The term ‘seizure’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two distinct axes that rarely intersect without friction. The first is neurological and clinical: Oliver Sacks, Eugen Bleuler, Pierre Janet, and Eric Kandel employ the word to denote discrete paroxysmal events — epileptic, hysterical, or schizophrenic — in which normal neural or psychic integration is suddenly suspended. Here seizure functions as a diagnostic marker, separating the convulsive tonic phase from interstitial normality and raising questions about the boundary between organic lesion and psychological genesis. The second axis is archetypal and anthropological. Jung, as transmitted through Edward Edinger, treats seizure as a phenomenological metaphor for the moment an archetype overwhelms the ego: ‘falling in love at first sight’ is paradigmatically a seizure by the anima or animus. Joseph Campbell extends this usage into cultural evolution, positing that individual and collective ‘seizures’ by compelling mental patterns were the generative engine of shamanism and popular cult. Erich Neumann bridges the two registers by locating seizure at the heart of ritual possession — the dance, the orgiastic rite — where consciousness is deliberately suspended so that suprapersonal forces may inhabit the body-psyche. The productive tension across these bodies of work is whether seizure names a pathological rupture to be treated or a numinous threshold to be traversed.
The archetype is a force. It has an autonomy and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. Falling in love at first sight is something like that.
Edinger, transmitting Jung directly, establishes seizure as the defining phenomenological signature of archetypal possession, in which the ego’s autonomy is overwhelmed without warning.
, Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002thesis
the dance plays a crucial role, as expression of the natural seizure of early man… Because seizure in large part presupposes an exclusion of the normal daytime consciousness
Neumann theorizes seizure as the psycho-somatic mechanism underlying ritual possession, the structural precondition for orgiastic worship of the Great Goddess.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
An individual ‘seizure’ — comparable, on the mental plane, to the chimpanzee’s ‘seizure’ by the round polished stone — would have been a pointer, already, toward the mentality of shamanism
Campbell extends seizure from individual neurological event to a phylogenetic and cultural mechanism by which compelling mental patterns bootstrap shamanism and communal ritual.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis
whenever she ‘heard’ anything, the high-voltage waves became sharp, spike-like, and frankly convulsive. This confirmed my thought that she too had a musical epilepsy, associated with disease of the temporal lobes.
Sacks demonstrates that seizure activity in the temporal lobes can produce involuntary, vivid musical experience, complicating the boundary between pathological discharge and aesthetic consciousness.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985thesis
Often the seizure opens with a tonic phase which, in distinction from true epilepsy, may last very long and does not attain the terrifying intensity of the morbus sacer.
Bleuler differentiates the schizophrenic seizure from genuine epilepsy through its prolonged tonic phase and attenuated intensity, situating it as an organically conditioned but psychically inflected event.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
Convulsive attacks, which we have first to attend to, are exceedingly frequent phenomena; they were noted even by the philosophers and doctors of ancient Greece.
Janet situates hysterical convulsive attacks within a long clinical and cultural genealogy, framing them as incomplete somnambulisms rather than purely organic events.
, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907supporting
Thereafter, the animal will always have a seizure when it receives this burst of brain stimu-
Panksepp’s truncated reference to kindling establishes seizure as a neuroplastic phenomenon in which repeated sub-threshold stimulation permanently lowers the threshold for paroxysmal discharge.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Significance of Epileptic Seizures as a Therapeutic Factor in Medicinal Shock Therapy of Schizophrenia
Bleuler’s bibliography records the early-twentieth-century debate about whether induced epileptic seizures could serve as a therapeutic agent in schizophrenia, implicating seizure in the history of somatic psychiatry.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
Brain Changes Associated with Electrically Induced Seizures
A bibliographic citation marks the neuropathological investigation of electrically induced seizures as part of the broader schizophrenia research apparatus of the period.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911aside
In 1898 one-sided twitching, occurring in fits, was noticed. At that time a relatively lucid delirium, with plastic and very stable visions, was observed
Jung’s early case record documents epileptiform fits alongside vivid visionary states, prefiguring his later theoretical linkage between paroxysmal disruption and autonomous psychic contents.
, Experimental Researches, 1904aside