Reintegration

Reintegration occupies a structural position in depth-psychological discourse wherever the movement of psychic life is understood as necessarily involving dissolution before reconstitution. The term’s valence shifts significantly depending on context. In Fordham’s developmental model, reintegration is the complementary arc to deintegration: after the infant’s encounter with stimulating experience, reintegration names the return to a quieter, assimilative state in which the self reconsolidates what has been taken in. McGilchrist draws on Hegelian Aufhebung to frame reintegration as the right hemisphere’s recovery of what the left hemisphere has analytically abstracted — a philosophically sophisticated reading in which the achieved reintegration is not merely a return but a genuine sublation that preserves and elevates prior differentiations. Eliade deploys the term mythologically, identifying reintegration with the ritual reactualization of sacred time, the periodic return to illud tempus that briefly abolishes profane history. Corbin references a cognate ‘myth of reintegration’ in Iranian Sufism, situating it within the cosmological narrative of spiritual return. Across these registers — developmental psychology, neuropsychology, comparative religion, and phenomenology of mysticism — reintegration names the same essential motion: a gathering of what has been scattered, an overcoming of fragmentation through a higher or restored wholeness. The tension between whether reintegration produces identity with an original state or genuine transformation remains the field’s central open question.

In the library 12 passages

REINTEGRATION AS AUFHEBUNG I have expressed this reintegration in terms of a ‘return’ to the right hemisphere. This risks suggesting that the achievements of the left hemisphere’s interventions are lost or nullified

McGilchrist explicitly theorizes reintegration as Hegelian Aufhebung — a dialectical sublation in which the left hemisphere’s analytical work is preserved rather than negated when the right hemisphere recovers the whole.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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reintegration involves sleep or sleepy states of quietude. Reintegration is a time when the infant needs to feel separate as he assimilates and digests the exciting deintegrative process.

In Fordham’s model as reported by Samuels, reintegration is the infant’s restorative phase following deintegration — a quiet, separative assimilation that constitutes one pole of the self’s primary developmental rhythm.

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

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It is precisely the reintegration of this original and sacred time that differentiates man’s behavior during the festival from his behavior before or after it.

Eliade identifies reintegration as the festival’s defining ritual act — the periodic restoration of sacred, originary time that suspends profane temporality and re-connects humanity with divine creative acts.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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laying a foundation for subsequent social reintegration

Li employs reintegration in its clinical-social register, designating the return of individuals with substance use disorder to communal life as the telos of a phased rehabilitation exercise programme.

Li, Yongting, Exercise as a Promising Adjunct Treatment for Methamphetamine Addiction: Advances in Understanding Neuroplasticity and Clinical Applications, 2025aside

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the separated cannot remain separated forever. It will be united again and the month of the fish will soon be over.

Jung articulates in mythological-astrological idiom a vision of coming reintegration — the eventual reunion of opposites that have been cosmologically divided since the Christian aeon.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside

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