We Live Fragmented: How to Recover an Inclusive Psychology That Doesn't Lose Its Shadow
- Alice
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
The fragmentation of the human experience: a problem of our time
If there's one thing I'm exceptionally good at, it's questioning everything.
That and asking why.
The combination of both has led me to relentlessly investigate, seeking satisfying answers to quell my insatiable curiosity. Add to this my neurodivergence, and the result is a series of small obsessions that propel me on profound…endless journeys.
But of all these life journeys, the one that has captivated me since I can remember stems from a visceral need to understand what truly drives us.
And therein lies the first problem: human beings are profoundly complex.
That's why I fervently believe in the need to explore all the fields of knowledge available to us, to see where they converge, how they complement each other, and how information has been interpreted throughout history.
Looking back and analysing my academic path, even though I knew from a young age that I wanted to study English Philology, my curiosity about psychology, oral and written expression, and sociology began to awaken before I even started my degree. Today, this curiosity extends to neuroscience, metaphysics, and what are still considered pseudosciences.
However, back in the day, specialising in something was more highly regarded, which in my case became an almost mythical descent into the underworld; I jumped from one job to another because none of them fulfilled me, and I took several courses for the same reason. In this sense, I can say that for years I was haunted by the shadow of the "jack of all trades, master of none."
When society doesn't acknowledge you: being different in a divided world
So what once stigmatised me has, over time, become a blessing; being a learner of many things also provides distance and a certain objective freedom. It helps us see how everything is interconnected and to decide where to focus our attention at any given moment.
It is this distancing that has made me realise we continue to live fragmented lives, which inevitably throws us off balance. Something that became very clear to me last August when my eldest son was diagnosed with Level 1 Autism.
Suddenly, the unease he felt about fitting into a system that had been detrimental to him, and which he had been expressing for years, made sense.
In a strange, almost synchronous way, my personal crusade to bring to the surface what we repress and therefore exclude translated into an overwhelming clarity about the imminent failure of the education system and its obsolete social models.
Both continue to perpetuate the invisibility of a large part of the population. And this can be seen by looking at textbooks.
Everything uncomfortable or that doesn't fit the traditional mold continues to be banished. A clear example of this is the still-ignored use of Gothic literature and horror as tools for inner exploration, since they are languages of the unconscious comparable to dreams, intuitions, and other forms of self-discovery.
Although it pains me to admit it, I myself had been excluding an important part of myself from my own narratives. A part that, thanks to my son's diagnosis, I realised I was relegating to the shadows: my own neurodivergence and all that it entails. This cognitive characteristic that makes me see the world in an "atypical" way could largely explain my fascination with the Gothic.
Whether due to ignorance, thinking that everyone was like me, trying to conform to the social norms I've been forced to live with, or wanting to fit in, I've spent my entire life not only neglecting my own neurodivergence, but also ignoring my gut microbiome, undervaluing my creativity, and burying my spirituality.
We return to the complexity of the human being, and to the why behind it all. That's why I invite you to take a short trip back in time. A journey that might feel familiar, stir something within you, and, with a bit of luck, leave you questioning many things.
My aim is that you continue exploring and reconnecting with all the parts that make you who you are, and not someone else.
How we got here: history, science and the forgetting of the whole
Do you remember that subject they taught us in high school that seemed pointless at the time? It was called philosophy.
Do you remember how many times you said, "How is this going to be of use to me in the future?"
Well, a few may remember (perhaps it was never explained to us) that philosophy was the origin of psychology.
According to the superficial account we were given, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were among the first to question the nature of the soul (psykhé) and its connection to the body. When I say superficial, I mean that by leaving out the other half of humankind, they denied us access to an integrative view of our history and, therefore, of our identity.
Continuing to replicate this limited and egocentric narrative would only contribute to the systematic exclusion of all those who don't fit the mold of a white, Western, university-educated man.
Towards an integrative psychology: body, unconscious and symbolism
The official history we were led to believe never mentioned figures like Diotima of Mantinea (5th century BC), the first recorded female philosophical figure in the Western tradition and Socrates' teacher in the mysteries of love (eros), cited in Plato's Symposium. Diotima was knowledgeable in religion, mystical psychology, and moral philosophy. Her vision of love as a force for spiritual transformation was already a profoundly Jungian idea avant la lettre.
Although indeed, we cannot know for certain whether she existed historically or was a Platonic construct, she undoubtedly embodies the most influential female voice in the ancient history of thought on love.
Nor were we told about Hipparchia of Maronea (4th century BC), a disciple of the Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes. Hipparchia rebelled against the norms of her time, defended intellectual equality between men and women, and lived according to her philosophical principles. She was, in essence, one of the first women to practice philosophy as a way of life, and a direct precursor to modern existential psychology.
Hasn't this shaken your worldview yet?
If, like me, you were born before 2000, you'll realise that our textbooks presented us with a biased history of knowledge. Worst of all, my children's textbooks (one is 15 and the other is 11) continue to portray these women, and certain men as well, as mere "curiosities," rather than as fundamental pillars in the advancement of societies.
Without access to institutions, these women's ideas were attributed to men, which has silenced them or directly disconnected them from the scientific world.
This, along with the spread of Christianity (4th–11th centuries), laid the groundwork for certain traditional knowledge practised by women to be feared for not being under clerical control and therefore misinterpreted as pagan superstitions and malevolent irrationality.
Gothic psychology as an inclusive psychology to explore the dark and reclaim the human
Centuries later, psychology sought to distance itself from philosophical speculation and adopt the well-known experimental rigour. This experimental shift allowed for enormous advances, but at the cost of excluding the subjective, symbolic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience, leading to a significant fragmentation that continues to affect us today.
In 1879, thanks to Wilhelm Wundt, the first psychology laboratory was founded in Leipzig. This laboratory inaugurated a new objective, empirical, and observational science, which not all the pioneers accepted, since this vision disregarded the more unconscious and spiritual aspects of human beings.
It is for this reason that, at the end of the 19th century, scholars such as the British poet, classicist, and philologist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) began to explore the limits of consciousness. Realising that the human mind was also composed of intuitions, inhabited by dreams, and capable of experiencing phenomena that the science of his time rejected, Myers founded the Society for Psychical Research.
However, the fear of the invisible, of that which cannot be contained or explained, has always been the greatest precursor to monsters in the history of humankind, but also the best instigator of curiosity.
William James (1842–1910), a friend of Myers and considered the father of American psychology, understood precisely the depth of his friend's attempt to describe that more elusive part of the human being. In other words, Myers was already advocating for an inclusive psychology. This perception, which he described with a metaphor that has gone down in history as the seed of a "Gothic psychology," is what gave rise to the missing link that I believe we should recover. James did not propose a “Gothic psychology” as a formal school of thought, but he did use the Gothic metaphor to describe Myers’s attempt to encompass both the visible and invisible aspects of the psyche.
In this regard, I find the following quote very interesting:
“It was like going from classical to Gothic architecture, where few lines are pure and where strange forms lurk in the shadows.”—William James, Frederic Myers’s Service to Psychology (1901/1902)
As I briefly mentioned in my video Why We Need a Gothic Psychology: viewing the human mind as a Gothic cathedral, with its mysterious complexity, full of hidden rooms and secret passageways, was crucial. It is what allows us to understand our deepest psyche metaphorically as a living structure where reason and mystery coexist.
Thus, while Wundt opened the doors of experimental psychology, James and Myers opened the inner doors, anticipating a more integrative model, that inclusive psychology we talked about earlier.
Recognising the female contribution to psychology
Once again, during this transition, the contributions of women like Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), a student of James and Royce at Harvard, were overshadowed.
Calkins was none other than the first female president of the American Psychological Association (APA).
As a crucial point, Harvard refused to grant her a doctorate despite her having met all the requirements. The problem? She was born a woman.
Calkins was a pioneer in the psychology of the "Self", an approach centred on the unity of consciousness and personal experience. Although her concept of the "Self" is not identical to Jung's, they both shared a similar intuition: the centrality of the psychic whole and the unity of experience. This was a remarkable achievement considering that they were working in an era when psychology was leaning toward reductionist and mechanistic models.
Another important figure was Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939), the first woman to earn a doctorate in psychology (Cornell, 1894). A disciple of Titchener, Washburn championed the mind-body connection and paved the way for thinking about the psyche beyond the purely human.
And in this magnificent list, we couldn't leave out Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, and Melanie Klein. Both are considered direct heirs and transformers of psychoanalysis. Their contributions opened the doors to a symbolic, poetic, and profoundly human psychology.
Klein is of particular interest to me because, from a contemporary perspective, she could be considered, along with her male counterpart Myers, one of the first psychologists of the Gothic, albeit unknowingly. Her use of language filled with imagery of death and rebirth, fragmentation and reconciliation, drives and shadows, demonstrates this.
What psychology lost
Just when it seemed that the two worlds were beginning to merge naturally, the 20th century gave rise to the reign of positivism, dominated by the fear that magical thinking would erode psychology's scientific "respectability." This new approach reduced the human mystery to measurable data.
As a consequence of this intellectual constraint, figures like Carl Gustav Jung, who coincidentally shared with Myers and James an interest in looking beyond the visible, ended up being misunderstood by both science and esoteric groups.
In Jung's case, the more rigid scientific establishment accused him of mysticism for speaking of the soul and archetypes, and the more naive esotericism idolised him without understanding his symbolic depth.
To this day, Jung remains trapped in a paradox in which science considers him too poetic and the more spiritual circles too scientific.
Part of psychology has become excessively prescriptive and behaviourist, prioritising the measurable over lived experience, which has led to the inability to contain one's own shadow any longer.
Those parts of society that continue to ignore their own depth, rendering it one-sided, rigid, and incapable of understanding the ambivalence that constitutes it, are what partly explain why losing our shadow has caused us to lose empathy for what is different.
Going back to neurodivergence
As Jung wrote:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (Carl Jung, CW 13: Alchemical Studies)
What was next for women, you might ask?
Well, the dominant tradition inherited from Freud, Skinner, and Wundt marginalised Jung, ridiculed Myers, reduced James to anecdotes, and erased women psychologists from textbooks.
Today, rescuing these voices is not an academic exercise, but an act of historical restoration.
The new monster
Much of the narrative remains one-sided, reductionist, and biased. As a consequence, a new monster is brewing, emerging as a defensive reaction that, in attempting to correct centuries of exclusion, sometimes reproduces the very polarity it seeks to combat.
You may have noticed a phenomenon beginning to appear in classrooms among some teachers, as a result of historical anger that unconsciously puts the blame on new generations of boys, deeply affecting girls.
This is very dangerous, because when a collective wound is not addressed, a shadow is activated that can be unfairly directed at young people who are indirectly blamed for something they are not even aware of.
That is why, once again, as in psychology, we need more compassionate educational models that teach justice without anger, equality without confrontation, and memory without resentment.
A psychology without a shadow is a psychology without a soul
It's not about eliminating the Shadow or seeing it as something negative, but rather about understanding it, being aware of it, and integrating it to keep moving forward.
Giving the Shadow the place it deserves is, to a large extent, not just a psychological task, but a social one.
That's why having a Gothic psychology and a psychology of the Gothic, based on the idea of an inclusive psychology that understands what is strange and what makes us uncomfortable, would help us see darkness as something transformative, instead of something dangerous.
We cannot forget that the unknown creates uncertainty and, therefore, a feeling of lack of control over the future of our lives.
How to walk between light and shadow
Certainly, the solution isn't to illuminate everything, but to learn to navigate between light and shadow. Something that many people, myself included, find paradoxically explained in disciplines like neuroscience, which are turning our gaze back to that forgotten darkness.
In this sense, we see how advances in the study of dreams, the unconscious, and emotions confirm what James, Myers, and Jung already intuited: the mind is capable of benefiting from its more logical side, but we cannot deny that it is also made up of echoes, symbols, and figures that seek to communicate with us.
Fortunately, there are increasingly more groups of people seeking alternatives that don't pathologise their life experience, but rather offer non-judgmental listening. Where different ways of being in the world are respected, and where we learn from them. Therein lies true evolution.
Recovering what was exiled: integrating history and art
Perhaps the time has come to reclaim all that has been exiled: to integrate not only what science has contributed, but also what it continues to exclude; to acknowledge what religion monopolised and censored; and to reclaim what art silently safeguarded while dominant thought dismissed it as irrational or useless.
We still have a long way to go, but we can begin by honestly examining our own history: how we were educated, what we learned, what we internalised, and what we repressed. And, above all, we can begin to unearth the voices of the thinkers who were erased from the official curricula. Because if they had been there from the beginning, our understanding of humanity would be very different from what we have inherited. I do not doubt that things would be very different now.
So what can you do with all this now?
I began this article by telling you about my insatiable curiosity and my vital need to understand why we are the way we are. The human experience fascinates me, and every day I become more convinced that we still have so much to do. I always say that we can't help others without first helping ourselves. And one way to begin is by giving voice to those inner concerns, using any platform we have to express what bothers us and shed light on what society insists on keeping hidden.
If this reflection has resonated with you, I invite you to join my Investigation group of the Gothic Psyche, where we analyse how the unconscious speaks to us through symbol, myth, and art. There, we deconstruct, philosophise, and decipher how Gothic culture helps us heal.
If you want to know if this group is for you, or if you'd like fully personalised support, you can book a 45-minute free session with me.
And if you're also interested in being part of my independent doctoral research on how gothic culture functions as a psychic container (especially in neurodivergent people and those with complex trauma), I invite you to join my Patreon, where I share exclusive material and give priority access to my studies.
And what about you? Do you feel fragmented? I'd love to hear from you.
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