Uniqueness

Uniqueness occupies a distinctive and contested position in the depth-psychology corpus. McGilchrist mounts the most sustained treatment, arguing that uniqueness is epistemologically prior to categorisation and that it constitutes a fundamental challenge to left-hemisphere cognition: the truly unique resists linguistic capture and halts analytic reduction, finding its only adequate expression in poetry and the right-hemisphere’s mode of knowing. For McGilchrist, uniqueness is inseparable from individuality construed as Gestalt wholeness — the in-dividual as that which cannot be further divided without ceasing to be itself. Hillman approaches the term from a Platonic-archetypal angle, grounding qualitative uniqueness in the soul’s specific character or daimon: each person is unique not numerically but qualitatively, shaped by an acorn-image that neither genetics nor environment fully explains. Von Franz, writing from a Jungian alchemical perspective, links uniqueness to the mystery of encounter — in analysis and in love alike, the touching of another’s uniqueness imposes a natural discretion and closes the symbolic house. Seaford illuminates uniqueness’s shadow from a cultural-historical direction: money’s power of commensuration actively erodes uniqueness by reducing all particulars to a homogeneous scale. Ricoeur’s phenomenological distinction between numerical and qualitative identity provides a philosophical scaffolding for these discussions. The central tension across the corpus is between uniqueness as an irreducible ontological given and the persistent institutional, economic, and cognitive pressures that dissolve it into sameness.

In the library 22 passages

Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry

McGilchrist argues that uniqueness is constitutively resistant to ordinary language and left-hemisphere categorisation, finding expression only in the ambiguous, open register of poetry.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Uniqueness, however, halts analysis: it is a standing rebuke to our ever-ready categories. It cannot be accounted for in terms of its parts. That is what an in-dividual means – an entity that cannot be further divided, without ceasing to be what it is.

McGilchrist defines uniqueness as that which arrests reductionist analysis and constitutes the very meaning of individuality as an indivisible Gestalt whole.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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we are unique qualitatively. You have your style, your history, a set of traits, and a destiny. You are essentially different from me by virtue of the lasting sameness of each of our individualized characters.

Hillman locates uniqueness not in numerical distinctness but in qualitative character — the consistent, specific individuality that no legal, economic, or physical category can capture.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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First, uniqueness is lost in categorising: a triumph for sameness. The next step is to lose the uniqueness of the category – and the triumph for sameness is almost complete.

McGilchrist, following Nietzsche, describes a two-stage reductionist process by which left-hemisphere categorisation progressively annihilates uniqueness in favour of an all-consuming sameness.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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The lust for control lies behind the demand that all shall be equal to – reducible to – something else. The process is one, as Nietzsche makes clear, of triumph by reductionism: ingestion (appropriation by the left hemisphere), followed by digestion (lysis into parts).

Uniqueness is identified as the primary casualty of the will to power expressed through reductionist categorisation and left-hemisphere dominance.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique: has ‘the most intense individuality’.

McGilchrist, drawing on Bergson and Kolakowski, asserts that absolute uniqueness and wholeness are co-extensive properties of all existing things, grounded in the irreversibility of real time.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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the same conditions can never, by definition, obtain in the life of the self, because each, artificially isolated, moment of its duration includes the entire past, which is, consequently, different for each moment.

Kolakowski’s Bergsonian argument is invoked to show that irreversible memory makes every moment ontologically unique, defeating determinist claims of recurrence.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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As soon as one touches the uniqueness of the partner in an analysis, discretion is imposed… it is unique and that it should never be talked about with anybody else, quite naturally. It cannot be, and that has to do with the mystery of meeting with uniqueness in any love relationship

Von Franz argues that genuine encounter with another’s uniqueness in analysis or love naturally and necessarily imposes silence, linking uniqueness to the alchemical mystery of coniunctio.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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unique and closed system, a unique thing which centres round an unpredictable source of life. If that becomes real in an individual then one feels the mystery of a unique personality.

Von Franz describes individuation in alchemical terms as the realisation of a unique, closed psychic system whose source is irreducibly personal and mysterious.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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There is a ‘thisness’ to the type, as well as to the individual. It matters only at what level you place the bar… The trick is to find the level at which the richest patterns are revealed in the context in which one finds oneself.

McGilchrist refines the concept by showing that uniqueness operates at multiple ontological levels simultaneously, and that wisdom lies in identifying the level at which meaningful pattern and particularity coincide.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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In so far as things are measureable on a numerical scale to which almost all other things belong, any appearance of uniqueness will be reduced. Where things can be replaced by means of money, such reduction will be complete.

Seaford argues that monetary commensuration is the cultural mechanism par excellence for the destruction of uniqueness, transforming irreplaceable particulars into interchangeable units.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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James is a pluralist, an articulate advocate for the reality of individuation in the face of the common philosophical drive for generality. Talking of what he calls the ‘each-form’, the result of individuation… the differentiated world brought about by time has a greater, and more fruitfully complex, order

McGilchrist recruits William James’s pluralism to argue that individuation — the emergence of unique ‘each-forms’ — produces a richer and more complex order than monist generality allows.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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It is not just a pile of genetic stuff that makes for uniqueness, but the way your hand of cards fills out and forms a particular, and successful, configuration.

Hillman uses the emergenic model of genetics to argue that uniqueness arises from irreducible configurational patterns rather than from the mere accumulation of inherited traits.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate.

Hillman indicts modern psychology for its systematic neglect of the daimon as the ground of individual uniqueness, character, and fate.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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I doubt his uniqueness; he is of a type which always was and will be. Therefore it was not necessary to seek him out.

Jung’s refusal to visit Ramana Maharshi on the grounds that the holy man represents an eternal type rather than a genuinely unique individual offers a pointed counterpoint to romantic claims of personal uniqueness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside

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The whole notion of an indivisible atom, something of such a nature that it cannot be separated into anything smaller, is, I think, a projection of the Self. Indivisibility is at the root of analysis.

Edinger connects the philosophical concept of indivisibility — the logical prerequisite of uniqueness — to the psychological archetype of the Self, grounding uniqueness in the deepest layer of individual identity.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995aside

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love as spontaneous affirmation of others, as the union of the individual with others on the basis of the preservation of the individual self. The dynamic quality of love lies in this very polarity

Fromm frames the preservation of individual selfhood — the foundation of uniqueness — as the condition of authentic love, arguing that genuine union does not dissolve but affirms the particularity of each person.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941aside

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