Who is the Subject of Psychology?

I - Where am I?!

…in the seen will be merely the seen; in the heard will be merely the heard; in the thought will be merely the thought; in the known will be merely the known.

-Saṁyuttanikāya 35.95

Before your eyes even opened this morning, before the first thought of the day’s obligations took shape, there was a quiet, unshakable assumption: "I am here." This "I" acts as a central point around which the entire universe is organized. It is the fulcrum upon which the discipline of psychology balances, and indeed, the point upon which life itself pivots. We do not merely experience the world; we grasp it. We colonize our senses, instantly transforming the raw data of light, sound, and touch into something personal. The wind isn't just blowing; it is blowing on me. This "me-ness" stretches itself like a translucent skin, pulled taut across the annals of our past and thrown forward to cover the horizon of our future, creating a private habitat out of our dreams, hungers, and histories.

It is a deeply intuitive arrangement. You feel yourself to be a singular inhabitant of a body, moving through space and time, undergoing the high manias of joy and the harrowing dread of loss. When this subject—this "me"—cries out for healing, recognition, or stability, psychology rushes to meet it. We treat the "I" as the most precious and permanent of instruments because it appears to underlie everything. After all, what is life if not a word that follows the possessive? My life.

The problem is, even the most minute investigation reveals that this "subject" is terrible in consistency! How can we trust or affirm that there is a true self among these experiences, which down to its very nature truly constitutes "someone" present? Thankfully, the dry grit of our experiences and their perceived ownership can be investigated: ask yourself, "Where am I?" 

It is comfortable to land first on the body, but this is easily dismayed. We cannot pry open your body in any place where we might see the real "you" which pilots its form. Nor would you say there is less "you" were you to lose a limb or bodily function of some kind. And of course, your body has likely already changed since you’ve sat down to read this; cycling skin and flesh, the inhales and exhales; cells falling away and birthing anew. The fact that our bodies still partly function for some time after death says enough about its status as a permanent abiding "me."

Suppose then we get extra intuitive. I am my thoughts. The identification with thought is perhaps the most seductive trap of all because thoughts possess a unique, internal intimacy. They seem to be the very voice of the "I," it uses the very word for so much of its noise as the hidden director issuing commands, making judgments, and narrating the movie of our lives in real-time. You can even make it say "Hello!" as many times as you like right now.

While the voice in your head seems like the master of the house, it is, upon closer inspection, more like a flickering television left on in an empty room. If you sit quietly and watch your thoughts, you will notice a startling lack of authority. Thoughts simply arrive, unbidden and unannounced. A memory of a childhood embarrassment, a sudden craving for salt, a flash of anxiety about next Tuesday—none of these were "authored" by you. If you were truly the thinker of your thoughts, you could choose to stop thinking for the next ten minutes. But you cannot. The machine continues to whir, producing "me-noises" regardless of your intent.

Fine then, everything observed must necessarily not be an abiding subject or observer. Objects of consciousness are not the subject of consciousness. I am not my body or my thoughts or other such things being seen. I am merely that which sees, the silent observer which receives all perceptions, no matter their conventional consistency. Unfortunately, this claim is just as smoke as the others. Where is this observer? If you truly investigate the source of this witness you will find it to be simply somatic. Perhaps a tension in your forehead or in your chest, where the world seems to orbit about, or "come to." But these sensations and their happenings come and go, they are without a do-er of any fashion.

In fact we have to make an effort toward a fabrication of an observer somewhere "back here" who takes experience in. This process can get so incredibly subtle that it becomes difficult to grasp without serious meditative experience. Even the sensations of scanning the body for little divots and knots of "I" to unbind or see through can sneakily reify itself as the real "I" which others abide to. But these leave us, and we all clearly have full spectrums of experience without needing to transpose a meta-observer.

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So, if our histories, bodies, linguistic quirks, or subtle somatic suns whereby sensations revolve, are all revealed to be mere events—phenomena without a proprietor—then psychology finds itself in a strange predicament: psychology or any discipline which deals in subjects on a technical, phenomenological level, has no "real" subject which it may discipline with its techniques and catalogs of understanding. 

And yet conventionally, we are so clearly persons… There is a reason that despite all of this talk on the lack of a subject, I am still using the word you. Additionally, we can all attest, in some ways, to psychological methods which make the assumption of a self being present. Even the historical figure most famous for dismantling the "I" in its most root-borne subtleties, the Buddha, remained by all accounts, a vivid and distinct character. We often mistake the absence of a permanent core for a kind of blank, robotic nothingness, yet the records of this teacher suggest a man with a specific temperament, physical vulnerabilities, and clear aesthetic preferences.

For instance, in the Udana (4.5), we find him reaching a point of very human exasperation. He was staying in a crowded, noisy environment where the monks were constantly bickering. Rather than remaining in a state of indifferent bliss, he found the clatter unbearable. He essentially abandoned the community for some time, retreating into the forest to find the company of an elephant, explicitly stating that he preferred the solitude of the woods to the friction of the crowd. Or we may follow the pain he felt later in life, passing off lectures to other monks because he needed a nap or because things just hurt too much. In fact, he specifically attempted to enter absorption states of bliss to ward off pain that ran amok the near end of his days.

How much of a relief is it that the penultimate, almost archetypal image of someone who is enlightened may be freely annoyed by people? Or did his best to manage pain in his life by cultivating a sense of bliss? The absence of a solid, central "I" does not result in the absence of a person. Such a conclusion that it does is the projection of an unnecessary dualism in our experience. Consider a melody. A melody has no "thingness"; it's empty, you cannot capture it in a jar or find its secret heart by dissecting the individual notes. If you stop the music to find the "essential song," you are left with only a single, vibrating pitch—or, silence. The song exists only in the movement, in the specific, idiosyncratic way one note leans into the next. 

To understand this more clearly, I like to use an analogy proposed by Daniel Ingram: imagine your entire field of experience as a high-definition digital screen. Every thought, every itch, every shade of color, and every pulse of emotion is like an individual pixel on that display. On a modern screen, each pixel is composed of three sub-pixels—red, green, and blue—shifting their intensities in a lightning-fast, coordinated rhythm to create the images we see. 

The core of our confusion lies in a misunderstanding of how this screen works. We tend to identify with a specific cluster of pixels—perhaps the ones representing our internal monologue or the habitual tension in our chest—and we imagine that this particular cluster is the "boss" of all the others. We act as if the "thought-pixels" are somehow reaching across the screen to turn on the "arm-moving pixels," or as if the "memory-pixels" belong to a specific "observer-pixel" located somewhere in the center. We mistake a localized event for a global commander. 

In reality, the pixels do not consult one another. The red sub-pixel does not wait for a signal from the green before it decides to glow; each one fires according to its own immediate causes and conditions. There is no "master pixel" that owns or operates the rest of the display. Instead, there is only a vast, selfless cooperation in a luminous dance of millions of tiny events and arcs happening simultaneously. Though some of these arcs swoon in and out as a person who claims a continuous history, it is nonetheless merely something here, and cannot—by its properties of autonomy and inconsistency—be the abiding self which we presume is living our lives.

This realization simply clarifies what the image of subjectivity is. What we call a person is more akin to a style of movement than a biological container. You are a specific "way" that life is happening. And this way is empty, it is devoid of any fixed essence or reality. The Buddha’s preference for the cool shade or his particular way of walking are not evidence of a hidden "I" pulling levers behind the curtain; they are the distinct textures of a gathering that has a certain momentum. Just as a riverbed is formed by the water that has passed through it, carving out specific bends and shallows, a "person" is the carving left behind by a lifetime of interactions, biology, and language.

There is of course, so much more to be said on the subject. Be it in the raw phenomenal investigations of our experience, Buddhist insights, or the most rigorous contemporary observations of how the mind-brain functions, we will continue to create different vehicles which explore and expound upon the nature of this "I" sensation. Therefore, knowing the distinct nature of our vehicles and their effect on this stream of activity is of major importance.

