Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘tendency’ functions as a foundational explanatory concept, naming the directional, vectorial quality of psychic and somatic forces before those forces resolve into discrete acts or symptoms. The term carries markedly different theoretical freight depending on the author. Jung employs it structurally, speaking of the psyche’s tendency to split into autonomous complexes and of tendencies toward change conditioned by internal and external influences, thereby grounding psychopathology in a general property of psychic organization. Freud uses ‘interfering tendency’ in the precise sense of a latent intention that disrupts conscious speech, situating tendency within his economic model of competing psychic pressures. Janet, as refracted through van der Hart and colleagues, systematizes the concept most elaborately, constructing a hierarchy of action tendencies ordered by mental efficiency — from reflexive fixed action tendencies through the highest progressive tendencies requiring full personality integration. Rank extends the term into metapsychology, reading the dream’s wish-fulfilling ‘reversal tendency’ as the unconscious’s sole available language for forward movement. Neumann, operating in the register of archetypal psychology, traces how the destructive tendency of the Great Mother becomes assimilated as an ego tendency through the adolescent’s self-confrontation. Collectively, these positions reveal a field-wide commitment to tendencies as irreducible psychodynamic vectors whose developmental fate — integration, fixation, or regression — largely determines psychological health.
The hierarchy of action tendencies is helpful in assessing the level of action tendencies in which trauma survivors engage, and in understanding the level they must reach to overcome their traumatization.
This passage presents the hierarchical action-tendency model as the primary clinical framework for assessing traumatic fixation and setting treatment goals.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
The tendency to split means that parts of the psyche detach themselves from consciousness to such an extent that they not only appear foreign but lead an autonomous life of their own.
Jung identifies the psyche’s tendency to split as a normative structural property underlying both pathological dissociation and everyday complex formation.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
There is an intimate and reciprocal relationship between mental efficiency and level of action tendencies (Janet, 1928b, 1934). To comprehend this relationship, it is important to refine our definition of mental efficiency.
Drawing on Janet, this passage establishes that the level of action tendency an individual can sustain is directly calibrated by available mental efficiency, grounding the hierarchy in energetic terms.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
errors result from the mutual interference of two different intentions, of which one may be called the intention interfered with, and the other the interfering tendency.
Freud formalizes ‘interfering tendency’ as the technical name for a latent intention whose pressure produces parapraxes, embedding tendency in his theory of competing psychic forces.
, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis
The ego center gains control over this aggressive tendency of the unconscious and makes it an ego tendency and a content of consciousness.
Neumann describes the developmental moment in which an unconscious destructive tendency is consciously appropriated by the ego, converting archaic compulsion into a directed ego-force.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
the defensive, precognitive instinct—the evoked fixed action tendency—is a startle response and fleeing. This action tendency is further organized by the context of the experience.
Ogden employs Janet’s concept of the fixed action tendency to describe how precognitive sensorimotor responses are subsequently modulated by conscious cognitive appraisal.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
The Unconscious can think of separation, departure, and dying only in terms of the wish-fulfilling regression to the womb, because it knows and can portray no other wish tendency.
Rank argues that the womb-regression is the unconscious’s sole available ‘wish tendency,’ making all apparent forward movement in dreams a covert rearward pull.
, The Trauma of Birth, 1924supporting
I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual practice to bypass or avoid dealing with certain personal or emotional ‘unfi[nished business]’.
Welwood names ‘spiritual bypassing’ as a tendency observable in spiritual communities, where practice becomes a vehicle for avoiding psychological work rather than complementing it.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
there is an outspoken tendency to clarify and characterize the object denoted by the stimulus-word. Wehrlin described this tendency as particularly characteristic for congenital mental deficiency.
Jung’s early experimental work identifies a ‘tendency to explain’ as a diagnostically significant response pattern in association experiments, linking it to specific forms of cognitive impairment.
, Experimental Researches, 1904supporting
Attention Tendency: Attending preferentially or habitually to particular interoceptive signals (compared to exteroceptive signals).
Within interoception research, ‘attention tendency’ designates a stable, habitual bias toward particular bodily signals, operationalizing tendency as a measurable psychophysiological construct.
, Interoception in Psychiatric Disorders: A Review of Randomized, Controlled Trials with Interoception-Based Interventions, 2018supporting
In the one sense hormê designates the tendency of a natural body to carry out its motion.
Inwood traces the pre-Stoic philosophical lineage of hormê as ‘tendency,’ situating the Stoic and Aristotelian senses of impulse-as-tendency within classical philosophy of action.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985aside