What Is Ousia Analysis?

Ousia Analysis is a nonclinical educational, philosophical, social, and spiritual practice of recursive dialectical inquiry, concerned with the substance of the individual and collective “I” and the relationships through which that “I” comes to understand itself.

William Apple works within this practice as an educator, mentor, and guide. He is not a licensed psychologist, psychotherapist, counselor, or mental-health provider, and Ousia Analysis does not provide psychotherapy, counseling, diagnostic assessment, psychological treatment, crisis intervention, or mental-health care.

What follows is an introduction to the practice and the questions informing it. Some of the language will require explanation, and some of the explanations will themselves become available for questioning; to which, you are welcome to read from the beginning or follow a particular subject through the sections below.

What distinguishes Ousia Analysis?
Beginning with you and Beingness as a Whole
What does “Ousia” mean here?
Where does the individual begin and end?
What does analysis mean here?
The inquiry includes what is doing the inquiring
What do we actually know?
A depathologizing orientation
Analysis as education
Nothing stands outside the question

What distinguishes Ousia Analysis?

When we enter a practice of self-inquiry, we generally arrive with some understanding of what we are attempting to examine, even if the reason we have arrived is that we no longer understand it particularly well. There is a person asking a question, something that person wishes to understand, and a methodology through which the understanding is expected to become possible; and, already, each of these carries assumptions about what a Human Being is, what can be known about that being, and what the inquiry is supposed to accomplish.

However, the person, the question, and the methodology have each developed through particular relationships, histories, languages, and conditions. Those conditions are already participating in what the inquiry can recognize, what it considers meaningful, what it is prepared to question, and what it expects an answer to look like.

Ousia Analysis places all of this within the examination. We question what has been brought into the conversation, while likewise questioning the questions being asked, the “I” asking them, the interpretations being offered, and the methodology through which any of this is being understood.

To which, the distinction concerns how thoroughly the inquiry remains available to examine its own foundations, including whatever it has learned to treat as unquestionable; and, perhaps more difficult to acknowledge, whatever the person conducting the inquiry may need to remain unquestioned in order to preserve their own sense of knowing.

How does this differ from talk therapy?

“Talk therapy” names a broad range of practices, rather than one methodology, and the differences amongst them are substantial. Some are organized around particular difficulties, skills, or patterns of thought and behavior, while others work through relationships, unconscious processes, existential questions, or combinations of these approaches. A practitioner may likewise draw from several methodologies rather than work exclusively within one. (apa.org⁠)

As such, the distinction cannot be determined simply by whether two people are having a conversation, whether the conversation becomes emotionally significant, or whether the practitioner asks questions that the other person finds difficult. We need to examine what the conversation is organized to accomplish, including what the methodology has already identified as a difficulty and what it considers an appropriate response.

If someone arrives saying, “I need to become more productive,” for example, then certainly we can begin there. However, what does productive mean to this person, and through which experiences have they learned to measure themselves according to it? What material circumstances make productivity necessary? What is the desired achievement expected to establish about their worth, and who, or what, has taught them that their worth requires such an achievement?

The need may be practical and consequential, while simultaneously carrying familial expectations, economic demands, shame, desire, and an inherited image of the person they are supposed to become. We need enough discernment to examine those relationships without dismissing the practical reality, while likewise remaining conscious that the practical reality has not explained the totality of what is occurring.

And, if the methodology through which we approach the question has itself been organized around restoring productivity, improving adaptation, or encouraging a particular image of a functioning individual, then those purposes must also enter the inquiry. What are we helping the person adapt to?

What conditions have made that adaptation necessary, and what possibilities might the proposed improvement require them to renounce?

Ousia Analysis approaches these as educational, philosophical, social, and spiritual questions. It does not provide clinical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment.

How does this differ from psychoanalysis?

Psychoanalysis provides substantial resources for examining unconscious processes, conflict, defense, desire, and the relationships through which a person’s experience becomes organized. Its traditions also include examination of the analyst’s participation, and psychoanalytic thought extends into social, cultural, and political inquiry. (apsa.org⁠)

Ousia Analysis is deeply indebted to that inheritance. The distinction concerns how those explanations are received, utilized, and questioned within the larger ontological undertaking, including whether the explanation remains available for examination once it has become persuasive.

If a concept appears to explain something, we must also ask what makes that explanation persuasive, which understanding of the Human Being it presupposes, and what it may prevent us from encountering. The history, culture, institutional commitments, and position of the person offering the interpretation remain consequential, including the possibility that an interpretation reveals something about the interpreter alongside whatever it reveals about the person being interpreted.

Said another way, recognizing that an individual has been conditioned does not, by itself, bring into consciousness the conditioning through which the analytical methodology has developed. The concepts, the standards of interpretation, and the authority to determine what an experience means have histories too; and those histories continue participating in the encounter, including when their participation has become difficult for the person conducting the analysis to recognize.

The same examination is needed when psychoanalytic language is used to interpret society. An explanation of ideology, authority, or unconscious desire must remain capable of questioning the assumptions through which its own account of those realities has been produced, including the possibility that its critique preserves something of the very configuration it is attempting to expose.

How does this differ from analytical psychology?

Jungian analysis offers a substantial inquiry into symbolic life, unconscious processes, and the relationship between the ego and a psyche that exceeds its conscious understanding. Ousia Analysis receives much of its analytical language through this inheritance, particularly Jung’s engagement with individuation, religious experience, and alchemy.

The distinction therefore cannot rest upon a claim that Jung failed to question the individual’s assumed self-sufficiency. It concerns the continuing availability of Jungian explanations themselves, including the interpretations that have accumulated around Jung’s language through subsequent institutions, teachers, practitioners, and popular usage.

If we call something a complex, an archetypal configuration, a shadow expression, or an aspect of individuation, we have introduced an interpretation whose usefulness must be examined in relationship with the particular experience before us. We must also consider what histories and assumptions the term carries, how its meaning has changed, and whether our allegiance to a familiar explanation is allowing the experience to become clearer or asking it to conform.

This becomes especially consequential when an account of individuation, masculinity, femininity, maturity, or spiritual development begins functioning as a declaration of what a person is supposed to become. The interpretation may contain something valuable, while its application may also impose the interpreter’s inherited image of a properly developed Human Being; and both may be occurring within the same explanation.

And, to be clear, the same question must be asked of Beingness, ontological hospitality, and recursive dialectic. Replacing Jungian terminology with Ousian terminology would accomplish very little if the replacement simply established another vocabulary whose authority could no longer be questioned.

How does this differ from Psychosynthesis?

Psychosynthesis explicitly attends to questions of Self, disidentification, wholeness, and the relationship between personal and transpersonal experience. Its account also extends into responsibility and relationship with the greater Whole, making it an important point of conversation for Ousia Analysis. (psychosynthesis.org⁠)

Within Ousia Analysis, we examine those possibilities alongside the expectations that may accumulate around them. What do we mean by wholeness? What are we recognizing as integration? Which experiences have been placed beneath an ideal of spiritual development, and what happens when a person’s life does not resemble the image through which that development has been imagined?

Even the position from which someone witnesses their thoughts or internal parts remains available for examination, because becoming conscious of an identification does not establish that the consciousness recognizing it has become free from every other identification.

The question therefore continues into whatever has come to regard itself as the witness, the observer, or the more conscious position. For, I may recognize that I am identified with something, while likewise becoming identified with the image of myself as someone who has recognized it; and that image may then provide another means through which I preserve a sense of superiority without having become particularly conscious of what I am doing.

How does this differ from Individual Psychology?

Adler’s Individual Psychology understands the person holistically and within social relationships, with considerable attention to belonging, significance, inferiority, and the conditions of collective life. Its name should therefore not be mistaken for a claim that the individual exists independently of society. (alfredadler.edu⁠)

Ousia Analysis brings those concerns into an examination of the conditions through which belonging and significance become organized. A person may need community, recognition, and the capacity to contribute, while the community itself may organize recognition through expectations that reproduce exclusion, exploitation, or superiority.

As such, we examine the individual’s relationship with society alongside the society’s definitions of a worthwhile individual, including the historical and material conditions through which those definitions became authoritative.

The capacity to belong remains significant, while the terms upon which belonging is being offered must also be questioned. Otherwise, helping someone find their place may become inseparable from helping them accommodate an arrangement whose demands have not themselves been examined, and whose consequences may be participating in the very difficulty for which the person sought assistance.

When a methodology becomes an authority over life

Across these comparisons, the concern is not that a methodology possesses structure. We require distinctions, language, practices, and provisional explanations through which experience can become available for consideration. The concern arises when the structure acquires an authority that the realities it encounters are no longer permitted to challenge.

An unfamiliar experience can leave us without the distinctions through which we ordinarily recognize ourselves and the world, and a structured approach offers something to hold while we attempt to understand what is happening. There is considerable value in that structure; and, all the same, the reassurance it provides can become entangled with our need to believe that whatever we encounter will eventually fit within what the methodology already knows how to explain.

The ego may therefore seek an explanation because something requires careful attention, while also seeking refuge from the uncertainty that such attention exposes. Both can occur within the same question, and the distinction becomes consequential when our desire to understand begins requiring existence to conform to the conditions under which we are willing to encounter it.

This is where I would distinguish between a living inquiry and what we might call a dead structure.

By “dead,” I mean a formulation held still: a definition, category, interpretation, or methodology whose established shape gives us something recognizable around which to orient ourselves. Such a structure can preserve knowledge, support learning, and help us act, while remaining a particular formulation of something whose relationships and possibilities it has not exhausted.

By “living,” I mean the ongoing reality of relationship, differentiation, response, consequence, and emergence through which what we encounter continues to exceed our account of it. The distinction is ontological insofar as it concerns the relationship between an articulated understanding of Being and the Being that understanding attempts to name.

And, to be clear, the “dead” formulation participates within living Reality too. We create it, inherit it, use it, revise it, and sometimes need to preserve it for a considerable time. Its existence is not an error to be corrected. The difficulty begins when we mistake the relative stability of the formulation for evidence that existence itself must remain within its boundaries.

Under those conditions, a person becomes accountable to a methodology that has ceased being accountable to the person. Whatever does not fit may be dismissed, subordinated, or treated as something that must disappear so that the explanation can remain intact.

This is a supremacist orientation insofar as a partial account assumes authority over the Whole, while whatever reveals its partiality is required to occupy an inferior position. The methodology may continue calling itself analytical, liberating, spiritual, or compassionate, while the relationship it establishes demands conformity to an image it has exempted from equivalent examination.

Such a configuration can appear within psychological, philosophical, political, religious, or spiritual language. A teacher may announce what a man must be, what a woman must become, what maturity looks like, or which configuration constitutes an authentic life; and the declaration may gather considerable authority without adequately examining the histories, desires, fears, and arrangements of power through which that image has been produced.

Traditional and nontraditional identities alike can become organized in this way. Their existence is not the difficulty. The difficulty is the demand that one configuration become the way, while the diversity of human possibility is judged according to its resemblance to that configuration.

And, if I have become attached to an image of myself as someone who knows the way, then questioning the methodology may likewise threaten the superior image of myself that has become dependent upon it. What appears to be a defense of knowledge may also be a defense against encountering how little of the Whole that knowledge permits me to hold.

The discipline of not knowing

This is why the discipline of not knowing is central to Ousia Analysis.

Its Socratic inheritance is often expressed through the familiar paraphrase, “All I know is that I know nothing”; however, the formulation in Plato’s Apology is more precise. At 21d, Socrates says:

ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.

A close rendering is: “What I do not know, I do not think I know.” (beta.perseus.tufts.edu⁠)

That distinction matters because the discipline concerns our relationship with the limits of knowing. We may understand something, recognize a pattern, or possess evidence sufficient to act, while remaining unable to claim that our understanding contains the totality of what is occurring.

The opening of the Dao De Jing offers another point of conversation through its distinction between an articulable way and the enduring Dao. (classics.mit.edu⁠) Within Ousia Analysis, I take this as an invitation to examine what happens when naming becomes possession: when an explanation that permits orientation begins claiming the authority to determine everything that can exist beyond it.

We can say something about what is present, while remaining honest about what our statement has not contained. We can hold an interpretation long enough to investigate its consequences, while permitting what contradicts it to remain within the inquiry. And we can acknowledge that we do not know without requiring uncertainty to become another absolute declaration about everything being unknowable.

To which, the discipline allows us to hold the tension between what seems to be known and what remains unknown, without demanding that either be sacrificed so that the other can provide us with certainty.

This requires humility before what no finite human life can exhaustively comprehend: existence in its wildly varied manifestations, through relationships whose totality exceeds what we can consciously hold.

“Infinite diversity in infinite combinations” is therefore an essential principle within the ontological orientation of this practice. It asks us to remain conscious that the recognizable configuration before us participates within possibilities and relationships that our present understanding has not exhausted, including what may become possible through the very encounter in which we are attempting to understand it.

What is meant by a living synthesis?

With that distinction established, we can begin to speak about a living synthesis: a relationship in which what is known provides orientation, while what remains unknown continues to participate in how that orientation develops.

The “I” does not need to become entirely without structure. There is a body, a history, a life to be lived, and responsibilities that require us to distinguish, decide, and act. However, the continuity of that life need not depend upon preserving every inherited declaration about who we are supposed to be, nor upon forcing every unfamiliar experience into the identity through which we have learned to recognize ourselves.

An identity can be held provisionally, providing enough recognition for relationship while remaining capable of responding to what relationship reveals. What becomes conscious may complicate the identity, alter its boundaries, expose something it has excluded, or disclose a possibility it had previously been unable to imagine.

This is part of what it means to allow psyche and soul room for emergence. The internal life of a person contains relationships amongst memories, desires, fears, images, contradictions, and capacities whose significance cannot always be determined in advance. What has been buried, shamed, or refused may require attention before we can understand what it carries, while understanding its presence does not require us to enact every impulse or disregard its consequences.

We may encounter something that disturbs an image we cherish of ourselves. We may recognize a desire that contradicts a moral allegiance, a fear that complicates a spiritual conviction, or an internal perspective whose existence we had learned to regard as unacceptable. And the analytical undertaking is to become sufficiently discerning that we can examine those relationships, including the demands that taught us what must be hidden in order to remain acceptable.

Such a synthesis includes differentiation, boundaries, refusal, rest, and the provisional stability through which a life becomes possible. It likewise includes the capacity for those arrangements to change when what is actually occurring asks something different of us, without turning change itself into another demand through which the individual must demonstrate their worth.

Ousia Analysis offers a methodology for approaching that possibility through a recursively logical and dialectical process: the interpretation returns to examine its premises, the question returns to include the questioner, and the methodology returns to consider how its own formation participates in what it has made visible.

The commitment to question everything does not establish that we have successfully identified every assumption through which we are presently looking. It establishes a responsibility to remain answerable to what the encounter reveals, including when that revelation requires further study, a different question, the relinquishment of an explanation, or an acknowledgment that we do not yet know.

And, as such, the structure offered through Ousia Analysis must remain capable of supporting a relationship with Being that exceeds the structure itself, so that the “I” participating within the inquiry may continue to encounter, differentiate, and respond to a Reality whose totality it does not possess.

Beginning with you and Beingness as a Whole

What do we mean by beginning with you and Beingness as a Whole, simultaneously, and why does that distinction matter to the analysis?

By you, I mean the particular person participating within the inquiry: your body, history, relationships, experiences, and present understanding of yourself, including whatever has brought you to ask a question. By Beingness as a Whole, I mean the total Reality within which that person exists, including the relationships and conditions through which your life has become possible, alongside whatever remains beyond our present awareness or capacity to understand.

The distinction matters because an experience can be intimately yours while also participating within realities that exceed your individual awareness. If we examine only what appears to belong inside the individual, we may overlook the conditions through which the experience has developed; and if we explain the individual entirely through those larger conditions, we may likewise overlook the particular person who has encountered, interpreted, and responded to them.

As such, the undertaking requires us to attend to both, while remaining conscious that neither our account of the individual nor our account of the Whole has exhausted what it attempts to describe.

And, to be clear, when I speak of the Whole, I am not suggesting that either of us possesses a complete understanding of what that Whole is. This is an especially important distinction because what we experience as a comprehensive understanding may be the boundary of what we have learned to recognize, rather than the boundary of what exists.

We may have inherited a religious cosmology, a scientific account, a psychological theory, a political explanation, or some combination through which the world becomes sufficiently recognizable for us to live within it. Such an account may disclose something consequential, while likewise organizing our attention around particular questions and leaving others difficult to perceive. Its apparent completeness may tell us something about the reach of our education and conditioning, including where we have not yet encountered a reason to question it.

The same applies to the understanding of Beingness offered here. Whatever I say about the Whole is being said through a particular language, education, history, and position within existence; and the capacity to recognize that participation does not place me outside of it. Ousia Analysis therefore asks us to consider the Whole while keeping our conception of it available for examination.

With that distinction established, we can return to the person who is actually here.

You may have considerable language for what is occurring, or you may only recognize that something requires attention. Either gives us somewhere to begin, because the particularity of your experience is how these questions become available within the conversation. We need to understand what you are encountering, what significance it carries for you, and what consequences remain within the circumstances of your life.

At the same time, the individual who has arrived is already participating within relationships that precede the present conversation, including relationships whose influence may have become so familiar that they are experienced simply as who you are.

You did not independently select the language through which you first learned to name yourself, nor the family, ancestry, historical moment, geography, culture, economy, religious images, ecological conditions, or arrangements of power into which you were born. Before you could consciously consider what a Human Being might be, you were already encountering the expectations through which other people recognized you, responded to you, and began teaching you how to recognize yourself.

Those expectations may have been spoken directly, while others became apparent through what received affection, what produced disappointment, what remained unacknowledged, and what you learned could threaten your belonging. Nor does this require anyone to have consciously intended the entirety of what was being taught. A family can transmit an understanding of worth, authority, gender, love, or responsibility through habits and responses whose origins its members have never had an opportunity to examine.

What you experience as “I” therefore includes relationships with material you inherited before you possessed the means to question it. Even the language through which you eventually resisted something was received through encounters with a world that preceded your resistance, and whatever you made of those encounters became part of the conditions through which further responses became possible.

However, the individual receiving these influences was never merely an empty container into which the world deposited its instructions. There was a particular body, temperament, capacity, and developing manner of responding; and those responses affected the people and conditions to which you were responding, whose subsequent responses became part of what you encountered again. The relationship was already recursive, including long before you could consciously recognize that recursion.

This is why an explanation of your conditioning cannot, by itself, tell us the totality of who you are. It may reveal something about how a fear developed, how a desire became organized, or why an expectation feels inseparable from your worth, while still leaving us with the person who received, interpreted, resisted, accommodated, and continues to respond to those conditions.

For example, you may experience a sense that you have failed someone. That experience is occurring within your particular life, and we need to understand what happened, what responsibility you carry, and what consequences remain. Alongside that examination, however, we may discover an inherited understanding of obligation through which disappointing another person has become almost indistinguishable from being an inadequate Human Being.

We would then need to consider what you actually agreed to, what the other person expected, what was possible within the circumstances, and how the judgment of inadequacy became attached to the event. There may be a responsibility that requires acknowledgment, while the image through which you are judging yourself may also require examination; and neither consideration needs to erase the other.

If we regard the experience only as an internal difficulty, we may help preserve an expectation whose demands have remained unexamined. If we explain it entirely through family or culture, we may overlook an action for which you remain responsible, or a relationship whose particular circumstances require closer attention.

To which, considering the larger relationships should allow us to become more precise about your experience. We can begin distinguishing what has happened from the meaning attached to it, what belongs to the present encounter from what has been inherited, and what remains within your capacity to respond to from what no individual can alter alone.

This is also where the distinction between individuality and absolute separation becomes consequential. Your body, history, perspective, boundaries, and relationships retain their significance, including where another person’s experience cannot be substituted for your own. Those differences participate within shared existence, while shared existence takes form through the particular beings whose differences make relationship possible.

Within the orientation of Ousia Analysis, you are therefore approached as a real and particular expression of Beingness as a Whole. The inquiry follows what becomes visible through your life into the relationships through which that life exists, while returning through those relationships to consider what has become clearer about you.

And, as we do so, whatever account we develop remains part of the encounter. An interpretation may change how you understand a memory, how I understand a question, or what either of us becomes capable of noticing next; and we must remain attentive to those consequences too, because the analysis is participating within the life it attempts to understand.

Beginning with you and Beingness as a Whole therefore means attending to your particularity without treating it as self-contained, while considering the larger Reality without pretending that our present conception of it has become complete. It is through that relationship that the question of what you are opens into questions concerning substance, identity, belonging, and Being itself, which brings us to why the word ousia has been chosen to name the practice.