II - Psychology’s "I"

Modern psychology is noun-drunk: "self-sufficiency," "self-esteem," "self-regulation." Clearly something about the intention to cultivate a science where we can be psychologically seen and sound is dependent on conceiving of an abiding subject. Psychology is itself aware of this of course, it works within a tension it cannot quite resolve. It recognizes the "plasticity" of the brain and the "fluidity" of the personality, yet its clinical goals almost always demand a return to a solid center whereby it can discern the center’s cries and return it to its preferred standards.

Such a system certainly can work. Even if the self does not actually exist, its conventional existence seems to always benefit—comfort wise—from systems which acknowledge it as it is in the moment, with no phenomenological pretense or arbitrary skepticism. Yet in constraining our conceptions of wellness to the calls of a center which ignorantly claims a kind of separate permanence and autonomy, we must acknowledge that in some way, psychological practice is ever-incomplete, or even doomed in the face of a changing life. Given that the DSM’s definition of pathology is that which crosses the threshold of interrupting our work, social relationships, or other such important functions; we might confidently say that modern psychology favors as stable a unit as possible amongst the variables of life. Even if it provides wiggle room for the flux of the human condition, the underlying architecture of the clinical gaze remains focused on the "owner" of the symptoms. It consults this "I" so that it can go back to being a productive, stable inhabitant of its history.

That is all we need to discuss with regard to modern psychology as we know it, despite all that could be said. I hope that what has been said is enough to provide a foundation, for I am much more interested in exploring alternatives; specifically alternatives which exist congruently with this reality of an undefinable and seemingly non-existent "self."

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Depth psychology in general already aligns itself more with this reality of an alleged subject. By presuming at the root that most psychic activity is autonomous and doesn’t belong to any “person” per se, it sidesteps a hard stipulation for what kind of healing can or should happen; such is its advantage, and perhaps the reason for its more emotionally oriented or spiritually flavored therapy. 

Freudian psychoanalysis, for all its revolutionary delving into the dark, technically remains an ego psychology. Its rallying cry, Wo Es war, soll Ich werden ("Where Id was, there Ego shall be"), reveals a colonization project. The goal is to reclaim land from the sea. In this view, the "I" is a beleaguered sovereign, constantly besieged by the animal demands of the instincts and the crushing moralism of society. Therapy, then, is a form of reinforcement engineering. It aims to strengthen the walls of the ego so it can better manage the hydraulic pressures of the unconscious.

Jungian notions of Individuation, while nuanced and profound, generally orient the psyche toward a telos of subject-ological wholeness. In the classical Jungian view, the psyche is a vast territory, but it is a territory ultimately meant to be mapped and integrated by a central organizing principle. The hero (Ego) descends into the underworld, confronts the shadow, integrates the contrasexual soul image (Anima/Animus), and returns to the surface having forged a diamond-hard "Self." It presumes that the ultimate aim of psychological life is to bring the darkness into the light, to unify the many into the One. The chaotic multiplicity of the psyche is viewed as raw material for the great work of building a cohesive identity. After all, individuating is simply an individual made into a verb, Jungian psychology encourages and presses this individual as a real reification which can perform and undergo actions in the psyche to its goals.

This of course is a very positive thing; it is frankly more conventional and workable for most people. By constructing a diving suit in the name of an ongoing and unified "self" which interacts with many "not-selfs" in experience, Jungian psychology cultivates a profound sense of depth. Though Jungian psychology still reaps its advantages by acknowledging a looser or at least more mythical insistence on the ego, the ego is still a "you" who is really, truly present.

No vessel so properly assesses the raw phenomenal flickering and fluid notion of the self as much as James Hillman, and his Archetypal Psychology. It carries a few axioms which makes it distinct from its siblings in the discipline of depth, but one that truly makes it stand out is the treatment of the ego not as "the person" who is undergoing the events of life, but is rather simply another event occurring. So then, the ultimate mistake is the literalization of "I". Of any actual subject at all. For the subject is a self-assertive archetype in the field, which when examined closely, reveals itself to be not the supreme observer, but merely the Archetype of the Observer. The ego or the witness comes and goes, shifts and sways, hardens and softens; they cannot be willed just as the rest of the field! It merely produces chains of sensations which infer a strong feeling of "doing" or "me-ness" which becomes literalized or reified! Such numbing subtlety! Hillman himself shares his own passion for the subject in Alchemical Psychology:

