Imagination Is an Organ Function: Hun, the Spirit of the Liver

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“What follows the Shen in its comings and goings is called the Hun” (随神往来者谓之魂). It’s the shortest line in the chain from chapter 8 of the Lingshu, quoted in full in The Flame and Its Oil: Shen, the Spirit of the Heart. It’s perhaps also the most precise: the Hun is the part of the psyche that comes and goes. It moves away from the present to explore, then returns. Dreaming, imagining, conceiving a project, sensing that another situation is possible: all of them excursions.

In the previous article, devoted to the Zhi and the Kidney, we distinguished deep will from mere motivation. The Hun describes the movement that precedes all will: before you can want a direction, you need to have pictured it. This fifth article closes the series of the five spirits: a traditional model that describes links between emotions, sleep and bodily signs, and that does not map onto the categories of contemporary psychiatry.

The series of the five spirits

This article is part of a five-part series on the visceral spirits (wǔ shén) of Chinese medicine, one per organ:

A cloud spirit: what the Hun governs

The character says almost everything already. Hun 魂 joins 云, the cloud, with 鬼, the spirit. A cloud spirit: light, mobile, ascending. The tradition counts three of them, in symmetry with the seven Po, the corporeal soul described in The Soul That Has a Body: Po, the Spirit of the Lung. The two pairs answer each other term for term: the Hun follows the Shen in its comings and goings, the Po joins with the essence in its entrances and exits. On one side the yang aspect of the psyche, imaginative, turned towards the possible; on the other its yin aspect, sensory, held to the body’s present.

The Suwen, in chapter 8, compares the Liver to a general charged with conceiving strategies (谋虑, móulǜ: plans, deliberations). The image is exact: before you advance, you need to picture a direction. And the text entrusts the decision to another officer, the Gallbladder, “just and upright,” from which judgments issue. The Liver proposes, the Gallbladder disposes. We’ll come back to this division of labour.

The Hun therefore governs projection: dreams, imagination, intuition, the projects that give shape to the future. Right up to the courage of initiative, that minimal boldness every beginning demands. Think of adolescence, the Wood surge par excellence: ideals, outsized plans, risk-taking. The Liver “opens onto the eyes,” the tradition also says; the capacity to see far, including what does not yet exist, had to be housed somewhere. The Hun decides nothing on its own. It supplies the Shen of the Heart with images, leads, possibilities that consciousness examines, sorts and integrates.

Its foundation is the Blood of the Liver. At night, “when a person lies down, the Blood returns to the Liver” (Suwen 10) and the Hun finds residence there. This ancient formula does not describe an anatomical mechanism; it expresses a clinical idea: imagination needs a place to settle. Without that support, even sleep becomes movement.

The bridled Hun: Liver Qi stagnation

“The Liver loves free unfolding and hates constraint,” the tradition repeats: tiáodá 条达, the image of branches extending without obstacle. Liver Qi stagnation is that unfolding prevented, and it’s probably the emotional picture most often invoked in Chinese medicine. Too often, and we’ll come back to that.

The mood is not necessarily low all the time. It knots up with frustrations, lightens when circumstances change, knots up again. The person sighs, often without noticing: it’s the picture’s most faithful sign, almost a signature. They feel stuck in a situation, a relationship, a decision that doesn’t move. Irritability stays contained; resentment accumulates. The flanks and the area under the ribs grow tight, sometimes the breasts; in some women, the whole picture sharpens markedly before menstruation. And projects become painful to conceive, as though every road were closed at once.

The central sign, then, is not anger. It’s the loss of fluidity. The Hun would like to come and go; it no longer finds a passage. The school of Zhu Danxi, in the fourteenth century, made this constraint (yù 郁) a central mechanism of pathology: where movement is lost, disorders proliferate. Which is why the first thing treatment does in that great chapter of the Liver syndromes is to set things circulating again, to restore some play.

Mei He Qi: when the knot takes bodily form

Stagnation can condense into a surprisingly precise sensation: a lump in the throat you can neither swallow nor spit out. The description is ancient. The Jingui Yaolüe, in the third century, speaks of a sensation “like a piece of grilled meat” caught in the throat; the later tradition preferred the image of the plum pit, Mei He Qi. Something remains caught between inside and outside, which is neither food nor object.

The picture’s distinctive trait: the sensation follows the emotions. It swells during a period of tension, fades when attention shifts, returns as a difficult conversation approaches. Chest oppression and sighing often accompany it. In the clinic, you sometimes see it literally move. A person is telling me about a family matter that’s been bogged down for months; the voice tightens; the hand rises on its own towards the throat: “it’s stuck right there.” Twenty minutes later, on another subject, the hand has come back down and so has the discomfort. The body was following the conversation. (Impressions composed over many encounters, never the portrait of one person.)

One clarification is required, the only one that really counts here: a constant discomfort that doesn’t vary, or a real difficulty swallowing food, is not a “plum pit” and calls first for medical assessment. The energetic model is never used to assign a symptom to emotion by default when it could have another cause.

From Yu to Fire: when stagnation heats up

A prolonged constraint doesn’t always stay silent. In Chinese vocabulary, compressed Yu produces Heat, then Fire, the way any sustained pressure ends up producing heat.

The picture then changes register. Outbursts of anger flare quickly and sometimes subside just as quickly. Contradiction becomes unbearable. You wake with a bitter taste in the mouth; the head pounds at the temples, the eyes redden, the whole upper body seems under tension. The Suwen had set it down in a formula: “anger makes the Qi rise” (Suwen 39). Everything rises. That’s the movement.

Night no longer calms anything. Dreams become intense, conflictual: you argue, you chase, you flee, you defend yourself. On waking, the body has slept, but the subjective experience feels like a night of work. Fire agitates the Hun right inside its residence, and sometimes right into the impulsive conduct of the day: decisions made in the heat of the moment and undone the next morning.

Liver Yang rising: irritable because exhausted

Two impatient people may present almost opposite dynamics. In Liver Yang rising, irritability doesn’t express a full excess: it appears on a base that’s lacking.

The head seems under pressure; dizziness, tinnitus or a sense of instability punctuate moments of tension. Above all, impatience shows itself at the end of the day, when resources drop, and sustained activity makes the whole thing worse instead of discharging it. The lower back is weak, recovery poor. According to the logic set out in the article on the Zhi and the Kidney, the Yin and the Jing of the Kidney nourish the base of the Liver: Water restrains Wood. When this base is exhausted, the Yang is no longer held. It rises on its own.

Dispersing someone already drained still further would be a misreading. The visible movement draws attention; the deficiency that permits it is the underlying problem.

The wandering Hun: Liver Blood deficiency

Everyday Chinese still says of someone distracted, absent, that they are hún bù shǒu shè (魂不守舍): “the Hun no longer keeps its dwelling.” The expression describes exactly the inverse of stagnation: no longer a spirit prevented from leaving, but a spirit that no longer comes home.

When the Blood of the Liver no longer provides a sufficient residence, the Hun stays mobile at the moment when it should settle. Sleep becomes light, unstable, filled with dreams you wake from tired, as though you’d passed through several stories in one night. Some people talk in their sleep. At bedtime, a diffuse fear sometimes rises, without precise object. And by day, the future empties out: little drive, few projects, a sensitivity worn on the surface. Indecision here isn’t an excess of analysis — the options themselves no longer form. That’s the whole difference from the indecision of the Gallbladder, which conceives the possibilities but doesn’t dare decide: here there’s nothing to decide between.

The classical terrains: after blood loss, postpartum, long sleep deprivation, undernourishment. The traditional reading adds the great uprootings (successive bereavements, migrations), which leave the Hun, it says, “without a dwelling.” The Hun doesn’t look imprisoned. It lacks a house.

The acute forms in which Wind and Heat violently agitate the Hun belong to other pictures, often paroxysmal, that fall outside the scope of this article.

The other excess: the Hun that leaves without returning

Finally, there’s a more discreet imbalance, one the clinic nonetheless meets constantly: the coming and going that now only goes. Invasive reverie, brief enthusiasms, ten projects begun and none carried through. Plenty of images, nothing put in order.

The contrast with the Spleen is instructive. The rumination of the Yi turns in circles without images or exit; the reverie of the Hun overflows with images without form or follow-through. Two ways of overthinking, clinically opposite. The swing back belongs to what anchors: the Blood that houses, the Po that embodies, the Zhi that holds over time. Imagination is fertile only if something brings it back.

The trap: not every dark mood comes from the Liver

Modern Chinese has picked its side: the word for “depression” is yìyù (抑郁), and the second character is precisely the yu of stagnation. The equation between dark mood and knotted Liver is inscribed in the very language. All the more reason to distrust it: the clinical model itself resists its own pull.

Yes, some people are knotted. Their state varies with frustrations, they sigh, oppressed, irritable, and momentarily recover their drive when an obstacle falls. There, something can be set moving again. But other pictures are dominated by flatness, exhaustion, worsening at the least effort; the mood stays low even when circumstances improve; appetite, memory and recovery decline. The articles devoted to the Yi of the Spleen and the Zhi of the Kidney showed how such moods belong, in this model, to deficiencies, where there’s almost nothing left to unknot.

The trajectory of Yu, moreover, often runs from fullness towards emptiness. A recent constraint calls for a strategy of mobilization; after years, the same picture combines stagnation and exhaustion, and you have to nourish without immobilizing, get things moving again without draining further. The clinical question is blunt, but useful: is there something to unknot, or nothing left to knot?

This is one of the reasons the system counts five spirits. A single explanation is never enough.

The Liver among the five movements

The Kidney nourishes the Liver

In the engendering cycle, Water nourishes Wood: the Jing and the Yin of the Kidney support the Blood and the Yin of the Liver. When this base is exhausted, Wood loses its suppleness and its Yang rises on its own. That’s the Yang rising described above, and the direct link with the Zhi of the Kidney.

The Liver nourishes the Heart

Wood nourishes Fire. The Hun brings the images and the directions; the Shen of the Heart gives them coherence and conscious presence. The two organs also share the Blood (one governs it, the other stores it), and their two yang spirits often grow agitated together: when the Liver’s movement becomes Fire, insomnia and agitation reach the Heart. The series closes here: the Hun imagines the road, then returns to the flame.

The Liver controls the Spleen

Wood controls Earth. When control becomes invasion, frustration cuts the appetite, knots digestion and tints thought with irritation: the irritable mood doubled with rumination, one of the most frequent mixed pictures in practice. The mechanism is developed in The Two Ways of Overthinking.

The Lung controls the Liver

Metal contains Wood. In the classical correspondences, sadness can temper anger; conversely, a weakened Lung leaves the Liver’s movement unchecked, and certain forms of irritability settle in after a great sorrow, as we saw with the Po of the Lung. The typical conflict deserves to be named: the person who can neither move forward nor let go (Hun bridled, Po knotted), with oppression reaching both the chest and the flanks.

The loop of the five spirits

Since this article closes the series, let’s set out the overall figure. The five spirits form a loop modelled on the cycle of the five elements: the Zhi (Water) founds the impulse; the Hun (Wood) turns it into images and projects; the Shen (Fire) brings them to consciousness and sorts them; the Yi (Earth) gives them form and memory; the Po (Metal) embodies them, then lets them go, and this letting go gives the Zhi back its depth.

Fine clinical work lies in spotting where the loop breaks. Projects with no will to carry them: Hun without Zhi. Laborious thought with no direction: Yi without Hun. A keen consciousness that nothing embodies: Shen without Po. Spotting it is less about naming the affected spirit than about locating the handoff that no longer gets made.

What do dreams really say?

Chinese medicine grants clinical value to dreams, and the classics even drew up catalogues of them: chapter 43 of the Lingshu associates excess of the Liver with dreams of anger, and notes that when a pathogenic factor lodges there, a person dreams of forests, mountains and trees. It would nonetheless be wrong to draw from this a universal dictionary in which each image has its fixed meaning. The normal dream is simply the nocturnal activity of the Hun: peaceful, little remembered. It becomes a sign when it’s repetitive, exhausting, stereotyped, and coherent with the rest of the picture: dreams of conflict in a person who wakes with a bitter mouth and tight temples don’t say the same thing as an isolated dream of an argument. Clues. Never proof.

This caution perhaps contains the last lesson of the series. Human states change nature over time: a tension becomes Heat, Heat exhausts the substances, yesterday’s excess prepares tomorrow’s lack. The same person doesn’t need the same reading at every stage of their history, and a model that thinks in movements rather than labels is made precisely to follow them.

Beyond acupuncture

A persistent low mood, a marked loss of functioning, a significant reduction in the need for sleep, unusual behaviour, intense distress or dark thoughts require the help of a physician or a mental health professional. In Québec, Info-Social (8-1-1, option 2) offers immediate psychosocial consultation, and the 9-8-8 line answers at all hours for people in suicidal crisis or worried about someone close to them. Acupuncture can take its place within a complementary approach; it replaces neither assessment nor appropriate psychological or psychiatric care.

Booking an appointment

Would you like to discuss your sleep, your level of tension or another reason for consultation as part of an individualized approach? You can book a first acupuncture treatment at the MonAcupuncteur clinic, in the Plateau-Mont-Royal. In the clinic: acupuncture and insomnia and acupuncture, stress and anxiety.

The traditional notions presented here draw notably on the Huangdi Neijing (Suwen, chapters 8, 10 and 39; Lingshu, chapters 8 and 43), on the Jingui Yaolüe for the ancient description of Mei He Qi, as well as on the physiology and psychic semiology resources of the clinic’s clinical corpus.

Please note — This article presents a traditional model for educational purposes, with no promise of results and no equivalence with a biomedical or psychiatric diagnosis.

In the Plateau-Mont-Royal, open 7 days a week. Acupuncturists · OAQ members, physiotherapist · OPPQ member. Insurance receipts issued on site.Our content follows a published editorial methodology.