The ‘Return of the Irrational’ designates one of the most consequential diagnostic concepts in the depth-psychological reading of Western cultural history: the resurgence of non-rational forces — magical, mythological, affective, daemonic — following periods dominated by rationalist hegemony. E.R. Dodds, whose 1951 work gives the term its most precise scholarly locus, traces this return across late Greek antiquity, documenting how the rationalist confidence of the Hellenistic centuries gave way, not gradually but with a kind of fateful momentum, to astrology, theurgy, demonology, and ecstatic religion. Dodds’s analysis refuses simple causation: war and political collapse are insufficient explanations, since the retreat from reason persisted even through centuries of relative peace and governance. The phenomenon thus demands a psychological account — one that the depth tradition is uniquely equipped to supply. Jung, cited in Dodds’s own index, understood the irrational as constitutively irreducible: in Jungian typology, the ‘irrational’ functions (sensation, intuition) are not defective but differently ordering modes of consciousness. The tension between rationalist suppression and the eruptive return of what has been excluded runs from Dodds’s historiography through Otto’s phenomenology of the numinous, into the clinical registers of Jungian and post-Jungian practice, and onward to McGilchrist’s neurological re-framing of the left hemisphere’s overreach. Across this range of voices, the return of the irrational is figured not as regression but as compensation — the psyche’s insistence on what systematic reason has refused to integrate.
the disturbed conditions of the first century B.C. helped to start the direct retreat from reason, while those of the third century A.D. helped to make it final.
Dodds argues that while historical crises accelerated the return of the irrational, socio-political explanation alone is insufficient, since the retreat persisted even through eras of peace.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
Irrational, Greek awareness of the 1, 254 return of the 244–253
Dodds’s own index explicitly names ‘return of the irrational’ as a discrete conceptual entry, locating it across a sustained analytical section of his work.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
Greek civilisation was entering, not on the Age of Reason, but on a period of slow in
Dodds establishes that late Greek civilization moved not toward enlightenment but into an era of irrationalist retrenchment, inverting the progressive narrative of classical rationalism.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
rational men who protested against these beliefs… But they were a diminishing band.
Dodds documents the progressive marginalization of rationalist resistance as irrationalist religion, demonology, and magic consolidated their cultural dominance in late antiquity.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
people were really afraid of this magical aggression… black magic expresses an evil will and has evil psychological effects.
Dodds traces the fourth-century proliferation of curse tablets and magical practice as concrete evidence of the irrational’s resurgence into public and legal life.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
life is by no means rational and symmetrical, it is very complicated and irregular. That is surely a point he would overlook because he always tried to arrange his life according to certain principles and not according to irrational facts.
Jung identifies the clinical consequence of excessive rationalism — the recurring intrusion of the irrational into a life organized on purely rational principles — as itself a compensatory return.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Nietzsche bemoaned the state of normal human beings, those semi-animals unhinged from instinct and no longer able to ‘count on the guidance of their unconscious drives’, being forced instead ‘to think, deduce, calculate, weigh cause and effect – unhappy people, reduced to their weakest, most fallible organ, their consciousness!’
McGilchrist, invoking Nietzsche, frames the dominance of calculative reason as a pathological loss of instinctual and right-hemispheric guidance — the structural precondition for a violent return of the irrational.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
its institutions stood exposed to rational criticism; its traditional ways of life were increasingly penetrated and modified by a cosmopolitan culture.
Dodds contextualizes the Hellenistic dissolution of closed communal structures as the precondition that simultaneously unleashed rational critique and, ultimately, the irrationalist reactions that followed.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
we have to be on our guard against an error which would lead to a wrong and one-sided
Otto warns against the rationalist reduction of religious experience, implicitly positioning the numinous non-rational as irreducibly prior to any conceptual overlay — a theoretical foundation for understanding why the irrational returns.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting
in a way, it conflicts with commonsense which would assert that the true opposites would be rational and irrational tendencies.
Samuels notes that Jung’s typological system complicates the naive opposition of rational and irrational, suggesting the irrational is not merely reason’s negation but a coordinate mode of orientation.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside
the elder Julianus ‘introduced’ his son to the ghost of Plato; and it seems that they claimed to possess a spell for producing an apparition of the god.
Dodds illustrates the late antique theurgical tradition as a concrete expression of the irrational’s return, in which even Platonic philosophy became fused with magical practice.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951aside