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THE NEUROSIS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich
The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich makes the work of one
of archetypal psychology’s most brilliant theorists available in one place. A
practicing Jungian analyst and a long-time contributor to the field, Giegerich
is renowned for his dedication to the substance of Jungian thought and for his
unparalleled ability to think it through with both rigor and speculative strength.
The product of over three decades of critical reflection, Giegerich’s English
papers are collected in six volumes: The Neurosis of Psychology (Vol. I).
Technology and the Soul (Vol. 2), Soul-Violence (Vol. 3), and The Soul Always
Thinks (Vol. 4), The Flight into the Unconscious (Vol. 5), and Dreaming the
Myth Onwards (Vol. 6).

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-

Collected- English-Papers-of-Wolfgang-Giegerich/book-series/CEPWG

Titles in this series:

The Neurosis of Psychology: Primary Papers Towards a Critical Psychology
(Volume 1)
Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web
(Volume 2)
Soul-Violence (Volume 3)
The Soul Always Thinks (Volume 4)
The Flight into the Unconscious: An Analysis of C. G. Jung’s Psychology Project
(Volume 5)
“Dreaming the Myth Onwards”: C. G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel
(Volume 6)
THE NEUROSIS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
PRIMARY PAPERS TOWARDS
A CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY

COLLECTED ENGLISH PAPERS

VOLUME ONE

WOLFGANG GIEGERICH
 First published 2005 by Spring Journal Books

Published 2020 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2020 Wolfgang Giegerich

The right of Wolfgang Giegerich to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-48534-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-48535-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-04152-8 (ebk)
 Contents

Acknowledgments .......................................................................... vii

Sources and Abbreviations ............................................................. ix
Foreword ....................................................................................... xi
Introduction ................................................................................ 1

CHAPTER ONE: Ontogeny vs. Phylogeny? A Fundamental

Critique of E. Neumann’s Analytical Psychology ................. 19
CHAPTER TWO: On the Neurosis of Psychology or
the Third of the Two ............................................................. 41
CHAPTER THREE: The Leap After the Throw: On
‘Catching up With’ Projections and on the Origin
of Psychology ........................................................................ 69
CHAPTER FOUR: No Alibi! Comments on ‘The
Autonomous Psyche. A Communication to Goodheart
from the Bi-Personal Field of Paul Kugler and James
Hillman’ ................................................................................ 97
CHAPTER FIVE: The Present as Dimension of the Soul:
‘Actual Conflict’ and Archetypal Psychology ........................ 103
CHAPTER SIX: The Provenance of C. G. Jung’s
Psychological Findings .......................................................... 119
CHAPTER SEVEN: Jungian Psychology: A Baseless
Enterprise. Reflections on Our Identity as
Jungians ................................................................................. 153
CHAPTER EIGHT: Jung’s Thought of the Self in the Light
of Its Underlying Experiences ............................................... 171
CHAPTER NINE: The Question of Jung’s ‘Anti-Semitism’:
Postscript to Cocks ................................................................ 191

CHAPTER TEN: Hospitality Toward the Gods in an

Ungodly Age: Philemon – Faust – Jung ............................... 197
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Rupture, or: Psychology and
Religion ................................................................................. 219
CHAPTER TWELVE: Deliverance from the Stream of
Events: Okeanos and the Circulation of the Blood .............. 233
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Lesson of the Mask ................... 257

Index ............................................................................................. 263

 Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of the following chapters have been published previously:

Chapter 1 as “Ontogeny = Phylogeny? A Fundamental Critique of E. Neumann’s
Analytical Psychology” in Spring 1975, pp. 110-129.
Chapter 2 in a slightly shorter version as “On the Neurosis of Psychology or The
Third of the Two” in Spring 1977, pp. 153-174.
Chapter 4 as “Comments on ‘The Autonomous Psyche. A Communication to
Goodheart from the Bi-Personal Field of Paul Kugler and James Hillman’” in Spring
1985, pp. 172-174.

Chapter 7 as “Jungian Psychology: A Baseless Enterprise. Reflections on Our Identity

as Jungians” in Harvest 33, 1987-88, pp. 91-103.
Chapter 9 as “The Question of Jung’s ‘Anti-Semitism’: Postscript to Cocks” in Spring
1979, pp. 228-231.

