The Psychoid Bridge and the Acausal Order of Meaning

Jung had a gap to close. Instinct is biological. Meaning is not. Yet the symbolic life that makes us human rises out of the body and carries significance the body alone struggles to account for. To explain that ascent, Jung needed a function belonging to neither side alone. He named it the psychoid.

The psychoid is a metaphysical dimension. Jung locates the archetype as such at the invisible, ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum, a psychoid factor that is transcendent and cannot reach consciousness (Jung, 1947/1969, para. 417). At the opposite end, infrared lies instinct, the biological instinctual psyche rooted in the organism. The archetype’s psychoid nature forms the bridge to matter, where spirit and matter confront one another on the psychic plane (Jung, 1947/1969, para. 420).

Hold the three apart. Instinct is the drive at the red end. The archetype per se brackets the unknowable, the ineffable, the metaphysical, into a psychological frame, the a priori precondition containing every potential form. The archetypal image is what we meet, the representation that “signifies and at the same time evokes the instinct” (Jung, 1947/1969, para. 414). We never know the archetype. We know its variations of manifestations—meaning, myth, metaphor, and symbol.

Le Grice offers a likely unintended picture of this. His matrix of planetary archetypes tethers each image to a material body (planet), so the archetypal image reads as a link to the material dimension (Le Grice, 2024, pp. 179–182). The matrix itself becomes an image of the psychoid. Synchronicity follows. If one substrate straddles psyche and matter, then matter can answer meaning without cause. Meaningful coincidence rests on an archetypal foundation (Jung, 1952/1969, para. 846), an acausal order “equal in rank to causality” (Jung, 1952/1969, para. 840). The psychoid elegantly holds his theory together.

References

Jung, C. G. (1969). On the nature of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, 2nd ed., pp. 159–234). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1947)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8, 2nd ed., pp. 417–519). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1952)

Le Grice, K. (2024). The way of the archetypes, Volume I: Universal principles and individuation. ITAS Publications.