Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2009, 54, 123–142

Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’:

an historical reconstruction

Ann Addison, London

Abstract: This paper traces the history of Jung’s ideas concerning the psychoid
unconscious, from their origins in the work of the vitalist, Hans Driesch, and his
concept of Das Psychoid, through the subsequent work of Eugen Bleuler, Director
of the Burghölzli Asylum, and his concept of Die Psychoide, to the publication of Jung’s
paper On the Nature of the Psyche in 1947. This involves a review of Jung’s early
work and of his meeting with Freud, when apparently the two men discussed calling the
unconscious ‘psychoid’, as well as a review of Jung’s more mature ideas concerning a
psychoid unconscious. I propose to argue that even at the time of their meeting, Jung
had already formulated an epistemological approach that was significantly different from
that of Freud and that clearly foreshadowed his later ideas as set out in On the Nature
of the Psyche.

Key words: archetypes, body-mind, emergence, instincts, psychoid, psychoid processes,

psychoid unconscious, vitalism

Introduction
In this paper, I want to look at the conceptual history of the psychoid
unconscious, in an attempt to discover how the seeds of this concept arose
and germinated in the mind of Jung, thereby to gain a better understanding
as to what Jung means when he refers to psychoid to designate a deeply
unconscious set of processes that are neither physiological nor psychological
but that somehow partake of both. Although my primary aim in developing
such a conceptual framework has been to formulate a theoretical underpinning
in relation to clinical work, nonetheless the history of this idea also sheds an
interesting light on the relationship between Freud and Jung and on differences
in their early epistemologies, and this is what I wish to focus on in the present
paper.
The paper will therefore begin here, with a reference in a letter of Freud to
Jung dated 7 April 1907, very shortly after their first meeting in the spring
of that year, in which Freud is responding to a suggestion, presumably made
by Jung in their meeting, to give the unconscious the name ‘psychoid’. At first
sight, this exchange may seem to be no more than a casual interchange between
the two men, but I am proposing to demonstrate below that in fact it contains

0021-8774/2009/5401/123
C 2009, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
124 Ann Addison

far more significance than initially appears, and points towards a divergence of
approach right from the start of their collaboration.
This conversation is of interest, additionally, because it shows that even in
1907 Jung was already contemplating an idea of a psychoid unconscious; and
yet, apparently, he did not adopt the expression ‘psychoid’ into his own theory
until forty years later, when he published On the Nature of the Psyche in 1947.
The reference in question is somewhat mysterious, since what Freud says is:
I appreciate your motives in trying to sweeten the sour apple, but I do not think
you will be successful. Even if we call the unconscious ‘psychoid’ it will still be the
unconscious, and even if we do not call the driving force in the broadened conception
of sexuality ‘libido’, it will still be libido, and in every inference we draw from it we
shall come back to the very thing from which we are trying to divert attention with
our nomenclature.
(McGuire 1991, p. 58)
Rather tantalisingly, the currently published records do not show in detail
what passed between them in this first meeting, and so we cannot fully unravel
the strands of their dialogue to get at their underlying intentions. However,
we can readily surmise that it was Jung who raised the idea of calling the
unconscious the ‘psychoid’. We can also surmise that they were discussing
Freud’s theory of the unconscious, including his concept of ‘libido’ with its
sexual connotations, and that Jung was questioning his ideas. On the face of it,
Freud is trying to neutralize a view alternative to his own, by claiming that the
terms ‘unconscious’ and ‘libido’ carry within them the essence of his concepts,
which already incorporate or supersede the ideas offered by Jung.
It is to be borne in mind that, in the beginning, psychoanalysis was founded
upon an interest in the links between psyche and soma. The pioneering work
of Freud and Breuer, beginning with their Studies on Hysteria (Freud & Breuer
1892–5), traced a link between a precipitating psychic trauma on the one hand
and sensory memory and experience on the other (later described by Freud
as sensory hallucinations), that could be abreacted by bringing the memory
of the original trauma to consciousness through analysis. The mechanism
attributed to hysteria by Freud and Breuer involved the repression into the
unconscious of unwanted ideas of a sexual nature, and thus their dissociation
from consciousness, coupled with a conversion of the accompanying affect into
somatic symptoms.
At the same time, Freud was writing his Project for a Scientific Psychology
concerning the environment’s impact on the human organism and the organ-
ism’s reaction to it, in which Freud attempted to represent mental phenomena,
including dreaming and hysterical compulsion, in terms of physiological
processes (Freud 1895[1950]). Not much later, Jung in his word association
tests demonstrated through the use of a galvanometer, whose electrodes were
placed in skin contact with the hands and feet of his subjects, that a physical
reaction accompanies the manifestation of an affect-laden association of ideas
or complex (Jung 1907/8).
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 125

At this very early stage in the field of psychoanalysis, the ideas of Freud
and his followers were founded primarily on empiricism and a search for
causal mechanisms linking body and mind, following the prevailing influences
including natural causality, Darwin’s biology and the physiology of the
Helmholtz school 1 , whose principles were physico-chemical. In Freud’s Models
of the Mind, Sandler et al emphasize Freud’s causal approach stemming from
his efforts to avoid metaphysical ideas, including teleology, in favour of an
empirical orientation:
In line with the dominant scientific ideas of the time, Freud systematically attempted to
eliminate teleological explanations from his theories; that is, he saw mental functioning
as being a form of adaptation to natural causes rather than having an ultimate and
final ‘purpose’.
(Sandler et al 1997, p. 17)

By the time Freud and Jung met in 1907, Freud had moved to a more topograph-
ical theory of mind, in which Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious define
different depth levels. The Unconscious was characterized by a very primitive
mode of functioning according to which instinctual drives and wishes seek
discharge, gratification and relief but are in conflict with the moral values of the
Conscious and therefore subject to censorship. Freud linked these instinctual
drives with the psychosexual development of the child, and conceptualized them
as fluctuating quantities of energy seeking discharge. Such energy he termed
libido.
Although, in the early years of their collaboration, Jung’s attitude to Freud
is popularly believed to have been based on an adherence to Freud’s ideas, I
would like to argue that in fact Jung was from the very beginning in this first
meeting proposing a completely different view of the unconscious: one that
was embedded in the history of vitalism; and one that foreshadowed and laid
the foundation for many of his later theories. I believe that already Jung had
begun to formulate his own theory of the unconscious as it would ultimately
be summarized forty years later in 1947 in On the Nature of the Psyche, and
that the implications in this first meeting were borne out by the subsequent
unfolding of events.
I am proposing therefore to begin by tracing Jung’s interests at the start of
his career, to look at his first case history and early clinical work in the light
of these interests, and then to set these against Freud’s early views on hysteria.
This will involve locating the psychoid concept within the history of vitalism,
since the notion of ‘a psychoid’ had already been conceived by the vitalist Hans
Driesch prior to the meeting of Freud and Jung. I shall then follow through
the subsequent development of the psychoid concept and offer a review of the

1 In connection with the association between Freud and the School of Helmholtz, Cranefield (1966)
reacts against the position that Freud was a mechanist/materialist, a view which was attributed to
Bernfield (1944)
126 Ann Addison

extent to which Jung’s more mature ideas departed from those of the vitalist
tradition.

Etymology
A consideration of the etymology of the word ‘psychoid’ locates its roots in the
Greek word psyche, meaning spirit or soul, after the goddess Psyche, and breath
or breath of life; and the Greek suffix -oeide, which is related to eidos, meaning
shape or form or what is seen. Interestingly, the Greek word psycho, meaning
I breathe, is onomatopoeic, representing out-, followed by in-, breathing. The
Greek psyche can be traced through the Latin psyche to later derivations in
numerous languages. The Greek psyche also carries the meaning ‘mind’, and
psyche in the sense of mind may be opposed to the Late Latin (i.e., AD 180—
600) psychicus having the meaning materialistic or carnal. Hence, the expression
‘psychoid’ may express an attempt to convey something about the manifest
shape or form of the spirit, soul or mind, animated by the breath of life. And
yet, at the same time, we also find from the same root a derivation which is
material and bodily.
Here, already, we have an association pointing in both directions towards
mind and body and betraying some uncertainty concerning their relation, and
in adopting the expression ‘psychoid’, the vitalists and Jung picked up on this
association. As I shall show, they tried to encapsulate the body-mind relation
in a single unified idea that was based not on psycho-physical parallelism but
on a conceptual unity.

Driesch’s concept of Das Psychoid

The term ‘psychoid’ was first employed in the field of vitalism to describe a
particular teleological function of the human organism, having been coined by
the vitalist, Hans Driesch (1867–1941), biologist and philosopher. Driesch was
interested in the relationship between body and mind and was opposed to the
notion of any deterministic connection between mind and body, and to the
mechanistic view that resulted from psycho-physical parallelism.
According to Driesch, all living bodies have three primary characteristics,
namely form, metabolism and the capacity for action. In experiments conducted
in 1892, he found that when an embryo of a sea urchin was at a very early
stage, including only two or four cells (blastomeres), and all but one of those
blastomeres were mutilated or destroyed, the single surviving blastomere still
developed into a complete, though smaller than normal, whole. He concluded
that the living organism aims at some sort of wholeness in terms of its form, and
thus that the development of organisms is directed by a life force or unifying
self-determining ordering principle.
Following a long line of philosophical thinkers from Aristotle onwards, he
called this biological teleology ‘vitalism’, and he used the term ‘entelechy’ for the
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 127

life force or ordering principle governing the process (as described in Die ‘Seele’
als Elementarer Naturfaktor published in Germany in 1903 and Der Vitalismus
als Geschichte und als Lehre published in Germany in 1905). He went on to
show that entelechy might also be found to account for the inheritance of
characteristics from one generation to another.
He then turned to the third characteristic of the living body, namely
action in the sense of movement in response to a stimulus. Movement, he
said, involves a functional adaptation through experience, when a stimulus is
repeated over time. A mechanical cause and effect cannot be deduced, since
the correspondence between an individualized stimulus and an individualized
effect occurs on the basis of reaction that has been created historically. An
individual stimulus has a ‘prospective potency’ of possible fates, only a single
one of which actually results; some innate faculty responds to the stimulus
by acting to produce a specific combination of muscular movements based on
history. This innate faculty he called Das Psychoid (i.e., a ‘psychoid’) in Die
‘Seele’ als Elementarer Naturfaktor:
This seems to be just the right place in our discussion to give a name to the ‘acting
something’ which we have discovered not to be a machine. We might speak of
‘entelechy’ . . . but it appears better to distinguish also in terminology the natural
agent which forms the body from the elemental agent which directs it. . . . I therefore
propose the very neutral name of ‘Psychoid’ for the elemental agent discovered in
action.
(Driesch 1929, p. 221)
Accordingly, Driesch considered that the psychoid served to regulate action,
and it did so by employing the faculties of the brain as a piano player uses a
piano.
He went on to postulate that, on the basis of future research into the nature
of instinct, the psychoid might also be found to underlie instinctual behaviour:
If the analysis of instincts should help us some day to a true proof of vitalism, instead
of offering only some indications towards it, it might also be said that a ‘psychoid’ is
the basis of instinctive phenomena.
(Driesch 1929, p. 221)
Driesch came to associate this innate faculty with unconscious ‘intra-psychical’
(as opposed to physical) states involving memory and association. Investigating
the ‘relations between my conscious phenomena and my material body’ (Driesch
1929, p. 304), he concluded:
Seen from a purely psychological side 2 , entelechy, or at least that part of it which
regulates action, i.e., our psychoid, is the same entity which is usually called soul or
mind, being the ultimate foundation of the Ego, with all his experiences.
(Driesch 1929, p. 306)

2 My emphasis
128 Ann Addison

Therefore, he defined his psychoid as an intra-psychic factor providing the

unconscious ultimate foundation of the conscious ego and linking the conscious
ego and the body-in-action. It is important to understand that overall Driesch
saw his psychoid as neither body nor mind but as something occupying a third
position in between and relating to both. This psychoid directs the brain in
response to acts of volition from the ego to achieve individualized behaviour
based on history, a process which he described as ‘I live my life’ (Driesch
1929, p. 306). Further, this psychoid is teleological and purposive in the
sense that it constitutes an ordering principle urging behaviour along paths
of adaptation to the environment based on intentionality of the ego and on
historical experience.

Jung and vitalism

Returning to Jung, we know from his very early work that he had a significant
interest in vitalism. In The Zofingia Lectures, delivered as a student in the years
1896–1899, Jung rejected both ‘contemporary sceptical materialist opinion’
(Jung 1896, para. 63) and metaphysics. He sought a third position lying between
them, which he found in vitalism, asserting that ‘a pre-existent vital principle is
necessary to explain the world of organic phenomena’ (Jung 1896, para. 63).
He described the vital principle as a life force, which
governs all bodily functions, including those of the brain, and hence also governs
consciousness . . . The vital principle extends far beyond consciousness in that it also
maintains the vegetative functions of the body which, as we know, are not under our
conscious control. Our consciousness is dependent on the functions of the brain, but
these are in turn dependent on the vital principle, and accordingly the vital principle
represents a substance, whereas consciousness represents a contingent phenomenon.
(Jung 1897, para. 96)

He linked the vital principle with the purposeful and organizational activity of
the soul in what he described as the new empirical psychology:
The new empirical psychology furnishes us with data ideally designed to expand our
knowledge of organic life and to deepen our views of the world . . . Our body formed
from matter, our soul gazing towards the heights, are joined in a single living organism.
(ibid., para. 142)
Accordingly, right from the outset and even as a student, Jung espoused in his
psychology a purposeful, i.e., a teleological, approach directed towards goals
of wholeness in the future, and in this he displayed the foundations of some of
his much later ideas with their vitalistic basis. This bias is also taken through
into his early clinical work, as his first case study demonstrates.

Jung’s dissertation
Jung’s initial publication of clinical work was his dissertation on a case of
somnambulism (1902). The subject, designated as Miss S. W., was in fact his
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 129

cousin Hélène Preiswerk although this was not at the time disclosed. She was
a young girl who experienced states of ‘double consciousness’ in which she
held séances attended by the young Jung. Jung describes at some length so-
called occult phenomena occurring in these states, without at any stage offering
a view as to the reality of such phenomena. Rather, he adopts a position of
enquiry into their psychological meaning for Hélène.
In her somnambulistic ‘attacks’, Hélène would display an unnatural pallor
and enact the behaviour and dialogue of other personalities foreign to that
of her normal waking state. Jung quotes Krafft-Ebing (1879, p. 498) that
hallucinations of all the senses are not uncommon in somnambulism (Jung 1902,
para. 11), and Hélène would display various kinds of automatic behaviour,
including unconscious motor phenomena and automatic writing, prior to
returning gradually to her waking state by way of a cataleptic stage.
Some of these other personalities were frivolous and childish but one, named
Ivenes and identified by Jung as the somnambulistic ego of Hélène, was a more
mature woman, assured and influential. Jung considered that Hélène:
anticipates her own future and embodies in Ivenes what she wishes to be in twenty
years’ time – the assured, influential, wise, gracious, pious lady.
(Jung 1902, para. 116)

The mechanism of this double consciousness, as described by Jung, bears

comment. Although he refers to the secondary personalities as dissociations
from the already existing personality, mentioning Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams, nevertheless he explicitly avoids adopting Freud’s theories on the
ground that he has no means of judging how far the emotion in question
was ‘repressed’ (ibid., para. 97). He also refers to the dream-states producing
Hélène’s automatisms as hysterical, and links her periodic personality changes
and splits in consciousness with hysteria, although again he avoids any idea of
repression:
Our patient differs essentially from pathological dreamers in that it could never be
proved that her reveries had previously been the object of her daily interests; her
dreams come up explosively, suddenly bursting forth with amazing completeness from
the darkness of the unconscious. . . . it seems probable that the roots of those dreams
were originally feeling-toned ideas which only occupied her waking consciousness for
a short time. We must suppose that hysterical forgetfulness plays a not inconsiderable
role in the origin of such dreams: many ideas which, in themselves, would be worth
preserving in consciousness, sink below the threshold, associated trains of thought get
lost and, thanks to psychic dissociation, go on working in the unconscious. We meet
the same process again in the genesis of our own dreams.
(ibid., para. 119)
For Jung, then, repression is not a factor, but rather a ‘forgetfulness’ in which
worthwhile 3 content sinks below the threshold of consciousness. This paves the

3 My emphasis
130 Ann Addison

way for a view contrary to the theory of hysteria based on repression favoured
by Freud, a view according to which Hélène’s somnambulism has a teleological
function:
It is, therefore, conceivable that the phenomena of double consciousness are simply
new character formations, or attempts of the future personality to break through. . . . In
view of the difficulties that oppose the future character, the somnambulisms sometimes
have an eminently teleological significance, in that they give the individual, who would
otherwise succumb, the means of victory.
(ibid., para. 136)

Thus, in this very early piece of work, Jung achieves a remarkable synthesis,
which is more in line with his earlier expressed interest in vitalism than
with his acknowledgement of Freud. Firstly, he offers a mechanism for
explaining dissociation, in which body and mind co-operate to produce split
off somnambulisms that are activated by unconscious motor phenomena
and hallucinations, and that incorporate forgotten worthwhile content; and
secondly he emphasizes clearly both the psychological meaning of Hélène’s
experiences and their teleological function in giving intimations of future
possibilities and their form, as in the case of the personality of Ivenes.

A case of hysteria
During the next few years, Jung began to adopt some of Freud’s ideas more
overtly, most notably in his treatment of Sabina Spielrein, in which he employed
Freud’s method of working over childhood memories and associative material.
Sabina was admitted to the Burghölzli Clinic in 1904, when Eugen Bleuler
was Director and Jung had sole medical responsibility for patients. Although,
in 1896, Bleuler had described Freud’s Studies on Hysteria as ‘one of the
most important publications of the last few years in the field of normal and
pathological psychology’, the hospital records give no indication of any clinical
application yet of Freud’s ideas (Minder 1994, p. 111). Sabina was diagnosed
with hysteria, and she was effectively the Burghölzli’s first case to be treated
using Freud’s analytic method.
She suffered from compulsions, tics, and other somatic symptoms, and
according to notes taken by Jung, she reported feeling as if someone were
pressing upon her, and as if something were crawling around in her bed. In her
treatment with Jung, she confessed to a father complex, in which her father
had beaten and humiliated her as a child. Jung wrote that he applied Freud’s
method with considerable success and her symptoms cleared up (Minder 1994,
p. 121).
However, while Jung acknowledged the efficacy of Freud’s method, it is not
so evident that he agreed with Freud’s theory. Minder (1994, p. 129) thinks
that Jung was referring to Sabina in his paper Cryptomnesia (Jung 1905), in
which Jung describes hysteria in terms of his own theories, according to which
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 131

hysterical dissociation is brought about by a feeling-toned memory complex.

The following year, in their early correspondence during October to December
of 1906, Jung expressed directly to Freud doubts concerning various aspects
of Freud’s theory of hysteria and its genesis, writing that his scientific premises
were utterly different from those of Freud (McGuire 1991, p. 51). Papadopoulos
(2006) sees in this statement a reference to significant epistemological differences
from the outset.
In a lecture in Amsterdam in 1907 shortly after his meeting with Freud, Jung
again referred to his work with Sabina, presented as a case of psychotic hysteria,
describing her symptoms very much in the Freudian terms of infantile sexuality,
repression, and the consequent appearance of physical symptoms (Jung 1908,
paras. 51–2). Nevertheless, in the same lecture Jung also criticizes Freud’s
views, based on his own theory of complexes derived from his word association
experiments (ibid., para. 42), and he gives a very wide interpretation to Freud’s
understandings of ‘sexuality’ and ‘libido’, describing them respectively as ‘the
instinct for the preservation of the species’ and ‘any inordinate passion or desire’
(Jung 1908, para. 49). I think therefore that it is quite possible that Jung tended
to see the aetiology of hysteria more in terms of his own ideas concerning
complexes and their links with dissociation and physical symptoms, rather than
in terms of the mechanism described by Freud. All of this seems to suggest that
Jung had clear reservations about Freud’s ideas even at the stage of their first
meeting.

Freud and Jung and their meeting

In the light of this background, Jung’s suggestion to Freud to call the
unconscious ‘psychoid’ would seem to be no mere chance remark but one
to carry within it a whole raft of already formulated ideas concerning the
unconscious, in spite of the fact that the remark was tossed lightly aside by
Freud with the comment that Jung was simply ‘trying to sweeten the apple’.
Given his already demonstrated interest in vitalism and his approach in his
dissertation to the psychological experiences of his cousin Hélène, Jung might
well have contemplated an idea of the unconscious more in line with the vitalism
of Hans Driesch than with the views of Freud, i.e., one that was teleological
and aligned towards potential future forms, one having an organizing function,
and one whose drives were not solely sexual in origin. The contents of such
an unconscious could then be seen as worthwhile and forgotten, as opposed
to unwanted and repressed, and the dissociation and somatic symptoms of
hysteria could be explained in terms of Jung’s theory of complexes and the
somatic thinking of Driesch.
Even at this early stage, therefore, it appears that Jung may well have been
contemplating a view of the unconscious that embraced something like the
psychoid of Driesch to account both for the body-mind connection and for the
teleological function that he attributed to Hélène and her somnambulisms.
132 Ann Addison

That this view is in fact quite probable may be demonstrated also by Jung’s
references to vitalistic ideas and works on vitalism in his later writings on his
theory of libido, including Symbols of Transformation (1912), which proposed
an idea of libido in non-sexual energic terms, and his essay On Psychic Energy
(partly written in 1912 although only published in 1928), which sets out to
explain the rationale for his ideas on libido.
Marilyn Nagy (1991) draws attention to references to vitalistic ideas in
Symbols of Transformation, commenting:
I am certain that what was really at stake between the two men in their struggle over
the nature of psychic libido was the ancient mind-body problem as it surfaces in the
biological sphere.
(Nagy 1991, p.128)

In my opinion, the differences ran even deeper than this and were of an
epistemological nature, since Freud, as stated above, espoused a biological-
mechanical model in his initial work on hysteria and in the Project and located
the origins of pathology in childhood sexuality, whereas Jung from the outset
held to a vitalistic teleological approach, which continued to influence his
thinking in one form or another throughout his life.
It is then no surprise that subsequent events led to a parting of the ways, as
both Freud and Jung continued to develop their ideas along the lines already
foreshadowed in their divergent initial epistemological approaches. In Jung’s
case, this meant that the influence of vitalism continued in the future evolution
of his views concerning a psychoid unconscious.

Bleuler’s concept of Die Psychoide

The next step in the background to Jung’s mature ideas on a psychoid
unconscious, derived from the field of vitalism, is provided by Eugen Bleuler
(1857–1939), professor of psychiatry at the University of Zurich, and director
of the Burghölzli Asylum in the period 1898–1927. Jung was Bleuler’s assistant
from 1900–1909, and we know, from Ernst Falzeder (2007) for example, that
the Burghölzli community was close knit and that ideas were freely discussed
and exchanged. It is likely, therefore, that Bleuler was well acquainted with
Jung’s interest in vitalism, and he was certainly aware of Driesch as his writings
attest, although he dismissed Driesch’s view of the psychoid on the ground that
the underlying theory could be attributed to philosophy rather than science.
It was only considerably after Jung had left the Burghölzli that Bleuler
published a concept of the psychoid in Die Psychoide als Prinzip Der
Organischen Entwicklung (1925). In distinction from Driesch’s concept ‘Das
Psychoid’, having the neuter gender, Bleuler called his the feminine ‘Die
Psychoide’. In a review in the IJPA (1927), Reich suggests that Bleuler does
not satisfactorily distinguish his psychoid from that of Driesch but I think that
this shows an insufficient understanding of the two views.
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 133

By contrast with Driesch, Bleuler described his psychoid in terms of a psycho-

physical parallelism, in that he argued that ‘both physiology and the psyche
act on similar principles’ for motives that seek to achieve some final future
orientation (Bleuler 1930, p. 35). In the case of the organism, the instincts are
so ordered that life is maintained; and in the case of the psyche, intelligence acts
as a guide to the same end. In both, adaptation occurs in response to experience
and introduces new orientations accordingly. This approach suggests the idea
of a psyche-soma split, whereas Driesch disputes such parallelism by proposing
a third position for his psychoid between the two.
For example, in the case of the body, according to Bleuler:
the organism adapts itself a thousandfold to unusual needs, heat, cold, increased or
diminished use of certain bodily organs, change of food etc. . . . It is as if the organism
were ‘learning’ to select the conditions most favourable to it. In any case, we are
in the presence here of a function similar to human memory, which creates new
connections . . .
(Bleuler 1930, p. 36)
In another example, a newborn baby cries by reflex and finds that mother
comes, which gradually leads first to an idea that mother comes in response to
crying, which the baby likes, and then to the building of memory and psyche.
The newborn has no ability to reflect, but his cry causes a reaction in that
mother comes. This produces a change in his psyche so that an association is
formed, and thereafter crying occurs on the mere inclination to have mother
near.
In both cases, an influence causes a reaction and a permanent structural
change, which shapes future reactions in a favourable direction. Since these are
not conscious, Bleuler eschewed the expression ‘memory’ in favour of ‘mneme’
for the link between influence and reaction, and he allocated the expression
‘engramme’ for the permanent change, borrowing his terminology from the
psychologist Richard Semon (Bleuler 1930, p. 38). Thus, the mneme yields an
adaptation, a ‘learning’ of a purposeful action as if it already had a potential
outcome in view, and the experiences are preserved in the form of engrammes
that are later revived in the shape of actions, and in associations that determine
the paths of our thought processes. In the body, this yields physical actions in
response to nervous stimuli, and regeneration occurs following injury. In the
brain, for example in the process of writing, it produces a perception of pen
and paper, as well as engrammes of the writing movement and a conception of
the ideas to be written that direct the writing action.
Thus, exactly the same elementary processes occur in the bodily functions as
in the memory of the psyche. Both learn by experience and both comprise an
integration of functions:
The psyche – apart from its experience content – consists of a number of
instincts . . . bound up as a unit . . . Bodily functions, too, are integrated to a high
degree, not only the nervous ones but all the others; all vegetative functions, digestion,
134 Ann Addison

circulation etc, are dependent on one another . . . Hence, we have good grounds for
bringing the bodily functions under one conception. This summary, the body soul, I
have called the psychoid.

As we ascertain in the psychoid, with the exception of consciousness, all the elementary
functions that we find in the psyche, and in the latter all that are in the former, we
cannot do otherwise than regard the psyche as a specialization of the psychoid . . .
(Bleuler 1930, p. 43)

Accordingly, the stage moves from the psychoid to the psyche at the point that
consciousness sets in. Bleuler defines the psychoid as the capacity to respond
and adapt in the face of stimuli thereby creating permanent changes in the brain
that shape future reactions. Out of this, he goes on to elaborate the functions
of the psychoid in the development or evolution of the species.
For Bleuler, therefore, the psychoid is initially a bodily function that extends
into the area of psychological growth, arising out of behaviour based on ‘what
is favourable’ and generating permanent changes in the body and in the brain
through the experience. This leads Bleuler ultimately to see the psychoid as a
causal agent of psychic development, as in the case of the infant who develops
a pattern of behaviour as it learns that mother responds to its crying, and in
this sense Bleuler’s psychoid also has a teleological character.
Bleuler, by opposing psyche and soma, is forced to locate his psychoid in
one or the other, and does so by placing it in the body rather than in the
psyche, in distinction from Driesch’s unifying psychoid having a third position.
Nevertheless, Bleuler offers an elaboration not provided by Driesch, according
to which his bodily psychoid is oriented towards psychic development based
on a selection of that which has a favourable outcome. Thus, he supplies a
mechanism of a causal nature by which psyche develops out of soma, which
may be contrasted with the very deeply unconscious and life enhancing process
envisaged by Driesch. We may therefore see the psychoid of Bleuler particularly
as a developmental agent, which fosters the development of mind out of the
matrix of the body.

Jung’s concept of the psychoid unconscious

This then is the background to Jung’s adoption of the same expression
‘psychoid’ to describe a particular aspect of the unconscious in his paper On
the Nature of the Psyche (1947).
In the period between offering the name to Freud in 1907 and this time, Jung
had been developing his own ideas concerning the structure and development of
the psyche, in which he regarded instincts as a key factor. In his paper Instincts
and the Unconscious (first published in 1919), he described instincts and
archetypes as correlates of one another in the spheres of action and perception,
the one regulating our conscious actions and the other determining our mode
of apprehension:
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 135

Just as instincts compel a man to a specifically human mode of existence, so the

archetypes force his ways of perception into specifically human patterns.
(Jung 1919/1928/1948, para. 270)
A few years later, he arrived at a different view, according to which
the archetypes are the forms which the instincts assume (Jung 1927/1931,
para. 339). By 1936, he was writing that the instincts are the chief motivating
forces of psychic events:
I regard the compulsiveness of instinct as an ectopsychic factor. None the less,
it is psychologically important because it leads to the formation of structures or
patterns which may be regarded as determinants of human behaviour. Under these
circumstances the immediate determining factor is . . . the structure resulting from the
interaction of instinct and the psychic situation of the moment.
(Jung 1936, para. 234)

He called this process ‘psychization’.

This development in Jung’s thinking is relevant to his views on the nature
of psychoid processes, because of the way in which Jung links such processes
with instincts and the archetypes. Acknowledging both Driesch and Bleuler,
Jung dismisses Driesch’s view of the psychoid as a ‘directing principle’ on the
ground that this approach is essentially philosophical, and observes that his
own use of the term serves to delineate roughly the same group of phenomena
that Bleuler had in mind, namely those subcortical processes concerned with
biological adaptive functions.
Jung defined his own use of the term ‘psychoid’ thus:
(F)irstly, I use it as an adjective, not as a noun; secondly, no psychic quality in the
proper sense of the word is implied, but only a ‘quasi-psychic’ one such as reflex-
processes possess; and . . . it is meant to distinguish a category of events from merely
vitalistic phenomena on the one hand and from specifically psychic processes on the
other.
(Jung 1947, para. 368)

Based on the enquiry, ‘(H)ow do we define the psychic as distinct from the
physiological?’ (Jung 1947, para. 376), he came up with precisely the view
that the contents of the unconscious psyche contain undoubted links with the
instinctual sphere, which may be thought of as physiological, the lower reaches
of the psyche beginning where the psyche emancipates itself from the compulsive
force of the instinct. The psyche then extends along a continuum from instinct in
its lower reaches in the organic-material substrate to spirit in its upper reaches,
and:
Where instinct predominates psychoid processes set in which pertain to the
unconscious as elements incapable of consciousness. The psychoid process is not
the unconscious as such, for this has far greater extension. Apart from psychoid
processes, there are in the unconscious ideas, volitional acts, hence something akin to
conscious processes; but in the instinctual sphere these phenomena retire so far into
the background that the term ‘psychoid’ is probably justified.
(Jung 1947, para. 380)
136 Ann Addison

Having thus linked instinct with psychoid processes, he goes on to link instinct
with his theory of archetypes, as follows:
Instinct and the archaic [primitive] mode [of functioning] meet in the biological
conception of the ‘pattern of behaviour’ . . . [E]very instinct bears in itself the pattern
of its situation. Always, it fulfils an image, and the image has fixed qualities. The
instinct of the leaf-cutting ant fulfils the image of ant, tree, leaf, cutting, transport, and
the little ant-garden of fungi. If any one of these conditions is lacking, the instinct does
not function, because it cannot exist without its total pattern, without its image. Such
an image is an a priori type. It is inborn in the ant prior to any activity, for there can
be no activity at all unless an instinct of corresponding pattern initiates and makes it
possible. This schema holds true also of man . . .
(Jung 1947, para. 398)
He considered that this instinctual (i.e., primordial) image 4 represented the
meaning of the instinct, and concluded that such patterns of behaviour
constitute unconscious conditions acting as regulators and stimulators of the
instinctual sphere. The resulting unconscious processes give rise to spontaneous
manifestations in the form of dreams and other fantasy-material of a consciously
perceptible nature, in which can be seen certain well-defined themes and formal
elements. The unconscious conditions thus act also as regulators and stimulators
of creative fantasy-activity, which avails itself of the existing conscious material,
so that the instinctual image stimulates mental activity generally. Consciousness,
he wrote, is not only a transformation of the original instinctual image but also
its transformer (Jung 1947, para. 399). In this respect, I think Jung is describing
and elaborating an emergent factor that arises whenever the instinctual image
is fulfilled and that yields a new and synergistic result.
He goes on to say:
The archetypal representations (images and ideas) mediated to us by the unconscious
should not be confused with the archetype as such. They are very varied structures
which all point back to one essentially ‘irrepresentable’ form. The latter is character-
ized by certain formal elements and by certain fundamental meanings, although these
can be grasped only approximately. The archetype as such is a psychoid factor . . . It
does not appear to be capable of reaching consciousness.
(Jung 1947, para. 417)

By designating the archetype as a psychoid factor, Jung is suggesting that

all archetypes possess this psychoid aspect, i.e., they are all underpinned by
psychoid processes immanent in the structure of the organism, that may be
conceived as emergent properties. This is the first time that he has specifically
related archetypes to psychoid processes, and it results in an extension of his
previous definition of the archetypes to embrace an idea where their effect may
be to generate phenomena other than visual images and ideas, which phenomena

4 His use of the word ‘image’ is confusing in this paper since he uses it on the one hand to refer to

a complete set of criteria composing the primordial or instinctual image, and on the other to refer
to the more usual context of a visual representation.
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 137

manifest psychically although being nearer in character to the physiology of the

organism:
In my previous writings, I have always treated the archetypal phenomena as psychic,
because the material to be expounded or investigated was solely concerned with
images or ideas. The psychoid nature of the archetype as put forward here does not
contradict these earlier formulations; it only means a further degree of conceptual
differentiation . . . Just as the ‘psychic infra-red’, the biological instinctual psyche,
gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its
chemical and physical conditions, so the ‘psychic ultra-violet’, the archetype, describes
a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last
analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically.
(Jung 1947, paras. 419–420)
Consequently, for Jung, the psychoid nature of the archetype is a way of linking
psyche and soma through a continuum extending from an instinctual or ‘psychic
infra-red’ pole to a spiritual or ‘psychic ultra-violet’ pole. We can see that, for
him, body and mind do not stand in a parallel relation but are two different
aspects of one and the same thing, represented in his notion of the psychoid
unconscious.
In Jung’s model, psychoid processes underlying the archetypes are immanent
at an instinctual level in the matrix of the organism and are so deeply lodged
that they are incapable of being made conscious. Such processes through their
links with the instincts give rise to activity within the psyche that produces
emergent forms of an archetypal nature, which contribute to the development
of consciousness and of structure within the psyche, both transforming the
existing structure and then being transformed by the new structure.

Discussion
Interestingly, both Bleuler and Jung dismissed Driesch on the grounds that he
was a philosopher and that his ideas were based merely on philosophy, in spite
of the fact that, of the three of them, Driesch was the one with the strongest
record of scientific experimentation, publication and scientific claim.
In viewing the evolution of the psychoid concept through its various
incarnations in the hands of the three men, I think that they adopted different
positions in regard to the nature of the linking mechanism between body
and mind, with Driesch and Jung both arguing that body and mind are
different aspects of the same thing, while Bleuler took a view based more
on psycho-physical parallelism. A common theme in each case, however, was
a notion of the psychoid concept as a teleological factor, and here each of
them developed the ideas of their predecessor further towards a hypothesis of
a specific methodology by which such teleology might be expressed.
Driesch postulated a unifying psychoid situated between psyche and soma,
such psychoid directing and organizing behaviour, in the sense of the body-
in-action, towards goals of wholeness lying in the future. Bleuler’s advance
138 Ann Addison

over Driesch was to elucidate a view of the psychoid as an unconscious bodily

process by which psychic learning takes place in response to physical stimuli,
as in the case of the infant who develops a pattern of behaviour as it learns that
mother responds to its crying.
Jung, I think, developed his description of psychoid processes a long way
beyond the ideas of both Driesch and Bleuler. However, the fact that he chose
to adopt the same terminology suggests that he still wished to retain a vitalistic
basis for his ideas, in spite of the fact that he eschewed the entirely vitalistic
notion of Driesch, saying that his definition of psychoid processes is not intended
to embrace merely vitalistic phenomena within its scope.
The key aspect of Jung’s advance, I think, lies with his linking of psychoid
processes with his theory of archetypes. This enables him to draw connections
with the function of instincts, and with his notion of the instinctual image
with its many components combining together into one single outcome. This
connection is a very interesting one, whose full implications may be far reaching.
As Jung observes, all of the elements must be present before any outcome
arises, but at the moment when they all come together something entirely new
emerges. In his example, the instinctual image of the leaf-cutting ant, all of
the ant, tree etc., must coincide to produce the leaf-cutting behaviour natural
to the ant. No previous experience of leaf-cutting behaviour is required for
the ant to know what to do, and no learning takes place; rather the instinct
is complete in its specificity from the very first occurrence. The instinctual
image is therefore complex and multi-valent. It is also purposeful, teleological,
and directed towards the survival of the organism in bringing about the next
developmental stage. In this manner, we can see that each succeeding stage
supervenes on the previous one, neither being caused by, nor reducible to, the
factors in the previous stage.
A pattern of elements, in their multiplicity, coincide and an entirely new and
more complex form emerges, in which all the elements are combined not simply
as an independent collection or collocation but as an interacting whole, in which
the interaction is not predictable from the individual parts.
Furthermore, the instinctual image with its pattern of elements is immanent as
a potential in the basic structure of the organism. It exists as potential internally
within the organism, but it can only be brought to fruition when external
circumstances arise to fulfil the instinctual image. The internal potential must
be met by the external circumstances for the next stage to emerge.
As Jung says, what holds true for the instinctual image of the ant is a schema
that also holds true for man. And indeed we can see it in the newborn infant
who, when laid on her mother’s breast, has been found to seek out the nipple
and start to feed. Here, infant, mouth, tongue, mother, breast, nipple come
together, and in this moment the infant instinctively suckles and milk starts to
flow.
However, Jung does not stop at the behavioural level of instinct. He goes
on to apply this schema to the development of consciousness, linking such
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 139

development with the dynamism of instinct at one end of the spectrum and
with the instinctual image at the other. To me, this suggests that he is giving
us a mechanism by which consciousness not only emerges from the matrix
of the body under the pressure of the dynamism of instinct in co-operation
with the elements of the instinctual image, but also how consciousness may
become increasingly sophisticated by developing to ever further levels by the
same process. It also suggests that this process requires a duality, in which the
instinctual image as potential meets the elements of the instinctual image as
objects, for new forms to arise. This points to the significance of relationship
in the development of the psyche, the ‘other’ being required to fulfil aspects of
the instinctual image in the early stages of physiological development and of
consciousness.
The process of emergence of new forms of instinctual image will gradually
give rise to consciousness, internal representations of the ‘other’, and fantasy-
material concerning self and other perceptible to and interacting with conscious-
ness. Thus, in later stages, I would suggest, such internal representations of the
other, including fantasy material, can also provide elements of the instinctual
image, and the process of emergence can be at least in part an intrapsychic one.
This fits with Jung’s comments that consciousness is not only a transformation
of the original instinctual image but also its transformer.