"Do you recall the passage in Jung, who on the great Athi Plains watches the animal herds across the primeval scene of Africa: "Man, I, an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence." The objective world requires a human subject! Horribile dictu [Horrible to say]: "I" crown the creation, those herds, by my consciousness! But what if both, all, are images?" (pp. 189, my italicizations)

By suggesting that the "I" is also just another psychic image—as much as simply feeling hungry or aroused is—Hillman performs a psychological regicide, stripping the ego, and more importantly subjectivity itself its metaphysical privilege. If the "I" is an image, it is no longer the container of experience but merely content within it. It possesses no more ontological weight than the herds of antelope it observes. The sensor and the sensed are revealed to be made of the same stuff—psychic stuff, image stuff. Or, they are both one image in the same, the object and subject two sides of the same coin.

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If we accept—and more importantly, test—Buddhist descriptions of phenomenology which I have not so subtly introduced this all with, we quickly find how much it and Archetypal Psychology (and perhaps even the platonic undertones borrowed by it) get along. What is "Literalism" if not the desperate cognitive act of freezing the fluid dance of phenomena into static, graspable things? It is the psychological equivalent of the Buddhist concept of reification or clinging—the error of mistaking a process for an object with inherent reality. And what is “soul-making” if not the gradual loosening of these literal propositions to treat not just a subject in the psyche, but the psychic world entirely as it presents itself? As a result, the entire phenomenal life undergoes therapeia. Not only is the ego or subjectivity opened to an unending mystery and openness, but also the alleged objects which present themselves. Ponder such a psychology for a moment. Subject and world at once purifying itself as it streams into existence; with such a subtle and divine beauty to be had, one can empathize with Hillman's strong stances and clever reversals which oppose his older brothers in depth psychology. So much of his writing life was spent getting the subject out of (or displaced from the top of) psychology's primary lexicon. 

I am often a skeptic of philosophical synchrony. It is all too easy to smash two distinct, delicate systems together and produce a gray paste that serves neither. But the shared space that both Archetypal Psychology and the peaks of Buddhist phenomenology hold invokes some very interesting ideas. Those being: why not introduce meditative practice and its various technicalities to the sphere of soul and its various mythologies, which Archetypal Psychology so closely inhabits?

To bridge these worlds requires us to first gently dismantle the caricature of Buddhism as a dry, solar ascent into a featureless void. While the "up and out" trajectory exists within the tradition, there is a profound, soulful horizontality in the Buddha’s method that is often overlooked. We tend to view the Buddha’s dismantling of the self as a rejection of the world’s richness, a turning away from the "ten thousand things." Yet, if we look to the Satipatthana Sutta—the very bedrock of mindfulness practice—we do not find a command to repress the multiplicity of the psyche, but rather a radically precise instruction to host it. The meditator is simply instructed to discern a "lustful mind as a lustful mind," a "scattered mind as a scattered mind," and a "concentrated mind as a concentrated mind." More still, this labeling does not forego the effect of these states, even if they are seen as "Just X." Recall the Buddha's impatience and technical avoidance of pain, which we can all relate to. Especially note his ever-present worldliness, organizing training and monks, changing his mind on rules and generally just being… human; with all of its archetypal eccentricities, but liberated from reflexive reification and literalizing.

Part of this misconception is our own fault in the West. Psychology has a terrible habit of confounding meditation with loaded cultural implication or dry reductionism. See only the dry and shallow reproduction of the effects of "mindfulness" practices or breathing exercises. Or explicitly washing meditative practice of its often profound and spiritually revitalising effects by reducing it to odd neurochemical tricks. Ironically enough these are often used to reify the ego in some sense. Meditation makes us "more productive," "less emotionally volatile," and generally better workers. Yet take any time to seriously meditate and you will find it the most destabilizing thing imaginable. Most cannot bear to sit for even a single minute; it gets too loud, erupts into too many voices, disrupts too much of what we considered ours, or what we once believed stable. Is this not the most face to face intimacy one can get with psychic reality?