Chapter 10 as “Hospitality Toward the Gods in an Ungodly Age: Philemon – Faust

– Jung” in Spring 1984, pp. 61-75.
Chapter 11 as “Rupture, or: Psychology and Religion” in Zen Buddhism Today,
Annual Report of the Kyoto Zen Symposium, No. 6, November 1988, Kyoto, Japan
(The Kyoto Seminar for Religious Philosophy), pp. 39-49.
Chapter 12 as “Deliverance from the Stream of Events: Okeanos and the Circulation
of the Blood” in Sulfur (A Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art) 21 (Winter 1988),
pp. 118-140;

Chapter 13 as “The Lesson of the Mask” in Sulfur 45/46, Spring 2000, pp. 109–
113.

The following chapters were newly translated from German for this volume:
Chapter 3, “The Leap After the Throw: On ‘Catching up With’ Projections and on
the Origin of Psychology,” first published in 1979 as “Der Sprung nach dem Wurf.
Über das Einholen der Projektion und den Ursprung der Psychologie” in GORGO
1/1979, pp. 49-71.
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 5, “The Present as Dimension of the Soul: ‘Actual Conflict’ and Archetypal
Psychology,” first published in 1978 as “Die Gegenwart als Dimension der Seele—
Aktualkonflikt und archetypische Psychotherapie” in Analyt. Psychol. 9 (1978), pp.
99-110.

Chapter 6, “The Provenance of C. G. Jung’s Psychological Findings,” first published

in 1984 as “Die Herkunft der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse C. G. Jungs” in
GORGO 7/JG. 4 (1984), pp. 1-31.
Chapter 8, “Jung’s Thought of the Self in the Light of Its Underlying Experiences,”
first appeared in a Japanese translation (2001) in W. Giegerich, “Shinwa to Ishiki”
(Yungu Shinrigaku no Tenkai [Gîgerihhi Ronshû], 3) translated and edited by Toshio
Kawai, Tokyo (Nihon Hyôron-sha) 2001.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for James Hillman’s
great support of my work during my early years as a writer in the field of Jungian
studies. I also wish to thank him and Clayton Eshleman for providing space for my
articles in their respective journals (Spring; Sulfur). And a special thank you to Greg
Mogenson as editor for intelligent, smooth, and productive collaboration.

W. G.
 Sources and Abbreviations

For the most frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations

have been used:

Briefe: Jung, C. G. Briefe. 3 vols. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Olten and Freiburg
im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1972-73.

CW: Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read,

Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and WIlliam McGuire.
Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957-1979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted,
by paragraph number.

GW: Jung, C. G. Gesammelte Werke. Zürich and Stuttgart (Rascher)

now Olten and Freiburg i:Br: Walter-Verlag, 1958 ff.

Letters: Jung, C. G.Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series

XCV: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

MDR: Jung, C. G.Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed. Ed. Aniela

Jaffé. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage
Books, 1965. Cited by page number.

O&H: Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1954.
 Foreword

T he critical thinker, dedicated in his commitment to a particular

school of thought, will be heartened, perhaps even inspired and
guided, by the felicitous phrase, traditionally attributed to Aristotle,
“I love Plato, but I love the truth more.” This certainly can be said of
the author of the papers collected in these volumes. Once lauded by
James Hillman as the person doing “the most important Jungian thought
now going on,”1 Wolfgang Giegerich has for more than three decades
dedicated himself to what he has called “thinking the Jungian myth
onwards.”2 A lover of Jung’s psychology, especially on account of what
he has praised as its authentic notion of soul,3 Giegerich has at the
same time been compelled by an even greater regard for truth to
become its most exacting critic. Sometimes, as Giegerich has told me,
this task has proven as difficult as “cutting into [his] own flesh.” 4
Seminal thoughts of Jung’s, in which he as a Jungian analyst has had
a personal stake, have had to be rigorously interrogated. But this is as
it must be, for only as Jung’s psychology is reflected into itself in the
light of its internal contradictions can its vaporized essence be
alchemically distilled and the elixir within it found.
Now it is important to emphasis that the truth that is to be loved
more than Plato, Jung, or any other thinker is not a truth imported
from outside. As what Giegerich calls “the discipline of interiority,”
psychology works strictly by means of the application of the theory
in question or matter at hand to itself. Eschewing external touchstones
(i.e., the validity standards of other disciplines), a psychology that is

1
James Hillman, “Once More into the Fray: A Response to Wolfgang Giegerich’s
‘Killings’,” Spring 56 (1994), p. 1.
2
Wolfgang Giegerich, “The ‘Patriarchal Neglect of the Feminine Principle’: A
Psychological Fallacy in Jungian Theory,” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies 45.1 (1999),
p. 7.
3
Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 39-43.
4
Personal communication, October 20, 2000.
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD

truly psychological in its form and approach proceeds by means of

internal reflection, immanent critique, reading Plato in terms of Plato,
Jung in terms of Jung—dreams, symptoms, and other phenomena in
terms of themselves as well.
Clearly, the contrast that sets off psychology as just described from
scientifically-conceived approaches that operate in terms of the idea
of objectivity and external verification could not be stronger. And
further to this it could be said that from the former’s point of view,
scientific psychology is to be adjudged as having been set up from the
outset in terms of a fallacy. Committed to an external form of reflection,
scientific approaches assign the epithet “inner” to such phenomena
as images, emotions, and memories, while continuing naively to view
these as if they were simply out there in front of consciousness,
unadulterated and pure.
But how then, if not by science, are we to proceed? How can
psychology get to interiority or “the soul” from within itself, right from
the start?
Working by means of what is known in philosophy as
transcendental deduction, Kant launched his critical philosophy by
asking how the mind must be constituted for it to be possible for us
to have the kinds of experience that we do. Psychology, working with
a more colloquial form of the same style of argumentation, asks similar
questions with respect to its ideas, its theories.
Examples are legion, there being no particular kind of
phenomenon that psychology has to be about. As we have already
indicated, all that is required is that the subject matter, whatever that
may be, is taken subjectively or hermeneutically in terms of itself.
Humming a few bars of this music brings a fanciful series of
colloquially expressed, transcendental-deduction-type questions to
mind.
What does psychology’s having formulated the ideas that it has
say about its conception of itself? And how do the scales stand in their
balance when each is weighed against itself as against a feather? Is
there a remainder left over when the math is done? Something extra
that must now be accounted for through subsequent acts of reflection?
The review in the journal, we may ask more specifically, has it a hefty
enough handle for the blade that it wields? The procedure we have
invented, the operation we have performed, can these still to be rated
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD xiii

a success given that the patient died? And the smoke of this cigar even,
is it as weighty in its own new way as the Havana that first gave it off?
“Never forget,” advised Jung, “that in psychology the means by
which you judge the psyche is the psyche itself.”5
A few sentences from Hegel, the philosopher most referenced by
Giegerich, may be cited here. The first of these merely expresses the
logical form of the questions we have just asked: “… in what
consciousness within its own self designates as the An sich or the true,
[in this] we have the standard by which consciousness itself proposes
to measure its knowledge.”6 The second helps us to understand, with
Hegel and Giegerich, that reflection, far from needing to be rejected
when it does not measure up to itself, must think its contradictions
on a whole new level, transforming itself thereby: “… [T]he Absolute
[as the sublated form of the contradictions that have given rise to it]
is … the identity of identity and non-identity, opposition and unity
are both in it.”7
In the papers that follow, topics as diverse as Neumann’s fanciful
history of consciousness, analytical psychology’s theory of projection,
Jung’s thought of the self, and the question of a Jungian identity are
reflexively applied to themselves in the manner just described. The
upshot of this is that in each case the topic under consideration ceases
to be a mere subject matter of psychology. While certainly remaining
this on one level, each becomes, by virtue of its having been reflected
into itself, an illuminating commentary with respect to the greater
question of how a psychology that can think on its own authority, out
of the depth of its own notion, constitutes itself. As Giegerich has
expressed this, “What at first appears as a content of consciousness [e.g.,
the aforementioned topics of psychology] is in truth the seed of what
wants to be a new form of consciousness at large.”8
The account that I have just given of the reflexive movement that
is at play in this first volume of Giegerich’s Collected English Papers
applies as well across all four. Indeed, as the reader will discover as he

5
CW 18, § 277.
6
Cited in Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
p. 135.
7
Cited in Taylor, Hegel, p. 67.
8
Wolfgang Giegerich, “Is the Soul ‘Deep?’—Entering and Following the Logical
Movement in Heraclitus’ ‘Fragment 45’” Spring 64 (Fall/Winter, 1998), p. 19.
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD

or she takes up Technology and the Soul (Vol. 2), Soul-Violence (Vol. 3),
and The Soul Always Thinks (Vol. 4) in their turn, the new form of
psychological consciousness that began as a seed with the title paper
of the present volume, “The Neurosis of Psychology,” comes
increasingly to the fore.
We started with an adage from Aristotle about his love of truth
being greater than his love of Plato. This we then extended to Jung.
Turning now to Giegerich’s papers, we may restate this adage again,
this time with psychology as the subject. Usually, psychology is taken
to be identical with the things to which it is applied, that is, to psychic
phenomena of various kinds. The difference between such phenomena
in their positivity and the logic of psychology as negativity (or reflection
into itself ) is not recognized, not drawn. Instead, we have a
proliferation of different psychologies. The problem here, as Giegerich
has pointed out, is that each of these so-called psychologies proceeds
as if psychology could simply be found out there in the objects it
empirically observes. Such naiveté, however, drastically shortchanges
Jung’s crucial insight that all experience is psychically mediated such
that no phenomenon, whether “inner” or “outer,” is immediately
observable apart from the constitution of consciousness itself.
Returning to this insight (even hoisting Jung upon it at times, as upon
his own petard), Giegerich has shown that it is precisely because all
phenomena are reflected from the outset that the question of their logic,
the question of their truth, arises. We cannot, as Giegerich has argued,
simply have psychology— “just like that”—in the form of the
phenomenal topics that interest us, but only as, in the case of each of
these, and through critique of each one’s seeming immediacy, we come
to love truth more.
If there is a thread through the labyrinthine turns of Giegerich’s
Collected English Papers, it is to be found in our recognition that
Giegerich’s most important contribution to psychology resides in his
having rigorously thought psychology through in terms of the
“psychological difference” that I have just described. Taking this thread
up now in our turn, may we, as lovers of this phenomenon or that
psychology, yet learn with Giegerich that a truly psychological
psychology can be founded only through our loving the truth more.
Greg Mogenson
 Introduction

T here have been many designations for the psychology established

by C. G. Jung and continued, in one form or another, by the so-
called Jungians: “Jungian psychology,” “analytical psychology,”
“complex psychology,” “archetypal psychology.” Jung also sometimes
referred to his psychology, without giving this phrase the status of an
official name and without explicitly indicating that he meant his own
psychology, as “the modern psychology of the unconscious.” But he
could also speak of “my critical psychology.”1 Again, this is more a
description than a name. But for reasons that I will briefly expound
here, “critical psychology” might be a good candidate.
The last phrase I quoted is from the year 1957 . But “critical
psychology” occurs in Jung’s writings already much earlier, at least in
the early thirties, e.g., in his “Foreword to the Argentine Edition”
(1934) of Psychological Types2 and in a letter to Wolfgang Kranefeldt
from 1933 . 3 In the earlier use of the phrase it refers to a rather
straightforward idea, as Jung’s explanation shows: “a critical psychology
dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes
that can be shown to be typical,”4 “a critical apparatus for the sifting
of the empirical material.”5 The straightforwardness of the thinking
prevailing in these quotations lies in the fact that there is here a clear
distinction between the typology as a tool (“apparatus”) on the one
hand, and the material or object to which this tool can be applied, on
the other. The fact that Jung here rejects, or reduces to secondary
importance, the “characterological diagnosis of the patient” in favor

1
C. G. Jung, Letters 2, p. 378, to Bernhard Lang, June 1957.
2
CW 6, page xv.
3
Letter to Kranefeldt of October 24, 1933 (Jung Papers, Wissenschaftshistorische
Sammlungen, ETH Zürich), cited in Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern
Psychology: The Dream of a Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.
86 .
4
CW 6, page xv.
5
See note 3 above.
2 INTRODUCTION

of the typification “of psychological occurrences” does not really change

the clear separation of instrument here, and material critically “sifted,”
“organized,” and “delimited” by means of it there.
Jung’s earliest reflections that led into his later typology had served,
however, the purpose of making conscious the problem of the “personal
equation.” The origin of his typology around 1913 and earlier had been
the wish to explain psychologically the basic theoretical differences
between the Freudian “eros” perspective and the Adlerian “power”
perspective on psychological processes, which for Jung could not be
resolved by declaring the one to be true and the other false. The idea
of basic attitudinal types, types of psychic movement (extraversion
versus introversion), seemed to offer an explanation. What is interesting
in this context is that this idea broke through the linear opposition of
psychologist (student of the psychic processes) vis-à-vis the psychic
processes and began to approach a circular conception of the relation
between psychologist and psychological reality: the psychic movement
of the libido was not only at work out there in the patient, but also in
the analyst, and not separately (or the one after the other), but rather
in such a way that precisely while the psychologist observed the psychic
processes in the patient, he was himself subject to psychic processes,
so that his explanations were just as much a psychic phenomenon as
that which they were supposed to explain. It is one and the same
psychological life that appears on both sides.
In the early days Jung did not yet fully realize the momentous
consequences of this seminal insight of his for the basic constitution
of psychology. But over the years the decisive difference between
psychology and the natural sciences impressed itself upon him. It
dawned on him that in psychology it was the soul itself that had to
recognize the soul. This insight found its clearest and most systematic
expression in Jung’s late essay, “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1954,
earlier version 1946). There we read,
[Psychology] lacks the immense advantage of an Archimedean
point such as physics enjoys. … The psyche … observes itself
and can only translate the psychic back into the psychic. … There
is no medium for psychology to reflect itself in: it can only
portray itself in itself, and describe itself. … [In describing
psychic occurrences] [w]e have not removed ourselves in
scientific regards to a plane in any way above or besides the
INTRODUCTION 3

psychic process, let alone translated it into another medium. (CW

8 § 421, transl. modif.)
… [P]sychology inevitably merges with the psychic process itself.
It can no longer be distinguished from the latter, and so turns
into it. … [I]t is not, in the deeper sense, an explanation of this
process, for no explanation of the psychic can be anything other
than the living process of the psyche itself. Psychology has to
sublate itself as a science and therein precisely it reaches its
scientific goal. Every other science has a point outside of itself;
not so psychology, whose object is the very subject that produces
all science. (§ 429, transl. modif.)

Soul is self-reflection, self-relation, and psychology (psychological

explanations or descriptions) is one of the ways in which the soul
reflects itself. The opposition basic to the sciences of subject and object,
theory and nature, does not exist in and for psychology. Psychology
cannot be a science. It is in itself and from the outset sublated science,
in itself sublated ‘scientific’ psychology. The clear distinction between
psychology and its subject-matter, the soul, cannot be maintained:
psychology is itself soul and soul is interpretation of itself (psychology).
Both soul and psychology follow a “uroboric” logic.
While it is one of the greatest merits of Jung’s psychology to have
advanced to this insight, it is deplorable that Jung viewed the situation
of psychology, which he analyzed correctly, negatively as a “tragic
thing” (§ 421) and felt that psychology therefore finds itself “in an
unfortunate situation” (§ 429, transl. modif.). This negative assessment
is what is in my view “the tragic thing” about Jung himself.6 As far as
I can see, his unspoken and express ideal remained the idea of a
psychology as an objective science and of the psychologist as the neutral
observer of the psyche as a fact of nature (for even in the very passage
that contains his amazing insight it is explicitly “in comparison with
the other natural sciences” that psychology finds itself in the said
unfortunate situation).
So he had only the resigned realization that—sadly—this ideal
could on principle not become real. He did not measure up to his

6
Cf. however Letters 2, p. 567 (to Bennet, 23 June 1960), where Jung says concerning
the fact that “in contradistiction to all others” [sc. other sciences] psychology “tries to
understand itself by itself”: “a great disadvantage in one way and an equally great
prerogative in the other!”
4 INTRODUCTION

own insight. He saw it correctly, he presented us with those

statements that truly overcome what we might call the prevailing
positivism of the conventional scientific mind, but he perceived and
evaluated them from below, from the old positivistic standpoint as
his standard and measure. He did not let go of the very expectations
and that value system that his own insights surpassed and shattered.
His perspective, or better, the logical form of his consciousness, did
not accommodate to the semantic content that his consciousness
entertained. The revolutionary insight was restricted to the
“semantics” of consciousness, while consciousness’s “syntax” remained
unaffected. Jung envisioned a grand conception from afar, but did
not take the additional step of entering it, of applying it to his own
mind-set or to the logical constitution of psychology. His was and
remained an external reflection (äußere or äußerliche Reflektion) about
psychology, while the message of this external reflection was that psychology
is internal or immanent reflection.
More than that, Jung was also not able to hail this situation of
psychology (the way he described it) as the distinction and privilege
of psychology, and as its singular opportunity. Far from being
psychology’s tragic handicap, the inevitable self-reflective character of
psychology is actually something like its Promised Land. Only if its
character would have been consciously embraced by psychology would
it have come home to itself, would it have logically been united with
the soul and in this way, and only in this way, become truly
psychological. Its alienation or exile from its home, the land of the
soul, and from its subject-matter, the life of the soul, would have ended.
But Jung did not rise to the level required by his own insight, on which
he could have appreciated that this complex, involved structure of self-
reflection both betrays and requires a higher status of consciousness;
that it is indicative of the conquest of a higher degree of logical
refinement of the mind and a significant cultural advance beyond the
naive innocence of the stance of immediacy for which there is an
unambiguous separation of theory here and fact there.
Incredible as it is, as late as in 1954 he even openly declared the
nonpsychic as the standard and measure for the psychic. “If we are
to engage in fundamental reflections about the nature of the psychic,
we need [!] an Archimedean point which alone makes a judgment
possible. This can only be the nonpsychic …” (CW 8 § 437). A clear
INTRODUCTION 5

confession on his part to external reflection as the basis of psychology

in all fundamental matters and to an ultimately “positivistic” stance.
When it is a question of the nature of the psychic itself, then all of
a sudden the psychic does no longer have “everything it needs within
itself.”7 Rather, Jung suggests that you have to have left psychology
and taken your position outside the psyche—become
unpsychological—to become able to understand the nature of the
psyche. He gives a reason for his view in the continuation of the
quoted sentence: “… for, as a living phenomenon, the psychic lies
embedded in something that appears to be of a nonpsychic nature.
Although we perceive the latter as a psychic datum only, there are
sufficient reasons for believing in its objective reality.” The ordinary,
everyday world-experience of the ego is assumed to be decisive. This
experience is what Jung here makes his basis. While empirically and
semantically the whole world is, as Jung stresses again and again,
embedded in the psyche and we are inescapably surrounded by the
psyche on all sides (which is even confirmed once more also in this
very quote: “a psychic datum only”), logically, epistemically, and
syntactically it is the other way around for him. Jung (at least here)
does not want psychology to take its own medicine, that medicine
which is, e.g., expressed in his warning (concerning the individual
psychological phenomenon), “Above all, don’t let anything from
outside, that does not belong, get into it …”8 He does not want
psychology to go under in its own interiority in order to find the
deepest “truth” about itself exclusively within itself and through its
own self-reflection.
However, he is able to rescue it from its own interiority only by
means of a dissociation. The (alchemical) “Immersion in the Bath” is,
as it were, reserved for the experiencing individual in the practice of
psychology (analysis), but refused when it comes to “fundamental
reflections” on the part of psychological theory, i.e., when it is a
question of the logical form of psychology itself.
This inability of Jung’s to see the basic situation of psychology
described and lamented by him, namely that it does not have an
Archimedean point, as a fundamental step forward on the part of the

7
CW 14, § 740.
8
Ibid.
6 INTRODUCTION

soul is, by the way, one of the reasons why he needed vehemently and,
as it were, “instinctively”9 to reject Hegel.10
But be that as it may, despite these shortcomings, Jung did
bequeath to us the precious insight into the mutual entwinement of
psychological observation and observed psychic phenomenology and
the inextricable immersion of psychology as a theoretical discipline
in that which this discipline is about, namely the soul’s life. Psychology
does not have the soul’s life neatly in front of itself as a positivity, a
natural given. It is from the outset itself an expression of this life, so
that it has the life of the soul at once in front of itself and behind its
back, as its a posteriori and its a priori. This is what it means to say
that the soul is self-reflection. The self-reflective character of the soul
has the consequence that the soul’s life on principle cannot be a self­
same (thing-like) object for psychology, a ‘fact.’ The soul is in this sense
not to be comprehended as a piece of nature, nor in ontological terms
(in terms of being: as an entity, a substance). It is essentially mental,
noetic, logical.11 It is not an immediate, but in itself an already reflected
reality. There is not first a soul as an existing entity that then also
happens to reflect itself as one of its activities. “The soul” is self-
reflection and nothing else: it is interpretation and what it is the
interpretation of is itself interpretation. We could express it this way:
the real occurrence of such self-reflection, the event that a “uroboric”
logic has become explicit, is what we call, with a still mythologizing
and substantiating name, “the soul.” And because “soul” and
“psychology” are only two different moments of the same in the sense
of the unity of the unity and difference of psychology and soul,
psychology is likewise not a theory about or interpretation of certain
straightforward (immediate) natural facts or events. Having a self-
reflective structure, it is the interpretation of interpretations (views,
theories) of reality. When I said that psychology cannot be a science,

9
Out of a strong affect and without any sufficient knowledge of Hegel, as he himself explicitly
confessed.
10
On Jung and Hegel see my article “Jung’s Betrayal of his Truth: The Adoption of a Kant­
based Empiricism and the Rejection of Hegel’s Speculative Thought,” in Harvest: Journal for Jungian
Studies, vol. 44, no.1, 1998, pp. 46-64.
11
‘Logical’ in this discourse means ‘of logos-nature.’ It does of course in no way
want to suggest that the soul always conforms to the formal laws of correct reasoning
(logic in the instrumental, technical sense). It is not a reference to the special
philosophical discipline called formal logic. It is much closer to the (however imaginal)
alchemical concept ‘mercurial.’
INTRODUCTION 7

I meant that it cannot operate with the fiction that it has its object
directly vis-à-vis itself and that this object is what it is, independent
of its (psychology’s) interpretations.
Through these considerations based on Jung’s later insights our
notion of “critical psychology” has become much more complex and
deeper. A critical psychology in this sense implies a psychology that
tries to get to and hold itself on the level of the uroboric logic briefly
described. It remains of course to us to draw from Jung’s insight the
necessary consequences that he could not fully draw for himself. What
was and remained for him an envisioned content of his thinking in
front of consciousness has to become for us the very basis as well as the
intrinsic logical form of our psychological thinking itself. And the
papers collected in this volume have for the most part the purpose of
preparing the ground for such a conception of psychology or even
showing it in action.
But if these papers are on the way to a “critical psychology,”
‘critical’ can also entail the more ordinary meaning, in our case a caustic
criticism in the sense of “trying the spirits,” whether they are in
accordance with the developed constitution of psychology or not.
There is such a tremendous simplification at work in Jungian
psychology as practiced by Jungians. Far from having drawn the
consequences from the significant insight gained by Jung about the
self-reflective character of soul and psychology, it has usually even fallen
behind this insight and operates naively with the idea of a psychological
reality as an immediate given, with its belief in the soul as a natural
fact, with symbols and archetypes as objective entities, etc. (A marked
exception is Archetypal Psychology, established by James Hillman,
with, for example, its ideas of psychology as soul-making, of the fiction
of case histories, of the poetic basis of mind, and of the archetypal
perspectives governing our viewing of and thinking about
psychological material. Here one sees a self-reflective structure at work.)
What generally rules is a stance characterized by immediacy and
positivity, by objectivistic, naturalistic, and personalistic thinking,
which is absolutely incompatible with a psychology that has become
aware of itself. Even where those insights of Jung’s are quoted, they
are usually only paid lip-service to and have no feedback effect
whatsoever on the constitution of psychology and the actual mentality
of the psychologist, which stay immune.
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