Subjectivity occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously as epistemological problem, phenomenological datum, and psychological method. Jung establishes the 'subjective factor' as a co-determinant of reality equal in weight to the external object — not a distorting bias to be overcome but an irreducible law grounding all psychological knowledge. Hillman radicalizes this: because the subjective factor is inherent and always intrudes, recognizing subjectivity is not a concession but a methodological necessity, the very starting point of any honest depth-psychological inquiry. Bosnak extends the question inward, arguing that what we call 'I' is itself a mixture of unconscious identifying-activity and habitual presence, making subjectivity less a stable foundation than a conditioned reflex. Damasio approaches subjectivity from a neurobiological angle, locating its emergence in the convergence of sensory perspective and feeling — subjectivity as the ownership and perspectival anchoring of mental experience. Thompson, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, insists that individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, irreducibly embodied and culturally embedded. McGilchrist frames the subject-object divide itself as a hemisphere-specific construction, warning that solipsistic subjectivity and alienated objectivity are mirror pathologies. The corpus therefore presents subjectivity not as a private inner theater but as the dynamic interface between organism, world, and other — at once the inescapable ground of psychological work and its most treacherous blind spot.
Subjectivity, the hallmark of consciousness, is the ability to own one's mental experiences and endow those experiences with an individual perspective.
Damasio defines subjectivity as the constitutive feature of consciousness — the perspectival ownership of experience — and argues it is far older evolutionarily than cerebral-cortex-centered models assume.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis
By the subjective factor I understand that psychological action or reaction which merges with the effect produced by the object and so gives rise to a new psychic datum.
Jung frames the subjective factor not as mere bias but as a universal co-determinant of all psychic reality, as foundationally lawful as any feature of the external world.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
Because the subjective factor is inherent and always intrudes, it becomes methodologically correct, and necessary, to recognize the subjectivity at the beginning.
Hillman argues that depth psychology's inescapable embeddedness in the subjective factor makes foregrounding subjectivity not a limitation but the only rigorous methodological posture.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Here we need to consider how feelings join sensory perspective to produce subjectivity.
Damasio identifies the precise mechanism of subjectivity's emergence: the convergence of homeostatic and emotive feeling-states with the perspectival anchoring of sensory images.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis
Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, originally engaged with and altered by others in specific geological and cultural environments.
Thompson, via Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, argues that subjectivity is constitutively intersubjective and embodied — never a solitary interior fact but always already cultural and relational.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
The mixture of the unconscious identifying activity and the presence with which it identifies gives rise to the experience of subjectivity.
Bosnak deconstructs personal subjectivity as a conditioned reflex — a learned habit of identification whose unconscious mechanism remains outside conscious will, making the 'I' a composite rather than a ground.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
Images come into subjectivity and integration by virtue of local, sequential highlight... the two ingredients of subjectivity.
Damasio maps the neural architecture underlying subjectivity, showing how images are co-referenced to a perspective map through large-scale brain networks, achieving both perspectival ownership and narrative integration.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
These facts are critical to understanding subjectivity... One of the main contributors to the building of subjectivity is the operation of the sensory portals.
Damasio demonstrates that the perspectival structure of each sensory modality — sight from the eyes, touch from the hand — furnishes the concrete bodily anchoring from which subjectivity is built.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
The enactive approach explicates selfhood and subjectivity from the ground up by accounting for the autonomy proper to living and cognitive beings.
Thompson proposes that the enactive approach, grounded in biological autonomy, offers the most fruitful path to explaining subjectivity without reducing it to either pure mechanism or disembodied idealism.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Objectivism tries to purge nature of subjectivity and then reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged.
Thompson, following Merleau-Ponty, identifies the self-defeating logic of objectivism: it must already presuppose the experiencing subjectivity it attempts to eliminate and later reconstruct.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
By postponing the consideration of subjectivity, we may be unable to interpret correctly the empirical data concerning the making and perception of images.
Damasio argues against Crick's methodological deferral of subjectivity, insisting that image-making and perception cannot be correctly interpreted without a concurrent theory of subjective ownership.
, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
This genre is the exposition of subjectivity, the confession, and it requires rhetoric of the ego, the first person singular.
Hillman traces the confessional literary mode to Augustine as the originary 'exposition of subjectivity,' linking the rhetoric of the first person singular to the historical invention of psychological interiority.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Is not every experience, even in the best of circumstances, at least fifty-per-cent subjective interpretation? On the other hand, the subject is also an objective fact, a piece of the world.
Jung dissolves the rigid opposition between subjective and objective by insisting that the subject is itself a piece of world-stuff, making the most subjective ideas simultaneously closest to nature and thus most true.
, Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902supporting
The deep work was inside the person's subjectivity... Precisely this external, nonsubjective view of the world now needs to be reworked.
Hillman critiques depth psychology's privileging of inner subjectivity at the expense of the world's own psychic reality, calling for a re-envisioning that extends soul beyond the personal interior.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand (with its fantasy of omnipotence) and alienated objectivity on the other... tend to collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon.
McGilchrist, drawing on Sass, argues that extreme subjectivity and extreme objectivity are mirror pathologies — both producing isolation rather than connection — and that neither represents an adequate stance toward reality.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
The polarity between the 'objective' and 'subjective' points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere's analytic disposition.
McGilchrist localizes the subject-object divide as a hemisphere-specific artifact rather than an ontological given, suggesting that the dichotomy is itself a product of a particular mode of analytical cognition.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
One is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul's native dominants of fantasy structures. These dominate subjective
Hillman argues that archetypal psychology cannot achieve pure phenomenological objectivity because the soul's fantasy structures permanently condition subjectivity, making epoché itself a fantasy.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
A true sense of objectivity must take into account the indissoluble link to a subjectivity that has become somewhat conscious of its own unconscious comple
Romanyshyn argues that genuine research objectivity is not the elimination of subjectivity but its conscious integration, since an unconscious subjectivity secretly shapes every claim to neutrality.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
They emerge from the cave with a new sensitivity in the possibility of fellowship, comrades in arms, into the smog-filled sunlight, which psychoanalysis had taught them was a place of mere shadows.
Hillman critiques psychoanalysis's confinement of reality to the intra- and intersubjective drama, calling for awakening from the 'anesthetized slumber of subjectivism' toward a soul that includes the world of things.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
Our direct experience is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns.
Abram grounds subjectivity in the lived, bodily situatedness of direct experience, arguing that the everyday world is a living field reciprocally shaped by both perceiver and perceived.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
The mode of perception of objectivity and subjectivity is the same in each and every being... Only there is one exception in yogis, in realized souls, that the contact of objectivity and subjectivity is different in them.
The Vijnana Bhairava posits that the cognitive mode uniting subjective and objective perception is universal, but that yogic realization transforms this contact into a conscious, divine awareness rather than an unreflective given.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless.
Merleau-Ponty's claim, cited by Abram, that all knowledge including science is founded on lived subjective experience provides the phenomenological warrant for treating subjectivity as epistemologically primary.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside
Objectivity can only be the author's, and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel.
McGilchrist, citing Tarkovsky, illustrates that all ostensibly objective statements involve perspectival choices — inclusions and exclusions — and are thus inescapably subjective in origin.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
Naturalism cannot explain matter, life, and mind, as long as explanation means purging nature of subjectivity and then trying to reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged.
Thompson's analysis of Merleau-Ponty's argument shows that naturalism's explanatory strategy is internally incoherent because form — its own key concept — is irreducibly phenomenal and cannot be derived from a subjectivity-free nature.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside