A review of What Is Soul? by Wolfgang Giegerich

Journal of Analytical Psychology 2015, 2015

Barreto’s paper,‘ Requiem for analytical psychology’ utilized Jung’s dreams and visions to argue for the obsolescence of Jungian psychology. Its thesis rested upon the theoretical assumptions of Giegerich’s psychology as a Discipline of Interiority, which he and Giegerich claim are themselves based in Jung’s psychology. Here I argue that that claim is misplaced because it depends upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Jung’s psychological project. I shall further argue that Giegerich’s arguments for a Jungian basis to his psychology rely upon misreadings and decontextualisations of Jung’s original texts. Finally, I shall attempt to draw attention to the weaknesses and contradictions involved in Barreto’s interpretations of Jung’s dreams and visions.

The Journal of analytical psychology, 2016

This paper represents an archetypal and deconstructive reading of the work of Wolfgang Giegerich. In an attempt to extend and philosophically develop Jung's late-life view of the objective psyche, Giegerich, via Hegel, defines psychology proper as fundamentally separate from the everyday person and the 'human, all-too-human' aspects of the soul. It is argued that, in so doing, Giegerich removes the human person from being the primary focus of his psychology and creates instead a hierarchy of ideas and values privileging syntax over semantics, the logical over the empirical, and thinking over imagination. This bypasses the emotionality of the everyday person/patient and also renders psychology proper unable to address the day-to-day practice of the analyst. Giegerich attempts to rectify this problem by re-incorporating what he had previously rejected, making his theory more complex than is apparent in his binary oppositions. In the end, however, it remains a question to w...

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015

This paper responds to a recent paper by Wolfgang Giegerich entitled "Two Jungs: apropos a paper by Mark Saban". Giegerich disputes my assertion that the "rigorous notion" at the heart of his psychology "finds no source in Jung's psychology, implicit or explicit". In order to do this he posits the existence of two Jungs, an exoteric Jung and an esoteric Jung. The implications of Giegerich's binary scission of Jung are explored in this paper, and show that the tendency to exalt one Jung while disparaging the other betrays a comprehensive blindness toward the contradictory complexity of Jung's psychology as a whole. It is suggested that this blindness is the consequence of Giegerich's systematic prioritization of a neo-Hegelian agenda that is in profound conflict with the telos of Jung's psychology.

2010

The reciprocal interpretation of body and world is, for me, 'the primal psychoanalytical insight'. It is here that our elusive psyche discovers itself, seized by surprise that what is, is. But the whole point of this reciprocal interpretation is that it assumes no order of priority as between body and world. Neither comes first. The insight, the discovery, the surprise depend on this. (Holt 1992: 180) Jung's psychology is founded on the idea of the reality of the psyche. However, it is not always easy to grasp what Jung means by 'psyche'. Although Jung sometimes writes as if psyche were more or less equivalent to 'mind', generally he seems to want to convey something other than this, something deeper and broader. For example Jung writes extensively about the spiritual dimension of psyche, which he describes metaphorically as the ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum (Jung 1947: par. 414). However, there has been less attention paid, either by Jung or his followers, to what he pictures as the infrared pole-where psyche merges with matter. Most of the work that has been done in this area has taken the form of speculation about analogies between Jung's psychology and the scientific disciplines of modern physics, ethology or, most recently, neuroscience. Interesting though such avenues of inquiry may be, they, on the whole, fail to maintain a psychological perspective on their subject matter. The task is to maintain contact with the materiality of our experience, without losing touch with what we might call its lived psychological dimension. This is not easy, because it comes up hard against the conceptual and linguistic limits of our culture. It is a task that is nonetheless urgent, given the increasing gulf between what we experience as our 'inner' lives and our outer circumstances, a gulf that has serious consequences in ecological, social and political arenas. Hitherto Jungian (or indeed wider psychoanalytic) discourse has, with a few notable exceptions, had little to offer in these areas, beyond the repetition of the mantra that we transform the world by transforming the

One of the most intricate topics that are still open in connection to a Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung is religion and related issues: What is the relation between religion and psychology? What is Jung's personal stance? Did Jung reject religion as a relict of primitive way of thinking or did he try to replace religion with psychology? Some speculations drawing primarily from Jung's imagery and symbolism revealed in Liber Novus put forward the claim that he even aspired to found a new religion. This paper will attempt to square Jung's attitude to religion, mainly Christianity. I will point out the main ideas of his psychology of religion. I will follow the evolution of particular ideas related to religion starting with his early works right through to his last.

2019

The thesis falls into two parts. The first examines Jung’s two personalities, as described in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The argument is that Jung’s experience of the dynamic between the two personalities informs basic principles behind, first the development of Jung’s psychological model and second Jung’s entire mature psychology. It is suggested that what Jung took from this experience was the principle that psychological health required the avoidance of one-sidedness, achieved through the dynamic of the two personalities. This dynamic was thus central to Jung’s notion of individuation. In short, this required the individual to bring any one-sided position into tension with a conflicting ‘opposite’ position, in order that a third position could be achieved which transcended both of the earlier positions. The second part of the thesis utilises the conclusions of the first section to bring an internal critique to bear on Jung’s analytical psychology as enshrined in t...

A paper delivered at the inaugural conference of the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority (ISPDI) in Berlin July 2012. After a lengthy and animated online debate (in the online Forum of the ISPDI), on September 19th 2012 Giegerich published (on the website of the ISPDI) a thirty five page rebuttal of my position(s). This paper is available to non-members and may be found at http://ispdi.org/images/stories/PDFdocuments/Saban's%20Alternative.n.pdf In the wake of this, several people have privately asked me if they could read my original paper. Here it is. Those interested in further developments might also like to read an article by Sean McGrath, published in June 2013 in the International Journal for Jungian Studies, entitled ‘The question concerning metaphysics: a Schellingian intervention in analytical psychology’