Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Thought' occupies a peculiarly contested position: it is simultaneously the medium of psychological investigation, the object under investigation, and—for several major thinkers—an activity whose nature has been systematically misunderstood. Giegerich mounts the most rigorous challenge to received assumptions, insisting that thought is not one of Jung's four orientation functions but the quinta essentia that transcends and grounds all functions; it is the living movement of soul's self-comprehension, not a cognitive faculty alongside feeling or intuition. Bion approaches thought from the clinical angle, treating it as a developmental achievement that arises to manage the frustration of absent satisfaction, and whose pathological reversal through projective identification tells the analyst something diagnostically decisive. Jaynes argues, against common assumption, that the actual process of thinking occurs entirely outside consciousness—only its preparation and outcome are consciously available. McGilchrist frames thought's fragmentation as a left-hemisphere pathology, while simultaneously arguing that language is not its necessary vehicle. The Eastern sources—Yoga Sutra commentary, Upanishadic teaching—treat thought as a stream of formations in chitta requiring disciplined observation or transcendence. Welwood, drawing on Mahamudra, reconceives individual thoughts as waves inseparable from the ocean of awareness. Running through all these positions is a tension between thought as discursive, propositional activity and thought as a deeper, non-verbal, structuring intelligence that underlies and exceeds its explicit manifestations.
In the library
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thought is not a 'function,' even though what JUNG called the 'thinking function' is of course one moment in developed, explicit thought. Thought is, as I said earlier, the quinta essentia of, and beyond, all four functions.
Giegerich argues that thought, properly understood, is not one psychological function among four but the supreme, encompassing medium of soul's self-articulation that underlies and surpasses Jung's entire typological scheme.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Something that comes as its own self-sublation cannot be imagined; it can only be thought. Psychology cannot be logically innocent and merely relate to the immediate.
Giegerich establishes thought as the only adequate instrument for a psychology of soul, because soul's self-sublating nature cannot be captured through imagination or immediate experience alone.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Thinking (in the sense that we are here talking about it) means three things, 1. having (having experienced, having been reached and claimed by) a thought; 2. absolute obligation to and constraint by this one thought, no freedom, necessity; 3. potential openness to any and all phenomena of life in the light of one's single thought.
Giegerich redefines genuine thinking as an experience of being seized by and unconditionally bound to a single animating Notion, distinguishing this from discursive intellectual activity.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Image is a form in which what is actually (that is, 'in itself,' but not 'for itself') a thought or Notion initially appears in consciousness. As long as it appears in the form of a symbol or image, the thought cannot yet be consciously thought.
Giegerich articulates the distinction between implicit and explicit thought, arguing that symbolic and imaginal forms are incipient thoughts whose thought-character remains unconscious until analytic work renders them explicit.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
I am primarily concerned to present a theoretical system. Its resemblance to a philosophical theory depends on the fact that philosophers have concerned themselves with the same subject-matter; it differs from philosophical theory in that it is intended, like all psychoanalytical theories, for use.
Bion distinguishes his psychoanalytic theory of thinking from philosophical accounts by insisting it must generate empirically testable, clinically applicable hypotheses rather than purely speculative propositions.
Freud said thought provided a means for the restraint of motor discharge... But through projective identification thought itself takes on the function previously entrusted to motor discharge—namely ridding the psyche of accretions of stimuli.
Bion extends Freud's account by showing how, in disturbed development, thought can itself become a vehicle for evacuating mental content rather than for containing and processing it.
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962thesis
Problems associated with disturbance of thought compel us to think about thought and this raises a question of technique—how are we to think about thought—what is the correct method?
Bion poses the methodological problem at the core of his project: the investigation of thought requires a rigorous meta-level engagement with thought itself, demanding a carefully chosen conceptual model.
Bion, Wilfred Ruprecht, Learning from Experience, 1962supporting
the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.
Jaynes makes the provocative claim that conscious experience has no access to the actual operations of thinking, which proceed entirely outside awareness, with consciousness available only to the framing conditions and final product.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
the fact that we are more aware of those times when we do think explicitly to ourselves in words ... should not deceive us into believing that language is necessary for thought. It could even be an impediment to it.
McGilchrist argues that language is not constitutive of thought but rather one mode of its expression, and that many of the highest forms of thinking—artistic, spiritual, intuitive—require transcending linguistic formulation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
One of the obvious things wrong with thought is fragmentation. Thought is breaking things up into bits which should not be broken up … and at the same time we are trying to establish unity where there isn't any.
