Weight

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘weight’ operates across at least three registers that rarely communicate with one another yet collectively illuminate its significance. The first is cosmological and metaphysical: Stoic physics, as reported by Long and Sedley, assigns weight to earthbound elements while fire and air are weightless, grounding a hierarchical ontology in which gravity indexes a body’s proximity to matter and distance from spirit. Von Franz, reading Aurora Consurgens, recovers the Augustinian-Scholastic triad of measure, number, and weight as attributes of divine creation, where weight belongs specifically to the Holy Spirit — the affective, gravitational principle that draws creation toward its proper end. The second register is phenomenological and somatic: Merleau-Ponty dissolves weight as Cartesian property into the lived body’s field, while Ogden’s sensorimotor approach treats the redistribution of bodily weight as a direct therapeutic intervention for trauma, grounding and orienting the psyche through gravity itself. The third register is clinical and psychosomatic: Woodman’s depth-psychological reading of obesity and anorexia treats body weight as the materialised expression of psychic conflict with the repressed feminine, while addiction-medicine literature frames weight gain and loss as barometers of metabolic and neurochemical dysregulation in substance-use recovery. The term thus binds spirit and matter, cosmology and clinic, in ways depth psychology has only partially theorised.

In the library 11 passages

God’s omniscient direction of the world should lead us to observe measure, since he ordered all things in measure, number, and weight… weight is ascribed to the Holy Spirit.

Von Franz recovers the alchemical-Scholastic tradition in which weight is not mere physical mass but the pneumatic principle of divine attraction, attributed specifically to the Holy Spirit and grounding a triadic cosmological psychology.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

putting on weight is more than a simple matter of eating too much… Behind any metabolic disturbance there may be both physiological and psychological causes.

Woodman establishes that body weight in obesity is the somatic symptom of a deeper psychic conflict, refusing any purely caloric or behavioural explanation and insisting on the psychosomatic complexity beneath metabolic disturbance.

Woodman, Marion, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

all the parts of the world move towards its centre, and particularly those with weight… air and fire are weightless. But they too extend in a way to the centre of the whole sphere.

The Stoic doctrine articulated here makes weight the defining property of corporeal, earth-bound elements, structuring a cosmological hierarchy in which gravity and pneuma are opposed principles of matter and spirit.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

shifting the weight of his body to his toes, heels, and sides of his feet, then balancing his weight on the entire surface of his feet, letting them soften on the floor… helped Ted feel more grounded.

Ogden demonstrates that conscious redistribution of bodily weight through sensorimotor exercises is a direct psychotherapeutic intervention for trauma-induced dissociation, restoring the body’s gravitational relation to earth as a correlate of psychological grounding.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

weight, hardness, and the power of heating, attracting, purging, and all the other qualities we experience in bodies, consist solely in motion or the privation of motion, and in the configuration and position of parts.

Descartes reduces weight to a mechanistic property of extended matter — motion and configuration — establishing the Cartesian dualism against which phenomenological and depth-psychological accounts of embodied weight would later define themselves.

Descartes, René, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

food becomes the scapegoat for every emotion, and forms the nucleus around which the personality revolves.

Woodman frames the obese person’s relationship to food — and by extension to body weight — as organised by an autonomous complex that hijacks every emotional function, making weight management inseparable from the individuation of feeling.

Woodman, Marion, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

animals simply sustain a lower than normal body weight. This lower level of body weight continues to be actively defended, so enforced weight reductions lead to increased feeding.

Panksepp’s neuroscientific account of hypothalamic set-point regulation reveals that body weight is not passively accumulated but actively defended by subcortical systems, complicating simple voluntarist models of eating and providing a neurobiological parallel to Woodman’s depth-psychological insight.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

When the body is out of alignment, an increase in muscular tension and energy is required to hold the person upright. The more the body is in alignment, the less effort is needed.

Ogden extends the concept of weight into postural alignment with gravity, arguing that the body’s vertical relation to its own mass has direct psychological correlates and that misalignment produces chronic energetic expenditure relevant to trauma treatment.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

43% of women expressed concern that weight gain could trigger drug relapse and other treatment research has shown that weight-related concerns exist in 70% of women.

Clinical data demonstrate that preoccupation with body weight during addiction recovery is not merely cosmetic but constitutes a genuine relapse risk factor, particularly for women, situating weight at the intersection of body image, affect regulation, and substance use.

Wiss, David A., The Role of Nutrition in Addiction Recovery: What We Know and What We Don’t, 2019supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The scales of Zeus may derive, albeit remotely, from the Egyptian notion of the use of scales to judge the dead.

Seaford traces the metaphysical use of weighing in ancient Greek thought to Egyptian psychostasis, suggesting that weight as moral-cosmic judgment — rather than physical measure — is the archaic precedent for later philosophical and psychological uses of the term.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Part Il (the falling weight) caused strong reactions… Weight Whistle Picture Height 9.4mm. 25.8 mm. 15.05 mm.

In Jung’s early experimental psychophysiology, a falling weight serves as one of several physical stimuli used to measure galvanic and pneumographic reactivity, situating physical weight as an instrument for probing the body’s affective responsiveness.

Jung, C. G., Experimental Researches, 1904aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms