Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘understanding’ emerges not as a static cognitive achievement but as a dynamic, layered, and fundamentally relational event. The term occupies a contested space between explanation and experience, between the left hemisphere’s drive to render things explicit and the right hemisphere’s more diffuse, implicit grasp of living wholes. McGilchrist, the most persistent voice on this subject, argues that understanding is the right hemisphere’s proper mode — irreducibly metaphorical, always in process, never finally grasped — and that explanation is at best a disciplined subset of it. Jaynes, arriving from a different angle, treats understanding as the felt recognition of a successful metaphor: to understand is to have substituted something familiar for something strange, a move that illuminates the cognitive mechanism while quietly relativizing all such achievements. Jung introduces a critical tension between understanding and knowledge, warning that understanding carried too far dissolves the individuated boundaries necessary for genuine encounter. Heidegger grounds understanding ontologically as Dasein’s fundamental mode of projective disclosure — not an epistemological operation but the very structure by which Being is opened. Thich Nhat Hanh embeds understanding (prajña) within a triad alongside awareness and concentration, giving it a contemplative valence that resists reduction to thought. Hillman insists that in depth-psychological work, ‘emotional understanding of the individual’ is the irreducible condition: pre-judged explanatory frameworks betray rather than serve it. Together these voices reveal understanding as the central problematic of any psychology that aspires to honesty about what it means to know another soul.
Explanation, science’s forte, is a subset – an explicit, rigorous, disciplined subset, but still a subset – of understanding. All understanding depends on metaphor.
McGilchrist establishes understanding as the right hemisphere’s encompassing mode, of which scientific explanation is merely a formal subset, and grounds all understanding in the inexhaustible operation of metaphor.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Explanation, science’s forte, is a subset – an explicit, rigorous, disciplined subset, but still a subset – of understanding. All understanding depends on metaphor.
McGilchrist establishes understanding as the right hemisphere’s encompassing mode, of which scientific explanation is merely a formal subset, and grounds all understanding in the inexhaustible operation of metaphor.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.
Jaynes defines understanding as the cognitive-affective event of successful metaphor-substitution, identifying the phenomenal sense of familiarity as its psychological signature.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge. An ideal understanding would ultimately result in each party’s unthinkingly going along with the other’s experience.
Jung articulates a critical limit to understanding, arguing that when it is pursued without the countervailing force of knowledge it collapses individuation and becomes socially and psychologically destructive.
, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis
understanding, like reality itself, is an unending process, not a thing that is finished so as to be grasped.
McGilchrist frames understanding as inherently processual and open-ended, aligned with the right hemisphere’s engagement with a reality that is never fully captured by representation.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
understanding, like reality itself, is an unending process, not a thing that is finished so as to be grasped.
McGilchrist frames understanding as inherently processual and open-ended, aligned with the right hemisphere’s engagement with a reality that is never fully captured by representation.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Anything that interferes with his unique emotional understanding of the individual will work against understanding in general. Only that knowledge of which he can make use serves understanding.
Hillman argues that in depth-psychological practice, genuine understanding is conditioned on the analyst’s unique emotional attunement to the individual, and that pre-formed explanatory knowledge actively impedes it.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
In awareness, there are also the elements concentration (samadhi) and understanding (prajña). Concentration and understanding together are both the intensity of awareness and the fruit of awareness.
Thich Nhat Hanh situates understanding (prajña) as an intrinsic constituent of mindful awareness rather than a separate intellectual act, making it both the quality and the outcome of concentrated attention.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988thesis
Having ready answers means you don’t understand; understanding here means never letting go of the questions. Unknowing will turn out to be a sign not of weakness, but of wisdom.
McGilchrist redefines understanding as the sustained holding of open questions rather than the arrival at settled answers, linking genuine understanding to the acceptance of irreducible mystery.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
there is a kind of practical understanding that consists in the keen responsiveness of intellect, imagination, and feeling to the particulars of a situation.
Nussbaum identifies a practical mode of understanding, exemplified by the lover’s knowledge of the beloved, that is irreducible to propositional knowledge and is constituted by the integrated responsiveness of intellect, imagination, and feeling.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
‘I understand now that there isn’t anything to be understood’. The difficulties which seemed so formidable have mysteriously vanished. What has happened is that he has learned to think directly and unconsciously in quantum-mechanical language.
McGilchrist, citing Dyson, illustrates a paradoxical third stage of understanding in which the subject transcends the framework of comprehension altogether and achieves transparent, embodied fluency.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘I understand now that there isn’t anything to be understood’. The difficulties which seemed so formidable have mysteriously vanished. What has happened is that he has learned to think directly and unconsciously in quantum-mechanical language.
McGilchrist, citing Dyson, illustrates a paradoxical third stage of understanding in which the subject transcends the framework of comprehension altogether and achieves transparent, embodied fluency.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Sometimes understanding can be translated into thoughts, but often thoughts are too rigid and limited to carry much understanding. Sometimes a look or a laugh expresses understanding much better than words or thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh argues that understanding exceeds conceptual thought and is more authentically conveyed through embodied, expressive acts than through propositional language.
, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting
Within the soul there are three properties, therefore: memory, understanding and will, corresponding to knowledge, self-knowledge and love.
Armstrong, drawing on Augustine, situates understanding as one of three constitutive faculties of the soul — alongside memory and will — that together form an analogical trace of the divine Trinity.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
the understanding of others in terms of their mental states requires a ‘massively hermeneutic’ background. This suggests that there is much going on in our understanding of others, in excess of and prior to the acquisition of theoretical and/or simulation capabilities.
Gallagher argues that interpersonal understanding is grounded in a pre-theoretical, embodied hermeneutic background that precedes and exceeds any formal theory-of-mind account.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
Citing Heschel, McGilchrist links understanding to the capacity for wonder, arguing that the left hemisphere’s conventional categories extinguish the radical amazement that authentic understanding requires.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.
Citing Heschel, McGilchrist links understanding to the capacity for wonder, arguing that the left hemisphere’s conventional categories extinguish the radical amazement that authentic understanding requires.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
If one knows but does not act, one cannot attain the Tao; if one acts without knowledge, one mistakes nature and life. Knowing and then acting, completing knowledge with practice, proving understanding in action.
The Taoist I Ching frames understanding as something that must be completed and verified through action, dissolving any strict separation between theoretical knowing and lived practice.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Psychology as Understanding Seeking Life
Miller positions psychology itself as an enterprise of understanding in quest of life, implicitly subordinating systematic explanation to the hermeneutic pursuit of living meaning.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside
No psychotherapist should lack that natural reserve which prevents people from riding roughshod over mysteries that they do not understand and trampling them flat.
Sedgwick invokes Jung’s counsel of therapeutic restraint, warning that the premature claim to understanding can constitute a form of psychic violence against the patient’s irreducible otherness.
, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001aside