to genuine objects, preventing a slide into pure illusionism.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Being able to maintain this hierarchy of degrees of reality is an essential part of realization. The degree of reality of particular inner and outer stimuli may shift.
Van der Hart applies Janet’s hierarchical model of reality to trauma theory, arguing that the capacity to grade and modulate degrees of reality is itself a core function of psychological health.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
intuition carries with it a similar feeling of certainty, but of a different kind of reality. It speaks of the reality of possibilities, but to an intuitive type this is just as absolute a reality as that possessed by the static fact.
Jung distinguishes sensation’s static, factual reality from intuition’s reality of possibilities, arguing that both confer genuine ontological conviction and cannot be hierarchically subordinated.
, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989supporting
The distinction between ‘real in nature’ versus ‘illusory’ is a false dichotomy. Fear and anger are real to a group of people who agree that certain changes in the body… are meaningful as emotions. In other words, emotion concepts have social reality.
Barrett argues that emotion categories are neither natural kinds nor mere illusions but possess ‘social reality,’ a category grounded in biological processes of categorization yet constituted through collective agreement.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting
‘Only that is real which never changes.’ By this definition nothing in the phenomenal world can be said to have ultimate reality.
Easwaran conveys Shankara’s criterion of immutability as the standard for ultimate reality, by which the entire phenomenal world — including the body — is disqualified from full ontological status.
, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualitysupporting
‘Only that is real which never changes.’ By this definition nothing in the phenomenal world can be said to have ultimate reality.
Easwaran conveys Shankara’s criterion of immutability as the standard for ultimate reality, by which the entire phenomenal world — including the body — is disqualified from full ontological status.
, The Upanishadssupporting
we propose to approach the phenomenon of reality by studying perceptual constants. A thing has in the first place its size and its shape throughout variations of perspective which are merely apparent.
Merleau-Ponty locates the phenomenon of reality in the body’s pre-reflective grasp of perceptual constants — size, shape, color — which persist across perspectival variation and ground the thing’s stable presence.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
consciousness consists in the appearances themselves… the point of the reduction would be lost if we tried to carve off the appearance and simply defined consciousness in terms of the underlying physical reality.
Thompson, following Searle, argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical reality because the appearance/reality distinction collapses in the case of subjective experience, giving consciousness a transcendental status.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
all turns on the mind’s conception or the mental being’s experience of Reality and how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative.
Aurobindo insists that the entire debate between Illusion and manifestation hinges on the validity and scope of mental and spiritual experience as a measure of Reality.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Physics does not talk any more about what can really be seen, but it designs and reflects theoretical models of reality. The natural reality level has been superseded.
Giegerich argues that modern physics and biology have moved to abstract, logical levels of description, superseding the naive natural-reality level and thereby demanding new psychological approaches.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the individual is only itself, but it exists as superior to itself, since it carries with it a more complete reality that individuation has not exhausted and that is still new and potential.
Simondon argues that the individual is always exceeded by a pre-individual reality it carries within itself, a surplus of potential that remains after individuation and grounds the transindividual.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
The play, for the performers and the audience, ‘is’ the mythical occurrence; but then again in a certain sense it is not, because everybody knows that the role of t[he performer is played].
Snell notes that Greek tragedy enacts a distinctive ontological threshold where mythical truth and temporal reality coincide without fully collapsing, prefiguring later discussions of symbolic and psychic reality.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside
the mysterious could, in fact, be ‘squared’ with physical reality… bringing together earthly and heavenly reality, present development and future potential, in a beautiful way.
Nichols invokes the alchemical squaring of the circle as an image of the integration of spiritual and physical reality, illustrating Jung’s approach to the coniunctio of inner and outer worlds.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside