Wolfgang Giegerich

Wolfgang Giegerich, born in 1942, is a German Jungian analyst with extensive clinical experience. He has authored numerous books and articles on depth psychology since the mid-1970s. Giegerich pursued his academic studies in Germany and the United States, earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He practiced in Stuttgart and near Munich before relocating to Berlin. His career includes significant engagement with the Eranos conferences and visiting professorships at Kyoto University. He also taught at Rutgers University and has lectured internationally. Giegerich's work encompasses approximately 200 publications, including fourteen books, and he continues to write and teach, focusing on the publication of his collected English papers. He is known for his critical approach to conventional psychology, advocating for a focus on the 'soul' rather than individual psychology.

Giegerich conceptualizes psychology as the 'discipline of interiority,' emphasizing the internal dimension of phenomena themselves. Unlike traditional approaches that might privilege specific content like dreams or myths, Giegerich's perspective requires that any phenomenon be viewed psychologically, as an expression of the soul, and assessed for its inherent truth. This approach involves a deep engagement with the phenomenon's own internal logic, encouraging a commitment to understanding its meaning without imposing external biases or personal valuations. The core idea is to let the phenomena 'think themselves out' through a rigorous examination of their inherent structures and movements.

Central to Giegerich's thought is the concept of the 'soul,' which he uses interchangeably with Jung's 'objective psyche.' He prefers 'soul' for its richer historical and philosophical connotations. This concept refers not to an individual's psychological makeup, but to the collective structures of thought and cultural categories that shape a given historical period. For Giegerich, the soul is the true subject of psychology, distinct from 'personalistic psychology' which focuses on individuals. The human being, in this view, is merely the vessel through which the soul manifests, with the world serving as the stage for human activity. This perspective necessitates a shift in focus from the individual person to the soul as the primary object of psychological inquiry.

Giegerich's methodology involves a dispassionate observation of phenomena, allowing their inherent 'thoughts' to unfold through a process akin to Hegelian dialectic. This involves examining a phenomenon through a series of affirmations and negations, a process he terms 'dialectical analysis.' This hermeneutic internalization allows for a deeper penetration into the phenomenon's logical structure, defining psychology as the 'discipline of interiority.' In clinical practice, the soul emerges as 'the third person of psychotherapy,' possessing an autonomous reality. It encompasses the world of complexes, archetypal images, and collective consciousness, representing psychology itself in its broadest sense, including its pathology, therapy, and Weltanschauung.

Giegerich's work has garnered significant attention, with James Hillman calling it 'the most important Jungian thought now going on.' However, Hillman also identified several 'fallacies' in Giegerich's writings. Within the Jungian community, criticisms often center on an overemphasis on intellect, an opaque writing style, and difficulties in applying his theories to clinical practice. Some critics argue that Giegerich dismisses the role of emotion, conflating it with Jung's 'feeling' function and advocating for a detachment that could lead to a lack of emotional awareness. While Giegerich has addressed some criticisms, debate continues regarding the practical implications and theoretical underpinnings of his work.

“There is no such thing as a soul that produces psychological phenomena. The phenomena have nothing behind them. They have everything they need within themselves, even their own origin, their author or subject. ‘The soul’ in my parlance thus does not refer to something real outside of, distinct from, and in addition to psychological phenomenology, but is no more than a still mythologizing, personifying, façon de parler, an expression for the inner soul quality, depth, and internal infinity, of the phenomena themselves as well as for their internal ‘teleology’.”

“For a true psychology, only the soul, which is certainly undemonstrable, merely ‘metaphorical’ and for this reason a seeming nothing, can be the ‘substrate’ and subject of the phenomena. The human being is then their object; he or she is nothing but the place where soul shows itself, just like the world is the place where man shows himself and becomes active. We therefore must shift our standpoint away from ‘the human person’ to the ‘soul.’ ... I am talking of a shift of our standpoint, perspective, or the idea in terms of which we study, just as before, the concrete experience of individuals or peoples.”

“To do psychology, you have to have abstracted from your own thinking, to become able to dispassionately hear what the phenomena are saying and to let the thoughts as which they exist think themselves out, no matter where they will take you and without your butting in with your personal valuations and interests.”

“[the soul] is no longer to be imagined as the individual property of each of the two other persons [in the consulting room, analyst and patient], but must be given independent reality. It is the world of complexes and archetypal images, of views and styles of consciousness, and thus it is also psychology itself, in the widest sense of the word, including all our ideas about the soul, its pathology and therapy, as well as our Weltanschauung.”