The Seba library treats Rebellion in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Winnicott, D W, Horney, Karen, Fromm, Erich).
rebellion belongs to the freedom you have given your child by bringing him or her up in such a way that he or she exists in his or her own right.
Winnicott argues that rebellion is not a failure of parenting but its proper outcome — the sign that a child has been given sufficient psychic space to exist autonomously.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
The rebellion may take violent forms, and then often is a rebellion of despair. If he can’t be the ultimate of piety, chastity, sincerity, then he will be thoroughly ‘bad,’ be promiscuous, tell lies, affront others.
Horney characterizes neurotic rebellion as a desperate inversion of the idealized self-image, oscillating between rigid compliance and transgressive excess rather than achieving authentic freedom.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
Since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself?
Fromm identifies the paradox that internalized authority — conscience — forecloses rebellion by dissolving the distinction between the self and the force it might otherwise resist.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis
he found himself on a ‘seesaw from hope to rebellion and back again’
Dennett traces Wilson’s cyclic rebellion against sobriety and spirituality to his Mars-Uranus-Saturn complex, framing addiction-driven defiance as an archetypal pattern rather than mere willfulness.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting
Wilson’s (2005) journey through addiction was marked by periods of rebellion, but his path to recovery was characterized by a series of realizations.
Dennett presents rebellion as a phase within the individuation arc of addiction recovery — a necessary but ultimately insufficient movement that must be superseded by surrender and spiritual opening.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting
God himself has solved the problem of human rebellion against the Creator by transforming the worst act of rebellion against him, the crucifixion of his unique Son, into the means of human redemption.
Thielman articulates a theological reading in which rebellion against the divine is both the fundamental human condition and the very instrument through which redemption is accomplished.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
the revolutionary ideals that would later be instituted during the following Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1787–98, one cycle later, in the U.S. Constitution (1787–88) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
Tarnas embeds collective rebellion within the cyclic Uranus-Pluto archetype, arguing that historical insurgencies cluster with remarkable precision around planetary alignments.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
Wilson’s Archetypal Complexes
Dennett’s chapter outline signals that rebellion is treated as one among several archetypal complexes organizing Wilson’s psychological and addictive biography.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025aside