Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'resignation' names a genuinely contested concept whose valence shifts dramatically according to disciplinary context and analytical purpose. Karen Horney supplies the most sustained theoretical treatment, distinguishing neurotic resignation — a defensive withdrawal from active wishing, striving, and engagement in order to manage inner conflict — from its constructive analogues in spiritual renunciation and the mellowing wisdom of later life. For Horney, resigned individuals often pass for 'normal' precisely because their detachment mimics equanimity, yet beneath that surface lies a static self-concept, emotional inertia, and a marked aversion to change. William James approaches resignation from the phenomenology of religious experience, reading Stoic and Epicurean variants as historically significant but ultimately insufficient philosophies of despair — dignified way-stations on the road toward fuller spiritual surrender. Edward Edinger reads resignation as the terminal destination of a purely personalistic, reductive psychology: where the numinous is dissolved into biography, disillusionment and resignation are all that remain. Jung's own letters deploy the term almost exclusively in its administrative register — tendering or finalizing his resignation from institutional offices — though this biographical material carries a secondary psychological weight, marking the moments at which he disengages from collective structures to pursue individuation. James's Puritan account of giving a dying wife 'up unto the Lord' presents resignation as a supreme act of devotional will. Together these voices identify a field in which resignation marks the boundary between pathological withdrawal, courageous acceptance, and transformative renunciation.
In the library
11 passages
Since he can do this only by resigning from active living, "resignation" seems a proper name for this solution. It is in a way the most radical of all solutions and, perhaps for this very reason, most often produces conditions that allow for a fairly smooth functioning.
Horney defines neurotic resignation as the most radical defensive solution — withdrawal from active living — distinguishing it from constructive spiritual renunciation while noting how its apparent smoothness allows it to pass undetected as normality.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
Looking back now at the total structure of resignation from the viewpoint of the preservation of integrity, certain observations fall in line and gain significance. Detached, resigned people may be impractical, inert, inefficient... but they possess — to a greater or lesser extent — an essential sincerity.
Horney locates a paradoxical integrity at the heart of the resigned structure: the very withdrawal that impairs functioning also preserves an incorruptible inner sincerity.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
The very essence of this solution is withdrawing from active living, from active wishing, striving, planning, from efforts and doing... The whole attitude of resignation may be conscious; in that case the person regards it as the better part of wisdom.
Horney characterizes the resigned type's static self-concept and aversion to change as intrinsic to the solution, noting that conscious resignation is rationalized as superior judgment rather than recognized as defensive withdrawal.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
The resigned type largely restricts his expansiveness in order to maintain intact the genuineness of his feelings. But if carried to extremes the process chokes off the very aliveness it was meant to preserve.
Horney traces the tragic internal logic of resignation: the defensive restriction intended to protect emotional authenticity eventually produces the deadness of feeling it sought to avoid.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
There is dignity in both these forms of resignation. They represent distinct stages in the sobering process which man's primitive intoxication with sense-happiness is sure to undergo.
James reads Stoic and Epicurean resignation as philosophically dignified but ultimately inadequate stages in the soul's progressive disentanglement from sensory happiness, pointing toward fuller religious surrender.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
"I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real Resignation, I gently put her out of my hands... This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did."
James presents an experiential case in which religious resignation — the deliberate relinquishment of a beloved to God — is framed not as passive defeat but as an act requiring maximal courage and constituting a formal devotional gesture.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
If Job is to be considered as a neurotic and interpreted from the personalistic point of view, then he will end where psychoanalysis ends, viz. in disillusionment and resignation, where its creator most emphatically ended too.
Edinger argues that reductive, personalistic psychology inevitably terminates in resignation and disillusionment, positioning the Jungian hypothesis of archetypes as the necessary corrective that rescues the psyche from this impasse.
Edinger, Edward F., The Creation of Consciousness Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984supporting
Shrinking process, and morbid dependency, 244; and resignation, 259, 260; and self-effacing type, 219, 223, 317
Horney's index situates resignation within a network of related neurotic processes — shrinking, morbid dependency, self-effacement — mapping its structural relationships across the typology of neurosis.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
Appeal of Freedom (Chap. 11), 259 ff. (see also Neurotic resignation) ... Avoidance tactics and neurotic resignation, 261, 279
Horney's index links neurotic resignation systematically to the appeal of freedom and avoidance tactics, indicating its structural role within her broader theory of neurotic solutions.
Horney, Karen, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950aside
On April 20, Jung resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. On April 30, he resigned as a lecturer in the medical faculty of the University of Zürich. He recalled that he felt that he was in an exposed position at the university and felt that he had to find a new orientation.
The Red Book's editorial note documents Jung's successive institutional resignations as the biographical threshold marking his withdrawal from collective psychoanalytic authority in order to pursue his own confrontation with the unconscious.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
The logical outcome of this situation is that I tender my resignation as president of the International Society and I shall address myself in this sense to the head of the German group.
Jung frames resignation from institutional office as a principled logical conclusion to untenable political circumstances rather than as psychological withdrawal, illustrating the administrative rather than depth-psychological register of the term in his correspondence.