We do not have to "flee east" as Hillman insisted he wouldn’t do at the beginning of his masterpiece Re-Visioning. We need only acknowledge that Buddhists, like the rest of us, exist in the world as we do. And that their insistence on constructing a language and vehicles for navigating the raw implications of phenomenality, which again we all share, is itself useful no matter our cultural position. This especially goes for no-self, which is an unarguable tenant of both Buddhism and Archetypal Psychology.

III - Concluding thoughts

Insight practice in Buddhism, particularly that of no-self, is a practice which does technically have a point where it ends. Which is an odd proposition if you take my synchrony seriously, considering that Archetypal Psychology’s insistence on the infinity of the interior refuses any finish line. Soul is not a project to be completed, but a depth to be sounded—a never ending aesthetic appreciation. But were we to continue our cross comparison we would find that the "end" that insight practice promises is not the end of experience, but the end of the literalism that constrains it. Perhaps an analogy will illuminate this more clearly:

For a lifetime, you have stood on the lawn of your own mind and looked up at the scattered points of light—your memories, your habits, your recurring pains, the sudden flashes of joy—and you have dutifully drawn lines between them. With the desperate geometry of survival, you have connected the burning point of a childhood failure to the flickering light of a current anxiety; you have linked a specific hunger in the morning to a vague hope for the evening. From these disparate, burning stars, which have no actual proximity to one another in the vastness of space, you have illustrated a Great Self, a coherent and solid "I" that strides across the heavens of your history. Whether it is subtle or gross, cerebral or somatic; you believe this figure is real, that the lines which come to connect him are the walls in which his life engages with the world outside of him.

The end of insight is the specific, irreversible realization that there are no lines in the sky. There have never been lines in the sky.

It is not that the stars disappear; the memories are there, the sensations pulse, and the thoughts still arc across the firmament. But in a sudden, sickening, and liberating flash, you see that the stars are trillions of miles apart, held together not by a skeletal structure of "self," but merely by the specific vantage point of the present moment. You cannot un-see the vast, open space between the events of your life. The search for the Hero’s safety or inherent identity ends immediately, for you cannot kill what was never born, nor save what was never there.

Further still, the sky without lines becomes even more alive! You are free to inhabit your old life as though it were nothing, but now completely free to the mystery of your immediate existence with no pretense of it needing to be anything. Melancholy drags dark thunderheads down past your throat; and then sudden strobing sensations of flickering thought; and you can feel your feet; and the air on your hands; and your breath pushing your stomach outward; the sense of being a person who is bored gallops up the skull. All of this in the span of mere moments. All things alive. All things aware of themselves exactly where they are as they are. As the quote that opened this essay says in the most simple truth there is: in the known will be merely the known. Nothing more, nothing less.

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While the specific project of insight may have a terminus, the broader spectrum of meditative practice continues to offer profound resources for the soul-making that Archetypal Psychology champions, even within an entirely Western framework. We see this clearly in the work of pragmatic dharma teachers like Daniel Ingram. In his many written explorations in concentration practice—particularly Fire Kasina—Ingram reveals that these technologies can produce imaginative states that rival, and often surpass, those induced by entheogens. This is why—despite his claims to ultimate insight attainments—he continues to go on meditation retreats, for the raw power of concentration is agnostic to the content it illuminates.

He speaks of practitioners who utilize this Buddhist tech to amplify Western ritual practices, charging their specific mystical traditions with a stability and visual clarity that would be impossible otherwise. In his work Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, he describes a (theoretical) practitioner who, wielding these powerful skills of concentration, navigates internal struggles by fully inhabiting mythic visions, allowing the archetypal narratives to play out with a viscosity and realism that provides immense psychological resolution and vitality.

We do not need to "flee East" or abandon the rich, mythic soil of the West to utilize the tools of phenomenology. We do not need to trade our cathedrals for stupas, nor our gods for theirs. The technology of attention—the ability to see clearly, to concentrate deeply, and to release the illusion of the lines between stars—is a birthright. By integrating the precision of the meditator with the depth of the archetypal eye, we arrive at a psychology that is both technically sound and soulfully rich. We find that when the "I" is finally exposed as a ghost, the world it haunted is revealed to be, quite suddenly, the garden before the fall.