The Myth of a Psyche for Real

The Myth of a Psyche for Real

draft 10.07.25

The concept of the “psyche” and the idea of separating social and emotional aspects of experience are both subject to social construction, though not in a way that negates their reality.

To separate the emotional in such an intense way as we do with the notion of the psyche typically does not fully make sense, to draw a border at > what causes reaction > how I react and whether this may be on a “political scale” or on very a practical and usable scale that translates into pragmatism perhaps, or if I am moving rather in thought, imagined ideas and sentiment etc.

The psyche as constructed but real

Constructed doesn’t mean that what something evolves around is unreal — it means we name, organize, and interpret an experience that we locate as a mainly inner experience, and how we do this is shaped by cultural and historical normalcies. The “psyche” is not a fiction, but it is mediated through the lenses of language, ideology, institutions, and narrative.

On separating the emotional

Emotions are not self-contained. They are referent to relations, interactions, ideas, memories, physical experiences, experienced structures.

Embedded in micro- and macrolevels of power, social pressure, politics and their consequences on scales that matter to different individuals in different ways.

Shaped by norms (what we’re allowed to feel or express, depending on race, class, gender, etc.).

Borders and causes: a false clarity

To draw a border as to what causes a reaction oversimplifies human experience. There’s rarely a clean border between: the political and personal, reason and emotion are tightly bond, especially when a positive outcome is likely, social and psychological factors cannot reasonably be obscured as interdependent and reciprocal, if psychological means emotional wellness here. All these things are logically interwoven dimensions on the experiential layers.

Thought and sentiment are not separate

In dominant Western thought, old fashioned values tied to patriarchal senses of discipline and strong hierarchy often had been led by the priorization of the rational over the sentiment: “Think with your head, not your heart”, “facts over feelings”, though the results again were not necessarily more reasonable but more fitting into the projections of what seemed to be pure reason.

Thinking and emotion are inseparable, only the quality of emotion differs (what we value, what we fear, what matters in our point of view).

Feeling is shaped by thought (interpretation, meaning, internal narrative).

And both are socially conditioned to a certain degree. Everything that is outside of the box of what social conditioning expects of you are supposedly reasonable and normal, is of course something we likely either put ourselves into question more easily or that is put into question and mostly overlooked, falsely interpreted, etc. by social norms/environments.

The psyche, which has basically to be taken as “the psyche as a myth that surrounds an emotional state that cannot be separated from experience in the world”, is, if we would be willing to take it without a fixed frame consisting of today’s diagnoses and classifications, as a “felt phenomenon” > neither purely internal nor wholly natural.

It emerges through social processes, language, and power, and it reflects how societies try to interpret experience. Any attempt to cleanly divide emotional from social life imposes artificial boundaries on a reality that is intrinsically entangled, dynamic, and historically situated.

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To continue this … so what are we talking about when we are talking about psyche: we are talking about that what we have constructed around the frame into which we fit our vague concept of a “psyche” which is basically first in itself a myth spun around our sense of the emotional and maybe the personal spiritual experiences, the experiences that took place in our thoughts that were thought-feelings and symbiosis of thought and feeling.

Around a notion of a myth of a psyche in different times different classifications and reasons for described weird states that a person could be in were set up and these mutated and changed over time periods, from having been possessed by something, to having been hysterical and unnormal, to societies norms, to an ever more abstract encyclopedia of own terms of collecting supposed similarities, pseudo-scientific creations for emotional phenomenons, the behaviour of the single individual got pigeonholed, as powerless as he or she was, as a body with a psyche.

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The “psyche” is not an object we have found — it is a container we have built. Into it, we have poured the experiences that disturb, confuse, or exceed ordinary, admitted, normalized social meaning. Across history, this container has been given new names, new diagnostics, new truths — but always shaped by the forces that wish to name, fix, and render governable the unruly or unwanted or embarrassing core of being human to in the end of the day sum the experience of being human up into categories of deficit. And the combination of any aberration had fatal consequences therewith. Any path, any condition, nothing could be sorted out as the psyche became a virtual battlefield where you could be sorted into, no matter what, when you became a target, were suffering or finally when you were even marked as a pathological outcast.

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The inner separation and conflation of the human sphere went along with a separation between an individual with the “natural environment”.

As separate or as interwoven > that what happens when we divide the inner state from the outer world is we put the axis into a disconnected individual, separating them from a world that had been classified first as god given and then as dead in the sense of unintelligent matter.

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Summing things up: So what are we talking about when we talk about the or a psyche?

When we speak of the psyche, we are not naming a clearly defined object. We are speaking about something that has been framed, shaped, constructed — a concept built around a vague, yet persistent sense that there is something inside us: something emotional, reactive, deeply personal, spiritual even. But this “something” is not stable. It slips between thoughts and feelings, between inner voices and outer norms, between the bodily and the invisible.

The psyche, then, is not a fact — it is a myth. A cultural invention that has evolved to give form to experiences that resist clear naming. In this sense, the psyche is less a scientific truth than a story we have told ourselves, a narrative meant to account for the complexity of what it means to feel, to think, to be moved, to suffer, to desire, to grieve.

In ancient times, those who behaved in strange or unsettling ways were said to be possessed — their actions explained by gods, spirits, or external forces. Later, medical language began to replace spiritual interpretations: the hysterical woman, the madman, the melancholic. These terms were not just diagnostic — they were social judgments, boundary markers between the “normal” and the “abnormal,” the acceptable and the deviant.

Over time, this process became more refined. The myth of the psyche adapted to new eras, growing more abstract and technical. Today, we see this in the form of diagnostic manuals, symptom checklists, and psychological categories — a kind of encyclopedia of emotional states, built to suggest clarity where there is, in truth, still mystery. Emotional pain becomes a disorder. Inward confusion becomes pathology. Struggles that were once described through metaphor or story are now reduced to labels.

This is not to say that such classifications are useless — but we must recognize them for what they are: constructs, created to organize and manage what remains, at its core, uncontainable. They are attempts to bring order to what cannot be fully explained — and in doing so, they often obscure more than they reveal.

What gets lost in this process is the fluidity of thought and feeling — the way a reaction can be social, emotional, political, spiritual, all at once. The way a single person’s distress may be a response to deeply structural conditions, yet becomes interpreted as an individual dysfunction. When we separate the “emotional” from the “social,” we cut through what is actually a dense knot of entanglements. Emotions are never just private. They are formed in relation, in context, in memory, in expectation.

And more than that — when we separate the inner state from the outer world, we insert a false axis: we locate cause, value, and disturbance entirely inside the individual, as if the self were a closed system, responsible for its own weather. The world becomes mere background — passive, irrelevant, dead.

But this is a relatively recent construction. Once, the world was thought to be animated, full of intention and divinity. Its events carried meaning. Suffering might come from the gods, or fate, or cosmic order. Now, in modern frameworks, the world is often rendered as dead matter — neutral, mechanical, without inner life. The living, feeling, responsive subject becomes cut off, tasked with generating meaning inside themselves, while surrounded by a world that is mute and indifferent.

This disconnection is not only metaphysical — it has emotional consequences. When we strip the world of intelligence, purpose, or relation, the individual is left to carry alone what might have once been understood as shared: grief, wonder, madness, mystery. The psyche becomes a container for everything unexplainable, but also a kind of prison, in which the burden of meaning is placed solely on the self.

To draw borders around the psyche — to try to pinpoint what causes a reaction, to locate where it begins and ends — is to simplify a reality that is fundamentally porous. There is no clean divide between inside and outside, no stable self sealed off from its surroundings. Thought bleeds into feeling. Feeling grows from thought. Both are shaped by the world — not the world as abstract backdrop, but as active, shaping, historical, and meaningful.

In the end, the psyche might best be understood not as a core we discover, but as a shape we create — a cultural container into which we pour our efforts to understand what it means to be human. Different times have built different containers, offered different explanations, set up different norms. But what remains is this: a deep sense that we are moved by something within us, and that this something cannot be entirely spoken, though we keep trying to name it.

And so we go on: theorizing, diagnosing, narrating, classifying — spinning new myths to make sense of what we can’t fully hold. But it always needs to be clear when we discuss > for example constructs in ableism from the viewpoint of the social model of disability for instance, how much myth is being created that is ought to serve as “the psyche”, and when > for example we wonder how remote the individual has become from taking or not taking responsibilities for their environment and being taken serious in exactly that position.

In other words the psyche might aswell get back into its own myth.