William James’s pragmatism offers a vital lens for understanding gender identity beyond rigid categories. Unlike phenomenological or existential approaches that emphasise self-declared essence, James viewed psychic facts as “more-or-less” realities—fluid, adaptive, and ecological. His influence on Carl Jung’s idea of the psychoid highlights a shared vision of the psyche as a dynamic field, resonating with quantum views of energy and matter. Revisiting James helps prevent compartmentalisation and fragmentation, fostering a more holistic, natural understanding of human psychic experience.
William James approached the study of human experience with a pragmatist’s sensibility. He did not seek to establish fixed categories or rigid systems of classification. Instead, he emphasised that psychic phenomena are “more-or-less” facts—real in so far as they are experienced, though not reducible to mechanical explanation or logical deduction. This orientation remains crucial when considering the contemporary psychology of gender identity.
The prevailing models for understanding gender identity often fall into two camps. On one side stand phenomenological and existential approaches, which prioritise subjective feeling and the authenticity of self-declaration. On the other side are pragmatic and psychological accounts, which emphasise behaviour, adaptation, and the practical consequences of lived identity. As Anselm Strauss notes:
“Error, re-evaluation, and the hypothetical nature of classifications, suggest a further corollary feature of man’s relationship to his world. A thoroughly static environment, met with thoroughly stable responses, would be in turn thoroughly known. A problematic world presents not only discovery but danger. The danger consists in the possibility that one may lose his world and his possessions” (Strauss, 2017, p. 38).
James’s contribution is significant here:he warned against turning psychic realities into abstract absolutes. For him, belief, will, and feeling were operative facts, yet they remained fluid and provisional, not eternal structures. This insight challenges us to consider gender identity not as a metaphysical truth nor as a mere social fiction, but as a dynamic psychological phenomenon embedded in experience.
Carl Jung recognised the importance of James’s orientation. Jung’s concept of the psychoid—that dimension of the psyche which touches the material and the symbolic simultaneously—echoes James’s idea of the psychic field. Both thinkers point to a liminal zone where mind and matter, symbol and fact, overlap. Here, the psyche is not compartmentalised into rigid systems, but is ecological, continuous, and open-ended. In this view, gender identity is not a discrete category but part of a wider constellation of psychic energies, archetypes, and symbolic enactments.
James’s refusal to discretely categorise psychic facts anticipates some of the developments in modern physics. Quantum mechanics has revealed a cosmos not made up of fixed particles, but of energy states, fields, and probabilities. What we call matter is, at its base, a configuration of energy. This resonates with James’s insistence that psychic facts are not static essences but provisional events in an ongoing stream of consciousness. Just as quantum mechanics resists the hard boundaries of classical physics, James resists the hard boundaries of psychological system-building.
For James:
“The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground of things is a perfection eternally complete” (James, 2000, p13).
This perspective matters because the tendency in psychology and cultural discourse is to compartmentalise, literalise, and fragment human experience. When gender identity is treated solely as an existential essence, or conversely as a purely social construct, something essential is lost: the recognition that the psyche is ecological.
It operates like a living system, fluid yet patterned, symbolic yet embodied. The danger of adopting a rigid systems view—whether medical, political, or ideological—is that it severs the psyche from its natural ground, reducing it to formulae and categories. An ecological view, by contrast, honours complexity and interdependence, seeing psychic life as part of the living continuum of the world. As Marie Louise von Franz notes:
“Thus what Jung once called the ‘mysterious flow of events’ has to do with the effect of the collective unconscious on the course of world events. The collective unconscious, however, is not something static, but rather over long periods of time certain archetypes more than others are constellated within the zeitgeist. And that raises the question of whether behind this process of constellation of archetypes determining the character of a given historical period some lawful principle of order can be detected or whether it is blind chance that reigns” (Franz, 1999, p. 285).
William James’s pragmatism, then, remains a resource for our time. It allows us to acknowledge the reality of psychic phenomena, including gender identity, without forcing them into premature closure. It keeps alive the tension between experience, symbol, and adaptation, while resisting the drift toward absolutism.
By returning to James, and by tracing his influence on Jung, we are reminded that psychology is not merely the study of systems but the care of a living ecology of meaning. As Jung notes:
“To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the ‘thorn in the flesh’ is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent” (Jung, 1968, p. 159).
Franz, M.-L. v. (1999). Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche. Shambhala.
James, W. (2000). Pragmatism and Other Writings. Penguin.
Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychology and Alchemy (Second ed.). London: Routledge.
Strauss, A. L. (2017). Mirors & Masks – The Search for Identity. London: Routledge.
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