Totality occupies a structural and normative position throughout the depth-psychological corpus that is at once descriptive, teleological, and contested. For Jung, totality is the formal definition of the Self: 'the psychic totality of the individual,' a centre that transcends the ego and holds conscious and unconscious in dynamic equilibrium. This formulation generates the corpus's most productive tensions. Neumann grounds psychic totality in pre-egoic body-experience, reading the uroboric stage as a 'genuine and creative totality' prior to differentiation. Von Franz applies the concept to symbolic arithmetic, finding totality encoded in numerological patterns that may nonetheless prove deficient when key psychic dimensions — the feminine, the Eros pole — are absent. Hillman contests the very aspiration, arguing that the self of 'psychological wholeness' replicates monotheistic logic and that the totalising impulse compensates, rather than integrates, plurality. Giegerich pushes further, insisting that striving toward personal wholeness is a psychological 'acting out' rather than genuine logical work, demanding instead that psychology face 'the whole' without protective demarcation. Aurobindo approaches totality from an integral standpoint, locating it in a supramental synthesis that transcends mental partitioning. McGilchrist mediates between part and whole phenomenologically, warning against both monistic absorption and atomistic isolation. What the corpus demonstrates is that totality is never a neutral descriptive term: it carries the full weight of the individuation ideal, the God-image problem, and the perennial contest between unity and plurality.
The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a m
Jung provides the canonical depth-psychological definition of totality as identical with the Self, anchoring the term as both structural concept and empirical claim about individuation.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
eight is a double of four points to the inner totality, to psychic completeness. So we can say that in the beginning there is a symbol of totality but in it the feminine element, is lacking.
Von Franz demonstrates that totality as symbolised in fairy-tale numerology can be structurally present yet qualitatively incomplete, requiring the integration of the absent feminine dimension.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The self of psychological wholeness, briefly, more clearly reflects the God of monotheism and the senex archetype. Unity and totalit
Hillman critiques Jung's model of totality as covertly monotheistic, aligning the Self's demand for unity with the senex archetype rather than with genuine psychological plurality.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
The self of psychological wholeness, briefly, more clearly reflects the God of monotheism and the senex archetype. Unity and totalit
Hillman's critique — that psychological totality reproduces monotheistic logic — is restated in the brief account, confirming it as a central polemical position within archetypal psychology.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
The body stands for wholeness and unity in general, and its total reaction represents a genuine and creative totality. A sense of the body as a whole is the natural basis of the sense of personality.
Neumann locates the primordial form of psychic totality in the pre-egoic bodily self, grounding the concept in developmental and phylogenetic foundations prior to symbolic differentiation.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
We do not need to develop 'our' wholeness. With one's 'striving towards wholeness' in the conventional sense of this idea, a psychological, i.e., logical, task is acted out
Giegerich radically subverts the conventional individuation telos by arguing that personal striving toward wholeness substitutes action for genuine logical confrontation with the whole.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature.
Aurobindo treats totality as the integral goal of yogic synthesis — the convergence of knowledge, will, and being into a supramental wholeness that transcends any single faculty.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
not only the totality, the All in its mass, but each
Aurobindo insists that genuine divine consciousness must encompass not merely the mass-totality but each individual finite, refusing the abstraction of the whole at the expense of particulars.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
the active one is sometimes the more destructive, Luciferian tendency who breaks away from a harmonious preconscious totality.
Von Franz identifies a pre-conscious totality in primitive creation myths as the originary state disrupted by emerging human consciousness, linking totality with the uroboric pre-differentiation.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constitu
McGilchrist, drawing on Schrödinger, articulates totality as a paradox of perspective: individual consciousness is simultaneously part and whole, neither absorbed nor isolated.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
To see the eddy as a separate entity from the river, or the wave as something 'additional to' the sea, causes the self to become unstable: either wholly localisable or lost in the whole, not part and whole together.
McGilchrist employs fluid imagery to warn against both reductive atomism and monistic dissolution, holding that genuine totality requires the simultaneous maintenance of part-ness and whole-ness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The 'whole man is challenged and enters the fray with his total reality.' Psychotherapy must not literally leave the consulting room. But it must leave it as its horizon.
Giegerich argues that authentic psychological work demands confrontation with totality as a limitless horizon rather than a compartmentalised technical specialty.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
a new centering of the total personality, a virtual centre. (Jung 1928: pars. 364–365) Clearly, this refers to Jung's own experiences of mandalas such as the 'Pool of Life' in which the total figure is organised round a centre
Papadopoulos situates Jung's concept of totality within the individuation process as the emergence of a virtual centre midway between ego and unconscious, exemplified through mandala symbolism.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting
In occult symbolism, the circle represents totality, infinity, eternity, and all there is.
Cunningham notes the traditional occult equation of the circle with totality, providing iconographic background for the mandala symbolism central to Jungian discussions of psychic wholeness.
, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982aside
The dream contrasts the complete, circular state with the threefold triangular state. I take this to mean that an attitude emphasizing static completeness must be complemented by the trinitarian dynamic principle.
Edinger uses clinical dream material to argue that static totality symbolised by the circle requires dynamic trinitarian supplementation, introducing temporal process into the concept of wholeness.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972aside
totalityofBeing-in-the-world : H.231 totality of care: H. i93f, 196, 317, totalityofDasein: H. 234, 237–240,
Heidegger's index entries indicate that totality in Being and Time is articulated across three registers — Being-in-the-world, care, and Dasein — providing ontological architecture adjacent to depth-psychological usage.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
The ten is viewed in this culture as a totality subdivided into ten degrees that evolve from one to the next, in a constant transformation of reality.
Jodorowsky reads the decimal system through the lens of totality as a living sequence of transformations, echoing the depth-psychological understanding of wholeness as process rather than stasis.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004aside