Glossary: Apperception

The process through which new experiences are enriched and given meaning by relating them to previous experiences. Jung differentiates from active apperception, where attention is given to the content, and passive apperception, in which the content forces itself on oneself, either from the external world or internally. (See also “assimilation”).

A rich child and a poor child walking together come across the same ten dollar bill on the sidewalk. The rich child says it is not very much money and the poor child says it is a lot of money. The difference lies in how they apperceive the same event – the lens of past experience through which they see and value (or devalue) the money.

- Christopher Ott

Sense-perceptions tell us that something is. But they do not tell us what it is. This is told us not by the process of perception but by the process of apperception, and this has a highly complex structure. Not that sense-perception is anything simple; only, its complex nature is not so much psychic as physiological. The complexity of apperception, on the other hand, is psychic.

- Jung, “The Structure of the Psyche,” CW 8, par. 288

In the former case [active apperception] we speak of “attention,” in the latter case [passive apperception] of “fantasy” or “dreaming.” The directed processes are rational, the undirected irrational.

- Jung, “The Structure of the Psyche,” CW 8, par. 294