Drawing on David Bohm, McGilchrist identifies fragmentation as a structural pathology of left-hemisphere-dominated thought, which simultaneously dismembers and imposes false unities on reality.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Language immediately makes a claim for itself to be a prince among the mental processes, and to be the exclusive medium of mental function, denying often by its existence the presence of other modes of thought.
McGilchrist, citing Stuart Dimond, argues that language's self-assertion as the privileged medium of mind actively suppresses recognition of non-verbal modes of thought, reinforcing a one-sided cognitive hegemony.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
to say that consciousness is not necessary for thinking makes us immediately bristle with protest. Surely thinking is the very heart and bone of consciousness! But let us go slowly here.
Jaynes strategically slows the reader's reflexive identification of thought with consciousness, preparing the ground for his demonstration that routine judgment and problem-solving operate unconsciously.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Like waves on the ocean, thoughts are not separate from awareness. They are the radiant clarity of awareness in motion.
Welwood, drawing on Mahamudra-Dzogchen, reframes thoughts not as objects arising within awareness but as awareness's own self-display, dissolving the dualistic tension between thinker and thought.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
we can look on it also as a process – a flow of precise forms in chitta which we call thoughts. When we watch this process for a while, what we see is the kind of meandering 'stream of consciousness' that so fascinates some writers.
Easwaran presents the Upanishadic account of thought as a ceaseless phenomenal stream in chitta, whose meandering character meditation is designed to observe and eventually still.
we can look on it also as a process – a flow of precise forms in chitta which we call thoughts. When we watch this process for a while, what we see is the kind of meandering 'stream of consciousness' that so fascinates some writers.
The Upanishadic tradition, as rendered by Easwaran, conceives thought as a field-process of flowing formations susceptible to meditative observation and transformation.
Easwaran, Eknath, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualitysupporting
Aristotle distinguishes between practical and theoretical or contemplative thought: 'These two, then, are concerned with locomotion: thought and desire, but thought which reasons for the sake of something and is practical; it differs from theoretical thought in respect of the goal.'
Lorenz explicates Aristotle's fundamental division of thought into practical and theoretical modes, noting that it is specifically practical thought—reason oriented toward action—that drives locomotion and desire.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
Aristotle plainly insists that phantasia is different from thought, and that none of the cognitive achievements of the brute animals counts as an act of thought.
Lorenz articulates Aristotle's strict boundary between phantasia and thought, grounding the exclusion of non-human animals from reason in the absence of practical thought as a distinct rational capacity.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world.
Jaynes argues that although thinking itself is unconscious, the metaphorical spatial structure of consciousness provides the framework within which its results are organized and rendered intelligible.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness.
Jaynes extends his argument to creative and scientific reasoning, asserting that the generative moment of insight—like all genuine thinking—takes place wholly outside conscious awareness.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
The Continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with hi
James gestures toward the embodied, organic rootedness of human thought, implicitly critiquing disembodied rationalism and anticipating later somatic and neurological perspectives.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
We think because we are, rather than existing because we think. When asked in a pub whether he wanted another beer, Descartes responded, 'I think not.' But did he disappear?
Levine inverts the Cartesian cogito to argue that thinking is downstream of somatic existence, subordinate to sensing, acting, and feeling in the hierarchy of processes that constitute the self.
Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
A thought does not even have a tail; that is the comedy of it. And what happens in meditation is that each individual thought begins to feel a little silly.
Easwaran uses a vivid simile to illustrate how meditative practice reveals the arbitrary, disconnected nature of individual thoughts, undermining the mind's habitual conviction of their necessity and coherence.
Chapter XIX.—Concerning Thought. Table of Contents The faculty of
John of Damascus signals a dedicated scholastic treatment of thought as a distinct faculty within Orthodox systematic theology, situating it within the broader architecture of the soul's capacities.
John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2021aside
pull out a scrap of paper and write down two or three negative, self-judgmental thoughts your mind throws up from time to time to give you a good thrashing.
Harris introduces ACT defusion techniques by directing attention to the mind's automatic generation of self-critical thoughts, framing thought not as truth but as passing mental events to be held lightly.
Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009aside
you start to separate from your thoughts and give them some space to move around in.
Harris describes the ACT practice of cognitive defusion, in which the patient learns experientially to observe thoughts as events rather than fusing with them as literal truths.
Harris, Russ, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009aside