The Forgotten Link: Why We Need a Gothic Psychology

Beyond manuals and theory, toward a symbolic language of the psyche

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It doesn’t matter how many books one reads on the theory of the Gothic, its origins, its first representatives, or how it has evolved through the centuries; there’s often a kind of hollowness in those approaches, I find. That hollowness is not merely academic; it mirrors our cultural discomfort with ambiguity and shadow.

On the one hand, we crave articles that stay close to the canon, and yet we feel a creeping boredom when all we get are endless lists of dehumanised characteristics. These lists rarely align across scholars, and they often miss what truly stirs the Gothic spirit.

On the other hand, there’s a need to control the Gothic through “manuals,” and in doing so, we erase the satisfaction of experiencing it without rules, without snobbery or sterile definitions. Just letting it move through us. Letting it speak to the deepest corners of our souls.

This might explain why some academic content, though perfectly safe, can feel strangely empty. Despite all the theories, few seem to touch the core of why the Gothic has always been essential to the human experience. I know this because I’ve spent years reading, analysing, and teaching it as a lens to understand our inner world. Because of this, the Gothic started to make conscious sense not through study alone, but when I realised it had been a mirror of my own fears, longings, and unspoken questions all along.

I can say then that to understand the Gothic, we first need to meet our shadow; that hidden region of the psyche shaped by all that we repress.

Carl Jung once said that real knowledge of the psyche cannot come from repeating other people’s theories. Rather, it must be experienced directly, through the living symbols that emerge from our own unconscious.

The same is true for the Gothic. Its real knowledge doesn’t come from repetition or disembodied analysis, but from the intimate resonance each of us feels when we hear the word Gothic.

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Toward a Gothic School of Thought

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When I speak of the Gothic, I don’t mean only novels or ruined castles. I mean that inner atmosphere we all know, the strange familiarity of fear, the beauty inside decay, the questions that surface at night when the world outside of us ceases to be important.

Out of the tension between the academic and what we experience lies the reason why we need to start talking about both a Gothic psychology and a psychology of the Gothic.

We need Gothic psychology to speak of the soul’s inner experiences through a language that mirrors the unconscious. And we need a psychology of the Gothic to analyse the cultural and literary manifestations of that same symbolic language in the collective imagination.

Just like dreams or intuition, the Gothic is another language of the unconscious. Yet it is still often dismissed as mere entertainment, and in doing so, we miss its potential as a tool for self-knowledge. It can serve as a symbolic door through which we explore those shadowed aspects of ourselves that may hold the key to transformation.

But those shadows don’t belong only to individuals. They spill into the collective, shaping politics, culture, and art. The Gothic, then, is not only a personal descent, it’s also a collective confession, a record of what our societies repress.

In simple terms, we could argue that Gothic psychology has to do with the exploration of how the Gothic manifests within the psyche itself: the moods, fears, and fascinations that shape our inner lives. Whereas a psychology of the Gothic studies how these same symbols appear in art, architecture, and literature as mirrors of the collective imagination.

For instance, when reading Frankenstein, Gothic psychology invites us to feel what the creature awakens within us, which could be our own sense of alienation or forbidden creation, while a psychology of the Gothic examines how the novel reflects the anxieties of its century. Both are necessary to grasp the full depth of the Gothic mind.

Another major problem with the Gothic is that it keeps coming across as something esoteric, marginal, or even pathological, rather than a natural expression of the human psyche.

This bias has deep roots in our Cartesian worldview, one that privileges what can be measured and observed, while excluding the imaginal and the intuitive. As a result, mind and matter remain estranged, creating the uncanny voids we keep stumbling into, and that contain everything we repress.

Those voids that pretty much resemble the shadow become the perfect home for charlatans and self-proclaimed gurus, ready to exploit our vulnerability during times of crisis and transition.

Partly this is why I think a School of Thought of the Gothic psyche is necessary. Because more than a genre. or even a mode, the Gothic is the language of our inner haunted houses, our monstrous archetypes, and our secret guides. Every symbol, whisper, and choice in the Gothic world is a call from the soul itself.

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Why the Gothic Was Excluded from Psychology

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As a philologist, not finding the words to express what I feel and think can be frustrating. Luckily, that frustration is also the dopaminic spark my neurodivergent brain craves to dig deeper. Together with my need to understand the "whys" of everything, I tend to bump into many unexpected and fruitful roads.

The main "why" that has followed me my whole life and that has triggered this need for a School of Thought on the Gothic psyche has been the recurrent question: "Why do you like ghosts, monsters, the paranormal, horror and the Gothic so much?."

This question has always come across as judgmental, ungrasping, discomforting, otherising and awkward, probably due to my RSD (Rejection Sensitive Disphoria) and heightened by the other person's unverbal communication, which seemed to say: "but you don't look like 'Wednesday'.

In this sense, neurodivergence becomes not a limitation but a sensitivity to the invisible, a capacity to perceive emotions and nuances that others might dismiss. It’s no coincidence that the Gothic itself operates through atmosphere, resonance, and intensity: the very qualities that define neurodivergent perception.

Trying to answer that question has taken some inner work over the years and a few sessions with an analyst. This is because my fascination with the Gothic isn’t merely a taste for the macabre. The Gothic is the translating mechanism that helps me understand not only my personal, but also the collective psyche.

So, in this, not quite fitting in what others have always considered "normal", I’ve often felt excluded, something many of us share with the Gothic.

Pushing individuals to the margins is common to societies grounded on worldviews that prize logic, measurement, and control over intuition, emotion, and mystery. But this wasn't always the case. When we revisit the Romantic imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries, we see that psychology and the Gothic used to share a common root. It was only when psychology started seeking scientific legitimacy that it parted ways from the Gothic. We see this with Freud's model of the psyche based on the medical and mechanical terms, Carl Gustav Jung's conscious avoidance of using "Gothic" labels to protect his work from being dismissed as mystical in an age obsessed with positivism, and the professionalisation of psychology in the mid-20th century, aligning more with medicine and statistics, such as Behaviourism and clinical models that left no room for mystery.

Anything that smelled of unexplainable or the occult was dismissed as pseudoscience. Unfortunately, the Gothic was dragged with them and put into the same bag of frauds, media sensationalism, and exploitative practices. The Gothic was sent to a cultural exile and turned into a dangerous spectacle that young women should run away from, rather than a source of knowledge.

The reductionistic view of the Gothic as just another way of telling ghost stories and a dangerous place to linger for too long is precisely what promoted neurosis due to the splitting of human nature and innate curiosity.

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Threads of Tradition

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The inability to fully describe what the Gothic means for so long has been eye-opening and profoundly significant to me.

It is curiosity that leads us to learning paths, and mine has helped me unearth the scattered ancestors of Gothic psychology. Here you have some names:

• William James, brother of novelist Henry James, was one of the first psychologists to describe the mind as layered and mysterious, which we could interpret as an “architecture of consciousness”. This already has a history in Gothic narratives where buildings carry the ghosts of the past.

• Carl Jung, as already mentioned, revisited the idea of archetypes, the Shadow, and the collective unconscious, concepts that are Gothic in essence, even if not in name.

• Marie-Louise von Franz, a close collaborator of Jung, studied myths, fairy tales, and dreams that evoke the same landscapes of darkness and transformation so familiar to our beloved Gothic fiction.

• Contemporary scholars like Michelle Massé and Catherine Spooner have woven psychoanalysis and Gothic criticism together in powerful ways.

  
  

Despite all these close connections between psychology and the Gothic, no one has fully recognised the Gothic as a symbolic language of the psyche in its own right, which scares me and excites me in equal terms, and by “symbolic language,” I mean a structure of meaning woven from metaphor, image, and atmosphere capable of embodying emotions as well as representing them. Like dreams, Gothic stories show us how the psyche speaks when words are no longer enough.

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Why This Matters Now

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The Gothic does not belong only to individuals; it haunts our collective structures as well. The ghosts of history — colonialism, war, ecological destruction — still linger beneath our polished progress. When we deny them, they return as anxiety, violence, or numbness.

To work with the Gothic is, therefore, also to work with the unfinished mourning of our civilisation.

We are currently living in Gothic times; war, technological acceleration, ecological anxiety, and identity crises haunt our collective imagination. They are the clashing ingredients bringing to the surface what some Jungians are calling the new monsters of the mind, such as depression, disconnection, burnout, and alienation.

It no longer makes sense to keep brushing the Gothic under the rug.

The Cartesian scientific model must make room for what it has been excluding for so many years; otherwise, we can't truly reimagine or re-enchant psychology to restore the imaginal as a valid mode of knowing.

We can't forget that the Gothic reminds us that what appears supernatural is often the psyche speaking symbolically through image and event. After all, every discovery started as a dream, a vision, a hunch or even a whisper from the unconscious.

The risk of excluding the Gothic from the totality of what it means to be human implies keeping our blinkers on, and therefore continuing to miss out on a symbolic model capable of providing us with the tools to work with trauma, grief, anxiety and transformation. The Gothic helps us confront what we fear from within, trains our critical thinking and strengthens our inner connectivity, which we need more than ever in the age of manipulation and chaos.

As Jung said, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble... They can never be solved, but only outgrown.”

And we outgrow them through discomfort, the very discomfort the Gothic invites us to face.

Only a few scattered research papers, videos, and ideas appear when searching for “Gothic psychology”, but no coherent schools of thought connecting Gothic literature, depth psychology, symbolic philosophy, metaphysics, and neuroscience, and yet, the signs of its urgency are everywhere. We see this in the constant and increasing reinvention of the Gothic and horror in popular culture, which reflects the collective anxieties of our times and the pressure to keep smiling through it all.

For many of us, the Gothic offers a language that can help us navigate life.

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A Descent, Not an Escape

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Before descending further, you might pause to ask yourself, what images or fears return to you again and again, and which stories or symbols refuse to leave you.

The images, sensations, intuitions and even memories that rise from those questions are but messages from the Gothic within.

A Gothic psychology, therefore, has the power to invite us to descend into the abyss of the human experience as a whole, to see the body as a haunted house, the mind as an archetypal cosmos and the soul as a Daimonic guide. Because the cracks produced in those spaces are where life feels most fragile, but also from where Gothic symbols arise. Entering the cracks means discovering that what terrifies us may also guide us back home.

To conclude, I have tried to develop here a first vision behind the Gothic Psyche School of thought,

Because the Gothic, like the psyche, never ends. It only changes shape. I hope you find in this blog a living, evolving space for research, reflection, and symbolic understanding.

For further information and learning, below you have some suggestions to keep working on your own descent. I hope you find the answers you are looking for.

Until next entry

Thanks for reading.

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RESOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ancestral Echoes

The roots of a Gothic psychology can be traced through many thinkers who, knowingly or not, opened the way for the soul’s darker language, from Jung and Neumann to William James and the Gothic scholars of our time.

(A fuller annotated list of readings and influences lives on my Patreon, where I share the evolving map of this descent.)

Continue Your Descent

If these ideas speak to you, and you would like to go deeper into the bibliography, resources, and thoughts, here are three ways to go deeper:

🎥 Watch: Why We Need a Gothic Psychology. The Gothic as a Language of the Unconscious.👉 https://youtu.be/jmixUv0HPa0?si=3qoG4pCsnfEaQ5De

📩 Join: The Gothic Descent, my monthly newsletter exploring how collective symbols and seasonal transitions mirror the movements of the soul.→ Join here and start your descent.

Support My Work

My independent research, The Gothic as a Psychic Container: Experiences of AuDHD Individuals with Complex Trauma through Gothic Literature and Horror Cinema, is completely self-funded and slowly growing into a long-term creative and academic project.

Every essay, every video, every descent I share is part of a larger experiment: to recover the Gothic as a legitimate language of the soul. This vision requires time, depth, and community, something that can only grow through shared curiosity and support.

If this work resonates with you and you’d like to help me continue building the Gothic School of Thought, you can join me on Patreon.

There, I share deeper reflections, bibliographic resources, behind-the-scenes notes, and conversations about the evolving Gothic psyche.

Each person who joins helps transform this from a solitary descent into a shared pilgrimage. Your support isn’t just financial; it’s part of building a living dialogue between the Gothic and the human soul.

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Your support allows me to keep researching, creating, and connecting this community of wanderers who walk between worlds, just like you.