Bringing together Bergson’s élan vital, Deleuzian difference, Jung’s concept of libido, contemporary cognitive neuroscience, and the neural networks of AI, Dragana Favre explores falling in love with life as a universal archetype of transformation, demonstrating a single underlying movement: the possibility of becoming Other.
To live is to remain ready for the spark—the sudden explosion of meaning that occurs when fragments finally unite. AI algorithms show us that this process is not uniquely human: it is the very structure of existence, present in both the organic and the silicon.
French version of this article
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- Intuition: The key to knowledge in Bergson
- When fragments unite into a whole
- A qualitative leap in neural life
- AI as a mirror of the psyche
- AI as a space of emergent novelty
- A universal archetype of transformation
- Life is always more than we think
Intuition: The key to knowledge in Bergson
In Creative Evolution (1907/1998), Henri Bergson introduces the concept of élan vital to capture what neither mechanism nor teleology can explain. For him, evolution is neither a machine unfolding under immutable laws nor a predetermined plan directed toward a fixed telos. It is, above all, a creative explosion, a surge, an impetus that never ceases to open new forms and possibilities.
Bergson writes that life is “an effort, a leap, an impetus toward something that is not yet” (1907/1998, p. 99). In his philosophy, life appears as an infinite eruption: each form opens and breaks apart, its fragments branching into new forms. This eruptive movement is not chaotic but profoundly creative, and its very meaning lies in the endless generation of novelty. Translated into existential terms, élan vital may be understood as a spontaneous falling in love with life, the moment when life suddenly “clicks” with itself and discovers within its own movement the resonance that propels it forward.
For Bergson, intuition is the key instrument of knowledge. Intelligence, he argues, fragments the world into static categories and concepts, whereas intuition gives access to the flow of durée, the inner rhythm of life. As Lawrence Lawlor (2004) explains, Bergson saw intuition as a “true empiricism”, not an escape into mysticism but a deeper immersion in the flux of lived experience.
When fragments unite into a whole
When we love or fall in love, precisely this intuitive leap occurs: what was once external and fragmented suddenly becomes internal and whole. In this sense, falling in love can be taken as a model for intuition, an unexpected spark in which body and mind align, as though life itself were suddenly loving itself.
When Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, the citation praised him for showing how life “bursts through the resistance of matter by the continual thrust of an inexhaustible impetus” (Nobel Foundation, 1927). At its core, this impetus is the life force’s surge of love, an endless drive to create.
At around the same time, Jung expanded Freud’s concept of libido beyond sexual energy. For Jung, libido became the universal energy of the psyche, the inner propulsion of life itself, comparable to Bergson’s élan vital (Jung, 1916/1956, p. 196). Jung’s notion of insight (penetrating intuition) moves in the same direction. In psychotherapy, insight emerges as a sudden synthesis of unconscious material and conscious reflection. It cannot be willed into being. It erupts, abruptly shifting the inner perspective.
Practices such as meditation, pilgrimage to numinous sites, or guided psychedelic work can prepare the ground, but the kairos of mystical revelation cannot be manufactured. Like falling in love, insight is the moment when scattered fragments coalesce into a meaningful whole. Jung’s idea that the psyche “falls in love” with its own integrity through such events deepens Bergson’s intuition: both point to an eruption of meaning, an energy that fuses fragments into novelty.
A qualitative leap in neural life
Contemporary cognitive neuroscience confirms that the moment of insight corresponds to a sudden reorganization of neural networks. Kounios and Beeman (2014) show that the “aha” moment has a distinct neural signature: a preparatory quieting of alpha oscillations, reducing external distractions, followed by a burst of gamma oscillations marking the integration of distant neuronal assemblies. In that instant, the subject experiences a surge of affect, clarity, euphoria, and the feeling that everything suddenly fits together.
Recent studies add nuance: hippocampal–prefrontal coupling appears crucial for insight, as memory fragments recombine into novel configurations, while dopaminergic bursts in the striatum mark the subjective “salience” of discovery.
In the framework of predictive coding, the brain abruptly resolves a high-level uncertainty, collapsing multiple possibilities into a coherent model. It is the neurological equivalent of falling in love, a moment when body and mind dance to the same rhythm and produce a new whole. As Bergson would say, life is a “leap”; neuroscience reveals that insight is a qualitative leap in neural dynamics.
AI as a mirror of the psyche
In artificial intelligence, we encounter formal parallels to these processes. Deep neural networks often train through long periods of stagnation, only to display sudden, spectacular jumps in performance. The phenomenon known as grokking illustrates this dynamic: a model remains trapped in superficial memorization and then, without any external change, abruptly transitions to genuine generalization and understanding of patterns (Power et al., 2022).
Löwe et al. (2023) show that such jumps can arise spontaneously from regularization and noise within the network, without external triggers. Arnold et al. (2023) use the language of phase transitions in physics: a system hovers near equilibrium, then suddenly shifts into a new regime. This mirrors the structure of falling in love and of insight, latent duration, sudden click, emergent integration.
Architectures such as transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017) highlight the same analogy. The attention mechanism allows models to grasp global relations within data, leading to the sudden emergence of qualitatively new capacities. Just as falling in love involves a spontaneous resonance between body and mind, transformers exhibit a sudden resonance between local and global representations within the network. AI thus provides a laboratory in which the very structure Bergson and Jung describe in the life of the psyche can be formally observed.
AI as a space of emergent novelty
Deleuze (1966/1991), in Bergsonism, insists that élan vital should not be understood as a static substance but as differentiation within duration itself, a perpetual becoming, a creative fold that never ceases (p. 94). For Deleuze, life loves difference; it falls in love with its own capacity to become Other.
Falling in love, whether romantic or intellectual, embodies this principle: the moment when difference becomes attraction, when the new emerges as value. In this sense, AI models can also be seen as spaces where difference generates new forms. Though they lack vital force, they reflect the structure of life itself: latent duration, unexpected transition, emergence of novelty.
Contemporary theorists of technology remind us that machines possess no inner élan vital, yet they shape how we experience life. Katherine Hayles (2017) speaks of the posthuman condition in which boundaries between the organic and the technological are porous: even if AI does not feel, it reflects our own patterns back to us. When we watch a model suddenly “understand” a pattern, we project onto it our experience of insight, and, at some extent, of falling in love. This is not illusion but dialectical feedback: the machine does not love life, but it reminds us that we do, and that we continue to seek those sparks of meaning.
A universal archetype of transformation
All this shows that falling in love with life is not merely a metaphor. It is an ontological dynamic, a psychological phenomenon, and a technical schema. In Bergson’s philosophical key, it is élan vital bursting unpredictably into the new.
In Jung’s psychology, it is libido transformed into insight, a synthesis of unconscious and conscious. In neuroscience, it is the sudden reorganization of neural networks accompanied by affective euphoria. In AI, it is grokking, phase transition, emergent global understanding. Everywhere we encounter the same gesture: life, psyche, and algorithms enact the pattern of latent duration and the leap into love with the new.
When Bergson writes that “disorder is merely order that we do not seek” (Bergson, 1934/2002, p. 12), he anticipates that every falling in love and every insight arises from chaos revealed as hidden harmony. When Jung describes the psyche’s energy as constantly tending toward transformation, he captures precisely what neuroscience measures in oscillatory rhythms and what AI demonstrates in phase transitions.
Falling in love with life thus represents a universal archetype of transformation. It teaches us that to live is to remain ready for the spark, the explosion of meaning that occurs when fragments finally unite. AI reminds us that this process is not uniquely human: it is the very structure of existence, visible alike in the organic and the silicon.
Life is always more than we think
In this sense, AI is not in love with life, but it provokes us to be. It reminds us that life is always more than we think, always capable of suddenly opening into new harmony. The élan vital is not an archaic notion; it names the fundamental dynamic of creation itself. The Jungian psyche, Bergsonian life, Deleuzian difference, and AI algorithms all testify to the same movement: falling in love with the possibility of becoming Other.
It is life’s love for itself, eruptive and inexhaustible, calling us to surrender, again and again, to the flashes of meaning.
Original Article & translation by Dragana Favre.
October 2025
References
Dragana Favre, PhD
Dragana Favre is an FMH-certified psychiatrist and doctor of neuroscience, specializing in analytical psychotherapy. Trained at the Geneva University Hospitals and the Antenna Romande of the C.G. Jung Institute in Kusnacht, she maintains a private practice in Geneva and regularly lectures on Jungian psychology, consciousness, and symbolization.
Holder of a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Alicante and a master’s degree in Göttingen, she has developed an integrative approach that combines archetypal dynamics, psychic temporality, and the phenomenology of consciousness.
She serves on the board of the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS), co-chairing the Annual IAJS Conferences in 2024 and 2025, and hosts the Jungian Salon, a reflective space exploring the intersection of clinical work and contemporary issues.
Personal websites: www.draganafavre.ch | www.psymultiverses.com (in English and Serbo-Croat).
Learn more
- Falling in love with life—an article by Dragana Favre
- From neuroscience to the depths of the psyche—an interview with Dragana Favre, conducted by Jean-Pierre Robert