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
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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
the LH leaves for the RH to reinstitute at a later stage of reintegration, which is why such a reintegration is essential
McGilchrist argues that formal analytical understanding remains lifeless and inert until the right hemisphere performs its essential act of reintegration, restoring immanent, living meaning.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
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
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
Corbin catalogues a 'myth of reintegration' as a named conceptual category within Iranian Sufi cosmology, pointing to a narrative of cosmic and spiritual return from exile or dispersion.
Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
as a person becomes more integrated, the range of extremes will lessen
Goodwyn treats increasing integration — the functional correlate of reintegration — as clinically trackable through the diminishing amplitude of conflict in dream imagery over the course of therapy.
Goodwyn, Erik D., Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018supporting
In all there is a lot more integration in this dream than in the previous dream. There is all sorts of conversation.
Goodwyn reads the presence of dialogue, shelter, and an absent antagonist in a dream series as evidence of progressive psychic reintegration, signalling deeper self-acceptance.
Goodwyn, Erik D., Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018supporting
Our job is to help our clients find their way to a state of integration, the place of health, and restoration.
Winhall frames therapeutic reintegration in systemic terms borrowed from complexity theory, describing it as the recovery of regulated functioning from chaos or rigidity — the restoration of health.
Winhall, Jan, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelsupporting
the psyche is experienced as dis-integrated. To survive, psychological dissociation has become essential.
Stein positions modernity's characteristic fragmentation and dissociation as the condition from which reintegration — the recovery of a unified center — would need to proceed.
Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
integration creates coherence by enabling the mind's flow of information and energy to achieve a balance in its movement toward maximizing complexity
Siegel grounds the logic of reintegration in interpersonal neurobiology, arguing that coherence — the goal of integrative process — emerges from a dynamic balance between differentiation and linkage.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
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
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