Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Source’ functions as one of the most philosophically charged and contested terms, operating simultaneously as ontological postulate, psychological metaphor, and apophatic limit-concept. In Plotinus, the Source is identified with the One — that which is ‘not a plurality but the Source of plurality,’ the generative simplicity prior to Intellect and Life from which all emanation proceeds. This cosmological reading is absorbed and complicated by Derrida’s sustained engagement with Valéry, where the source is shown to resist thematization entirely: it ‘cannot be reassembled into its originary unity,’ possesses ‘no proper, literal meaning,’ and presents itself only through the very self-division that marks its impossibility as origin. The Hegelian reversal — ‘Der Anfang ist das Resultat,’ the origin as result — haunts Derrida’s analysis, suggesting that what depth psychology treats as primordial wellspring is itself produced retroactively. Theological traditions from John of Damascus to the Philokalia posit the Father as eternal Source of being, making generativity co-extensive with eternity. Jungian and archetypal psychologies inherit this ambivalence, treating the unconscious as both motivational source and imago source, while never quite resolving whether such a source is discovered or constructed. The term thus marks the intersection of emanation theology, speculative philosophy, and psychological phenomenology.
the Universe is not a Principle and Source: it springs from a source, and that source cannot be the All or anything belonging to the All, since it is to generate the All
Plotinus establishes the Source as the One — a principle of absolute simplicity that is prior to and generative of the All, necessarily more simplex than everything that proceeds from it.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
The source for Valéry, then, must be that which never could become a theme… the source cannot be reassembled into its originary unity. Because — first of all — it has no proper, literal meaning.
Derrida, reading Valéry, argues that the source structurally resists thematization and originary unity, undermining any naïve appeal to it as a stable, self-present foundation.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The pure I, the source of all presence, thus is reduced to an abstract point, to a pure form, stripped of all thickness, of all depth, without character, without quality, without property, without an assignable duration. This source therefore has no proper meaning.
Derrida demonstrates that the source, conceived as pure subjective origin, evacuates itself of all content and hence forfeits any proper name or meaning.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
how can the source divide itself — the sources germinal from the title onward — and thus by itself separate from itself in order to be related to itself — which is, as a pure origin, the irreference to itself
Derrida interrogates the paradox of a source that must divide and depart from itself in order to function as origin, invoking Plotinian procession while pressing it toward aporia.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
the source is produced only in being cut off from itself, only in taking off in its own negativity, but equally, and by the same token, in reappropriating itself, in order to amortize its own, proper death
Derrida describes the source as constituted through a dialectic of self-severance and reappropriation, linking it to the Hegelian Aufhebung and to the question of whether dissemination can ever be sublated.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
where a father is the source of being, there also is birth; and further, where the Source of being is eternal, the birth also is eternal: for since birth comes from the source of being, birth which comes from an eternal Source of being must be eternal.
John of Damascus grounds Trinitarian theology in the logic of an eternal Source of being, arguing that co-eternal generation is necessitated by the very infinitude of the paternal source.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
if the source is always other, the alterity of the source, in the case of the mystic or the hallucinated, is of an other alterity; it is no longer the source which ‘normally’ divides and constitutes the I
Derrida, via Valéry’s reading of Swedenborg, distinguishes between the ordinary alterity by which the source constitutes selfhood and the radical, alien alterity encountered in mystical or pathological states.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
style, supplementing timbre, tends to repeat the event of pure presence, the singularity of the source present in what it produces… the source presents itself? Point.
Derrida traces the impossibility of self-presence in style and timbre to the inaccessibility of the source, which can never present itself to the very subject it generates.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
unconscious: active imagination as gateway to, 44-45… as imago source, 71… as psychic energy source, 53
Stein’s index maps the Jungian unconscious as a dual source — of imagos and of psychic energy — positioning it as the generative ground from which the self emerges through transformation.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
they made throughout the body itself a system of conduits, cut like runnels in a garden, so that it might be, as it were, watered by an incoming stream… carried from the source of supply to every quarter of his garden
Plato employs the hydraulic metaphor of a garden source to describe the body’s vascular irrigation system, naturalizing the concept of originary supply distributed through channels.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
reading of ‘In Praise of Water,’ with which Valéry, in 1935, prefaced a collection of tributes to the Source Perrier
Derrida introduces the literal spring — Source Perrier — as the material occasion for Valéry’s meditation, grounding the subsequent philosophical analysis in a specific textual and cultural context.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside