Psyche as Cosmos and When Individuation Entails Developing the Capacity to Bear Complexity
- Mar 30
- 9 min read
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
In the contemporary understanding of the psyche, there is an increasingly pronounced need to move beyond models that conceive the subject as a closed, homogeneous, and hierarchically stable entity. Classical psychological paradigms, especially those grounded in the ideal of transparent consciousness and a rationally organized self, prove insufficient for encompassing the complexity of inner life. By contrast, the Jungian, and especially the post-Jungian, tradition makes it possible to understand the psyche not as a simple interiority governed by a single center but as a dynamic, multilayered, and symbolically saturated field in which different forces, images, affects, and autonomous organizations of meaning are at work.
In this context, the metaphor of the cosmos proves exceptionally productive. Its theoretical value does not lie merely in poetic suggestiveness but in the fact that it enables us to think of the psyche as an open system of relations, gravities, distances, attractions, expansions, and concentrations. The psyche may thus be imagined as a cosmological space, the individual psyche as a galaxy, the collective psyche as the broader field within which individual galaxies move and remain connected, complexes as dense centers curving psychic space and time, emotions as analogous to light, and the ego as the necessary, though non-absolute, organizing center of a local system.
From a post-Jungian perspective, then, the psyche may be understood as a multicentered cosmology. Such an understanding makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between the individual and the collective, between ego and complex, between the present and the psychological past, as well as between affect and the symbolic order. In this way, the possibility opens up for a philosophically deepened analytical psychology in which the subject is no longer conceived as a closed substance but as a moving universe of tensions, rhythms, and transformations.
From the centralized subject to the multicentered psyche
One of the basic assumptions of modern thought about the subject is the idea that the human psyche is an inner unity whose identity rests on reflective self-consciousness. The subject is the center of its thoughts, decisions, and experiences. Its “I” represents an inner core that has access to itself and the capacity to govern its own life. In Jungian thought, however, this image undergoes a profound destabilization. Consciousness is not equated with the psyche as a whole, and the ego is no longer its absolute master but only the center of the conscious field. Beneath and beyond it stretches the unconscious, which is not merely a passive reservoir of repressed contents but an active and structured dimension of psychic reality.
Post-Jungian thought deepens this destabilization even further. The psyche is understood less and less as a unified system with a single sovereign center and more and more as a plural field of relatively autonomous centers. Within it operate complexes, archetypal figures, affective knots, imaginary structures, cultural patterns, and transgenerationally sedimented contents. The subject is no longer the unquestioned owner of the inner world but its local organizer, occasional interpreter, and often insufficiently stable inhabitant.
Precisely for this reason, the metaphor of the cosmos here becomes philosophically exact. The cosmos is not chaotic dispersion, but neither is it a totality gathered around one metaphysically privileged center. Galaxies have their own centers, stellar systems have their own organizing points, but the cosmos as a whole remains decentered, open, and mobile. Similarly, the psyche possesses organizing structures, but not one absolute point from which it could become completely transparent to itself. Such a conception allows the subject to be thought not as a closed monad but as a singular configuration of forces in constant relation to something that exceeds it.
Individual and collective psyche
Understanding the relation between the individual and the collective psyche represents one of the central questions of the Jungian tradition. The individual psyche is not merely the sum of personal experiences, nor is the collective psyche simply an external framework within which the individual happens to be situated. On the contrary, their connection is constitutive. The individual does not subsequently enter into relation with the collective, from the very beginning, he or she is permeated by it. The collective psyche is not an addition to individuality but its condition of possibility.
In the cosmological analogy, the collective psyche may be understood as the field that connects individual galaxies, sustains them in relation, and makes their existence possible within a broader structure. In psychological terms, this means that no individual produces on their own the fundamental images, motifs, and affective forms by which they live. The symbols that organize experience, the basic patterns of relation, fears, phantasms, mythological figures, and archetypal tensions do not arise from isolated biography alone but have a deeper and broader genesis.
This gives individuality a different meaning. It no longer signifies self-sufficiency but a unique configuration of what is at once personal and transpersonal. The subject is singular, but its singularity does not rest on separation from the universal, rather, it rests on the particular way in which the universal is present within it. The individual psyche may therefore be defined as a unique arrangement of collective and personal elements, as a particular form in which universal patterns receive an unrepeatable existential articulation.
Complexes as black holes of the psychic universe
The concept of the complex represents one of Jung’s most significant theoretical contributions. A complex is not merely a disturbance of consciousness, nor a secondary residue of repressed content, but a relatively autonomous organization of psychic energy structured around a strongly affective core. Complexes possess their own gravity, they attract attention, organize perception, direct behavior, and shape the way the subject interprets reality. It is precisely for this reason that the metaphor of the black hole becomes extraordinarily precise in describing their function.
A black hole signifies extreme density, a place where gravity becomes so powerful that it alters the relations of space and time. Analogously, a complex may be understood as a point of intense psychic condensation. Within it are condensed affect, memory, phantasy, wound, defense, and symbolic structure. When a complex is activated, consciousness is no longer free to regard reality from a relatively differentiated position, it enters a field of deformation. Perception, thought, and emotional reaction begin to organize themselves according to the logic of the complex.
From a post-Jungian perspective, it also becomes clear that a complex is never purely individual. It is formed on personal ground, but it is often permeated by collective contents. Family patterns, cultural prohibitions, gender norms, historical traumas, and mythical figures may be built into its core. The complex is therefore the point at which the individual galaxy comes into direct contact with the forces of a larger psychic cosmos.
The temporality of the complex
One of the most subtle and theoretically important dimensions of the complex is its connection with time. The activation of a complex does not mean only emotional disturbance, it also entails a shift in the subject’s temporal position. When a complex is set in motion, the subject no longer lives exclusively out of the fullness of the present but is returned to the psychological time in which the complex originated or became stabilized. In other words, every complex possesses its own psychological age.
This formulation allows for a deeper understanding of regression. Regression is not simply backsliding but a return to an earlier affective and symbolic regime of existence. Under the influence of an activated complex, an adult may react from the position of a child, an adolescent, or a wounded inner figure belonging to an altogether different existential period. Chronological time remains unchanged, but psychological time is displaced. The subject temporarily becomes the peer of their own wound.
Philosophically speaking, this means that the psyche is not homogeneous time, nor a linear succession of states. It is temporally layered. Within it coexist different levels of duration, unfinished affective events, sedimented images, and old organizations of relation to the world. Psychological life is therefore not simply here and now, but always also an encounter with what has not yet lost the power to return.
The ego as central complex
Within Jungian theory, the ego is traditionally defined as the center of consciousness. This, however, does not mean that it is the absolute center of the psyche as a whole. On the contrary, the ego is only one of its organizing instances, and one that is itself conditioned by its relations to the unconscious, to the body, to others, and to collective contents. In this respect, Jungian thought remains radically anti-absolutist, the ego is necessary but not sufficient.
In the cosmological analogy, the ego may be understood as the central complex of a local psychic system. To call it a complex does not diminish its importance, but precisely defines its status. The ego too is an organization of affect, representations, identity continuities, and relations to reality. It is a complex insofar as it represents a relatively stable core around which consciousness, autobiographical memory, and the sense of personal consistency are grouped.
Its function is to maintain orbit, not to abolish the existence of other centers of gravity. The ego cannot eliminate complexes, nor can it completely neutralize them. Its task consists in maintaining differentiation, in the capacity to recognize when some other center of force is taking over the organization of experience. It must remain stable enough to make reflection possible, but it must not become tyrannical.
The decentering of the psyche and the process of individuation
Post-Jungian thought, especially in archetypal psychology and in contemporary cultural and relational approaches, radicalizes still further the idea of the psyche’s plurality. Here, insistence falls no longer exclusively on unity and teleological wholeness, but on the multiplicity of inner figures, images, and voices. The psyche is not understood as a harmony waiting to be achieved, but as a permanently plural space in which different centers coexist, conflict, and mutually transform one another.
For this reason, the process of individuation cannot be understood as the final establishment of one supreme center. Individuation is not the triumph of the ego over the unconscious, nor the closure of all tensions in a harmonious synthesis. It is rather the capacity to live within inner multicenteredness without disintegration and without violently reducing everything to a single formula. In other words, individuation entails developing the capacity to bear complexity.
Here, the cosmic image acquires particular force. Just as the cosmos continually expands and yet does not cease to remain connected, so too the psyche may be in constant motion without losing all order. Displacement is not necessarily a sign of disorganization, it may be a condition of life. Psychic maturity therefore does not mean the abolition of movement, but the formation of an inner structure capable of bearing movement.
Emotions as the light of the psychic world
Within this cosmological interpretation, a special place belongs to emotions. If complexes are the black holes of the psyche, emotions may be understood as its light. Such a formulation is not merely metaphorical, but phenomenologically grounded. Emotions are not a mere supplement to neutral consciousness, nor secondary reactions to an already established reality. They are the way in which the world appears as meaningful.
This means that emotions have a disclosive function. They illuminate psychic space. Wherever there is strong affect, there is also a thickening of meaning. Emotion shows that the subject is in the vicinity of something existentially important. In this sense, affect is not an obstacle to thought, but its precondition at a deep level.
Of course, light does not only illuminate, it can also blind. Likewise, affect may enable a deeper access to reality, but it may also suspend reflective distance. Overwhelming emotion does not only open the truth of the psyche, it can also distort it. It is precisely here that the ambivalence of light becomes evident, it is the condition of appearance, but it does not guarantee calmness of vision.
From all this, it follows that the human being cannot adequately be conceived as a closed subject of self-consciousness. Rather, the human being is a singular cosmology, a moving arrangement of gravities, lights, wounds, symbols, and relations. It is precisely here that the post-Jungian perspective shows its greatest philosophical value. It allows the psyche to be understood not as an apparatus, but as a universe.
Read more from Dragana Favre
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
