Subjectivity occupies a contested, generative space across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as epistemological problem, phenomenological foundation, and psychological irreducible. Jung stakes out the foundational Jungian position in Psychological Types: the ‘subjective factor’ is not a defect to be overcome but a co-determinant of reality, as ineluctable as the radius of the earth — a formulation that sets the tone for subsequent revisionary work. Hillman radicalises this inheritance: the subjective factor is methodologically constitutive for depth psychology, meaning that the analyst’s own subjectivity is not a contaminant but the very entry-point for psychological truth; his critique of therapeutic ‘subjectivism,’ however, warns against collapsing world-soul into private interiority. Damasio approaches subjectivity neuroscientifically, tracing it to the convergence of sensory perspective and homeostatic feeling: without the feeling-body’s self-referential point of view, images remain unowned. Thompson and Merleau-Ponty, via the enactive paradigm, insist that individual subjectivity is always already intersubjectivity — culturally embedded, bodily emergent, irreducible to the objectivist’s purge. Bosnak, working in embodied imagination, proposes that habitual singular identification is a conditioned reflex, and that multiple subjectivities can be inhabited simultaneously in dreamwork. The corpus thus maps a wide arc: from neurophenomenology and enactivism to archetypal critique and Kashmir Shaivism, all circling the question of what it means for experience to be owned, perspectived, and resistant to complete objectification.
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 proprietary, perspectival ownership of mental life, positioning it as the defining feature of consciousness rather than a secondary philosophical problem.
, 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 argues that the subjective factor is a universal, objectively real co-determinant of experience, as lawful and ineluctable as any feature of the external world.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
Here we need to consider how feelings join sensory perspective to produce subjectivity.
Damasio identifies the convergence of feeling-states and sensory perspective as the generative mechanism by which subjectivity is produced in consciousness.
, 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, following generative phenomenology, argues that subjectivity is constitutively intersubjective and culturally embodied, not a solitary given.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Identification with a particular singular sense of self is a learned habit, a conditioned reflex, creating our personal sense of subjectivity.
Bosnak contends that ordinary subjectivity is a habituated, culturally conditioned identification rather than an ontological given, opening the possibility of multiple simultaneous subjectivities in dreamwork.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
Because the subjective factor is inherent and always intrudes, it becomes methodologically correct, and necessary, to recognize the subjectivity at the beginning.
Hillman insists that depth psychology’s inescapable subjective factor demands methodological acknowledgment rather than suppression, making subjectivity a constitutive condition of psychological inquiry.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
The enactive approach explicates selfhood and subjectivity from the ground up by accounting for the autonomy proper to living and cognitive beings.
Thompson argues that enactive biology, not disembodied cognitivism, provides the proper foundation for a bottom-up account of subjectivity grounded in organic autonomy.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
One of the main contributors to the building of subjectivity is the operation of the sensory portals within which we find the organs responsible for generating images of the outside world.
Damasio identifies the perspectival anchoring of sensory organs within a specific body as the structural basis upon which subjectivity is architecturally assembled.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Other parts of the brain command a sequential highlight of images. Each highlight occurs at its sensory source, thus contributing to a broad display of images that moves along in time but not in place.
Damasio details the neural mechanism by which images are co-referenced to a perspective map, constituting the integration and temporal flow of subjective experience.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Objectivism tries to purge nature of subjectivity and then reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged.
Thompson, following Merleau-Ponty, identifies the self-contradictory structure of objectivism, which presupposes the very subjectivity it attempts to eliminate.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Francis Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness is focused on the problem of image making and leaves out subjectivity altogether.
Damasio critiques the scientific bracketing of subjectivity, arguing that its omission risks misinterpreting empirical data about image-making and consciousness.
, 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 literary and cultural genealogy of psychological subjectivity to Augustine’s confessional mode, situating depth psychology’s inward turn within a long rhetorical tradition.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
The deep work was inside the person’s subjectivity. Of course, social psychiatry … strongly emphasizes external realities and locates the origins of psychopathology in objective determinants.
Hillman maps the tension between depth psychology’s inward focus on subjectivity and social psychiatry’s external determinism, arguing that neither approach adequately engages the psychic reality of the world.
, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting
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, only the scenery and machinery against which backdrop they played their inter- and intrasubjective drama.
Hillman critiques the therapeutic reduction of all experience to inter- and intrasubjective dynamics, advocating for a psychology that opens subjectivity outward toward the suffering of the world.
, 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 sharp subject-object boundary by insisting that subjectivity is itself a feature of the world, and that the most subjective ideas may be the truest because they are closest to nature.
, Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902supporting
One is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul’s native dominants of fantasy structures. These dominate subjective
Hillman argues that archetypal psychology acknowledges an ineradicable subjectivism rooted in the soul’s fantasy structures, rendering purely objective phenomenological access to the psyche impossible.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
The polarity between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere’s analytic disposition.
McGilchrist argues that the subject-object polarity is not a fundamental ontological divide but a secondary product of the left hemisphere’s abstracting and analytic tendencies.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
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 proposes that genuine research objectivity is achieved not by eliminating subjectivity but by bringing the researcher’s subjectivity into sufficient consciousness of its own unconscious dimensions.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
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, via Merleau-Ponty, argues that any naturalism that expunges subjectivity is self-defeating, since the concept of form required by naturalism is itself irreducibly phenomenal.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand (with its fantasy of omnipotence) and alienated objectivity on the other (with its related fantasy of impotence) tend to collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon.
McGilchrist, drawing on Sass, shows that extreme solipsistic subjectivity and radical objectivism are not opposites but mirror-image pathologies, both producing isolation rather than connection.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
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 reciprocal perceptual entanglement of body and world, arguing that lived experience is irreducibly perspectival and resistant to scientific objectification.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
The knowledge and the mode of knowledge of the objective world and the subjective world 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 tradition holds that the ordinary structure of subjectivity and objectivity is universal, but that yogic realization transforms the quality of that contact into a condition of continuous, non-reactive awareness.
, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
In your talk last time about art you used the term ‘subjectiv
A seminar interlocutor’s question prompts Jung to engage with the term subjectivity in the context of art and psychological function, indicating its contested usage even within his own circle.
, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989aside
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, as cited by Abram, insists that the lived perspectival subject is the irreducible foundation from which scientific knowledge must be reawakened, not bypassed.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside