Wolfgang Giegerich (1998) The Soul's Logical Life. Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology.

1. "No Admission!" The Entrance into Psychology and the Style of Psychological Discourse 13

a) The "who" of psychological discourse 17
b) The "how" of psychological discourse 25
c) The "what" of psychological discourse 32

a) The Notion of soul 39
b) The thinker 43
c) Implicit vs. explicit thought 45
d) The name, "Jung," as abbreviation for a body of thought 50
e) The advantage of implicit thought 52

a) The cat that is not a cat 55
b) From fiery liquid lava to crystallized stone 60
c) Sublated science, sublated religion, sublated medicine 66
d) Facing "the whole" 72
e) The question of the age, the great riddle, the burden of the mind 74

a) Polemic against the general state of affairs in todays conventional Jungianism 81
b) The Notionless conception of psychology 87
1. The miscellaneous aggregation of observations and ideas 87
2. Neutralization 90
3. The "eccentricity" of one's standpoint 94
4. The eclecticistic fantasy of completeness 97

a) The idea of "the human being who has such and such a consciousness" 107
b) Four presuppositions of truly psychological myth interpretation 109
1. The "allegorical" presupposition of myth interpretation 109
2. Excursus: Domesticated wilderness and pre-existence 115
3. The "tautological" presupposition of myth interpretation 119
4. Excursus: Is psychology the account we give of the soul's life or the account
we give of "people's psychologies"? 123
5. The presupposition of the "self-sufficiency" of myths and fantasy images 126
and the "objective" ("archetypal") meaning of mythic
6. The presupposition of the difference between the "subjective" and the "objective" ("archetypal") meaning of mythical images 126
c) Dissociation 129
d) Empty duplication 130
e) Imaginal psychology as ego-psychology 131
f) Excursus: Alchemy's opus contra imaginationem 134
1. The negated and reflected image 134
2. The artifex: awareness of the subjectivity and the logical dimension of psychological reality 135
3. The compelling drive for an end-result 139
4. The chemistry of matter 141
5. The sought-for substances as the projected logical form 146
6. Psychologism: Jung's regressive interpretation of alchemy 150
7. The mystification of the alchemical mystery 157
g) The inherent duplicity of the imaginal 161
h) "Likeness": the false sense of continuity 165
1. Myth, the Gods or: abstract forms 166
2. Our afflictions or: psychological antiques 172
3. The relation of "resemblances" or: "the simple act of matching" 182
i) The "middle ground" or: stop-gap and hideout 187
j) Sublating psychology versus re-visioning psychology 191

First determination: The hunter or: intentionality towards the Other 204
Second determination: The primal forest or: self-exposure to Otherness 205
Third determination: The identity of kill and epiphany or: comprehending the Other 232
Fourth determination: The epiphany of naked Artemis or: the revelation of the Other's innermost truth 207
Fifth determination: Transformation or: comprehending one's identity with the Other
(= having been comprehended by the Other) 246
Sixth determination: Dismemberment or: the dissolution of Self (hunter) and Other (game)
into Otherness as such (the Notion of the hunt/psychology) 255

7. Concluding Questions 277

References 279

Wolfgang Giegerich (1998) The Soul's Logical Life. Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology.

In writing the present book, I am following the procedure of this young man. This book has a twofold objective. It tries to prepare the way for a rigorous notion of psychology and at the same time it makes a case for the (perhaps surprising) idea that the soul's life is at bottom logical life. As the close relation of "notion" and "logic" may indicate, what appears to be two separate purposes is really only two sides of one single objective. In this century, the psyche has above all been understood as sexual libido, as desire, emotion, feeling, and so on. There has also been the idea that soul is image. The thesis propounded here, that the soul is at bottom logical life or thought, is immediately open to all sorts of misunderstandings and feeling-toned prejudices. It is the purpose of this book to elucidate how this thesis has to be understood. May it suffice at this point, in this preface, to give the reader the probably baffling hint that it is the thesis of the soul as logical life that can at long last redeem the promise of alchemical psychology and do justice to the Dionysian as a psychological concept.

Our time in history and the incredible problems that we face are such that we cannot afford not to advance to the insight that the innermost nature of soul is logical (is thought) and not to advance to a rigorous notion of psychology. As C.G. Jung said, the real problem will be from now on until a dim future a psychological one,⁽²⁾ a statement that makes only sense if psychology is comprehended to be a discipline of thought proper, and if the illusion is overcome that its actual subject matter ought to be no more than what is going on inside people...

In making a way for the realization of this twofold project, I throw my spear far ahead from where I am. I boldly make assertions and set up standards without worrying for the time being about whether I can match them myself or will ever be able to match them. If psychology is to leave the cozy confines of its present home and move out and reach the real world of the soul, there is probably no other way than to work with such literal "projections." But as I showed in a paper years ago,⁽³⁾ projections exist for the purpose of running or jumping after them in order to catch up with them. Just as when building a house the blueprint comes first, so here the projection comes first; it is only the first half of the whole project (and this book is intended to be no more than this first half). Only then does the question arise whether I am, or any reader is, able to master the second half, too, by backing the projection up and filling it with real life. The answer to this question falls outside the scope of this book.

It follows from the nature of my project that I sometimes have to level severe criticisms at the address of present psychology. To pull the stay-at-home, psychology, away from the home in which it seems to have taken roots, it has to be relentlessly confronted with its faults. But I beg the reader to take note that my charges do not have the form of "all psychologists do this or that." I am not talking about individual psychologists and not about all of them collectively. I am exposing and discussing a poor or false kind of psychology, in order to be able to develop the notion of a better kind of psychology. All criticism, therefore, is directed on the notional, not personal, level against certain conceptions and general ways of looking at things, or against what one might call an "ideal type" (in the sense of Max Weber) of bad psychology. The question of who in fact thinks this way (or how many do) is of no interest here. And even where I cite specific names of psychological authors, they are used only by way of concrete example for a certain type of thinking, and in order to help psychology to come into its own by pushing off from this inadequate type of thinking. They are not in themselves a target. With statements about "the psychologists," "the Jungians" etc. I do of course not claim to know what every member of the respective group thinks or does. This form of sentence is about general trends that can indeed be observed, but any psychologist, any reader must decide for himself if, and possibly how, he has any part in this trend or not.

For the young man in the saga, things were straightforward. He was the stay-at-home and he had to move out into the world. Starting point and goal, home and world, were unambiguous opposites. Psychology is in a much more complicated situation. To be sure, I called psychology a stay-at-home, too. But it is a stay-at-home precisely because it has not come home to itself. It prefers to stay in exile, feeling truly at home in the very alienation from itself. However, this does not mean that its task would simply be a movement in the opposite direction, from the world out there to its home. Psychology is that weird discipline that as the stay-at-home that it is has to move out into the world and come in touch with the reality of life, but for whom the very move out has to take the form of an unconditional interiorization into itself; and for whom this interiorization has to amount to a full-fledged move to the reality of life, and not be merely a withdrawal into a literal interiority. Psychology has to live with and within these contradictions. They are both its plight and its distinction, and it will be the task of the following discourse to find a way into them.

The course of my reflections proceeds in concentric circles, as it were. The first chapter raises the question of the relation between everyday consciousness and psychological consciousness. How can one get from the one to the other? The second chapter tries to show why it has to be, more or less exclusively, Jung from among all the many important psychologists of this century and all the various psychological schools that must be the base and starting point for our search for a rigorous notion of psychology. What follows in the next three chapters is a critical assessment of first Jungs, then conventional Jungianisms and finally archetypal psychologys relevance for a strict notion of psychology. It will turn out that these three stages mentioned cannot be thought of in terms of a linear ascent from a base via an intermediate state to a summit. Rather, the state-of-affairs of conventional Jungianism seems to be a regression far behind the achievement of Jung, while archetypal psychology is again a great advance, but is nonetheless in need of a radical criticism (with respect to its imaginal bias). To arrive at a rigorous concept of psychology we have to go beyond the imaginal. The last main chapter is devoted to the exposition of the Notion of psychology (or at least an outline of such) by means of an extensive analysis of one particular myth, the story of Actaion and Artemis.

1. Grönländer und Färinger Geschichten, Thule, vol. 13, Düsseldorf 1965, p. 143. I became aware of this episode from Heino Gehrts, "Vom Wesen des Speeres," in: Hestia 1984/85, Bonn (Bouvier) 1985, pp. 71-103, esp. p. 73 with note 7 on p. 100.
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2. C.G. Jung, Letters 2, p. 498, to Werner Bruecher, 12 April 1959.
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3. W. Giegerich, "Der Sprung nach dem Wurf. Über das Einholen der Projektion und den Ursprung der Psychologie," in: GORGO 1/1979, pp. 49-71.
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Wolfgang Giegerich (1998) The Soul's Logical Life. Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology.

Wolfgang Giegerich (1998) The Soul's Logical Life. Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology.

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