Conclusion
I would therefore like to propose that Jung is giving us a model of psychoid
processes in terms of the primordial image that he describes as a pattern of
behaviour in relation to the leaf-cutting ant. When a particular set of conditions
is fulfilled, then these processes are initiated and the instinctual sphere is
stimulated to activity. However, such set of conditions can only be fulfilled in the
human sphere in relationship, at which point psychoid processes respond and
lead first to connection, communication, and in time later to the development of
psychic structure. Thus, I would suggest that Jung’s psychoid processes link the
physiological and instinctual spheres with the growth of the psyche, and lead
to the emergence of ever new and more complex psychic and psychophysical
structures.
To return now to the point where I started, with Freud’s letter of 7 April
1907 to Jung, and the suggestion put forward by Jung in their meeting that the
unconscious could be called ‘psychoid’, it seems to me that even at this early
stage Jung had in mind some idea of an unconscious more aligned with the
somatic thinking of Driesch than with the views of Freud. I believe that, even
in their meeting, the groundwork had already been laid in the mind of Jung
for an idea of the unconscious based on a teleological outlook directed towards
the possibility and even character of future potential. Such a view implies that
the two men had wholly different epistemological approaches from the outset.
And, it seems to me that this was borne out in the unfolding of events, not only
140 Ann Addison

between Freud and Jung, but also in the way in which Jung’s more mature ideas
asserted themselves.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

L’article retrace l’histoire des idées de Jung concernant l’inconscient psychoı̈de depuis
leur origine dans l’œuvre du vitaliste Hans Driesch et son concept Das Psychoid, en
passant par l’œuvre d’Eugen Bleuler, alors directeur du Burgölzli, et son concept Die
Psychoide, jusqu’à la publication de l’article de Jung sur La Nature du Psychisme en
1947. Les premiers travaux de Jung y sont passés en revue, de même qu’y est évoquée sa
rencontre avec Freud, au cours de laquelle les deux hommes discutèrent de l’inconscient
en le nommant « psychoı̈de », et enfin le résultat de la maturation de ses idées concernant
un inconscient psychoı̈de. A l’époque de leur rencontre, l’approche de Jung était déjà
épistémologiquement fort distincte de celle de Freud, annonçant clairement ses idées plus
tardives, telles qu’elles seront formulées dans l’article de 1947.

Dieser Aufsatz verfolgt die Geschichte von Jungs Ideen das psychoide Unbewußte
betreffend von ihren Ursprüngen im Werk des Vitalisten Hans Driesch und dessen
Konzeptes Das Psychoid über das darauf aufbauende Werk Eugen Bleulers, Direktors
des Burghölzlis, und seines Entwurfs Die Psychoide bis zu Jungs Aufsatz On the Nature
of the Psyche von 1947. Hierin eingeschlossen sind sowohl eine Überprüfung von Jungs
Frühwerk sowie seiner Begegnung mit Freud, bei der beide offensichtlich über das
Unbewußte als ‘psychoid’ sprachen, wie auch eine Betrachtung von Jungs reiferen Ideen
bezüglich eines psychoiden Unbewußten. Ich stelle die These auf, daß Jung bereits zur
Zeit ihres Zusammentreffens einen epistemologischen Zugang formuliert hatte, der sich
bedeutend von jenem Freuds unterschied und der deutlich seine späteren Ideen ahnen
läßt, die er in On the Nature of the Psyche darlegt.

In questo lavoro viene tracciata la storia delle idee di Jung che riguardano l’inconscio
psicoide a partire dalle loro origini nel lavoro del sostenitore del vitalismo Hans Driesch
e del suo concetto de Lo Psicoide’,passando poi attraverso il lavoro successivo di
Eugen Bleuler, direttore del Burgholzlii Asylum e del suo concetto de Lo psicoide, alla
pubblicazione nel 1947 del lavoro di Jung Sulla natura della psiche. Ciò implicherà
una revisione sia del primo lavoro junghiano e del suo incontro con Freud, quando,
apparentemente, i due uomini discussero sul chiamare l’inconscio ‘psicoide’, sia su una
revisione delle idee più mature riguardanti un inconscio psicoide. Sostengo che persino
al tempo dei loro incontri, Jung aveva già approntato un approccio epistemologico
significativamente diverso da quello di Freud e che chiaramente anticipava le sue idee
più tarde come esposte in Sulla natura della psiche.

Este trabajo explora la historia de las ideas de Jung sobre el inconsciente psicoide,
desde sus orı́genes en los trabajos de Hans Driesch, y su concepto del das psychoid,
continuando con los trabajos de Eugen Bleuler, director del Hospital de Burghösli, y
Jung, vitalism and ‘the psychoid’ 141

sus concepto del Die Psychoide, hasta la publicación de Jung Sobre la Naturaleza de
la Psique en 1947. Ello connotará la revisión de las obras tempranas de Jung y su
encuentro con Freud, en el cual aparentemente ambos hombres discutieron llamando al
inconsciente ‘psicoide’, ası́ mismo se hace una revisión de las ideas mas maduras de Jung
concernientes al psicoide inconsciente. Me propongo argumentar que aún al momento
de su reunión, Jung ya tenı́a una aproximación epistemológica que era significativamente
diferente a la de Freud y que esta enmarcara claramente sus ideas posteriores como se
expresan en Sobre la Naturaleza de la Psique.

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[Ms first received November 2007; final version September 2008]