The Soul’s Logical Life  Paid

Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology

by Wolfgang Giegerich (Author)
©2008, Monographs, 282 Pages
Science, Society & Culture

SOFTCOVER

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C. G. Jung’s psychology was based on an authentic notion of soul, but this notion was only intuitive, implicit, not conceptually worked out. His followers forfeit his heritage, often turning psychology either into pop psychology or into a scientific, clinical enterprise. It is the merit of James Hillman’s archetypal psychology to have brought back the question of soul to psychology. But as imaginal psychology it cannot truly overcome psychology’s positivistic, personalistic bias that it set out to overcome. Its «Gods» can be shown to be virtual-reality type gods because it avoids the question of Truth. Through what logically is the movement of an «absolute-negative interiorization», alchemically a «fermenting corruption», and mythologically a Dionysian dismemberment, one has to go beyond the imaginal to a notion of soul as logical life, logical movement. Only then can psychology be freed from its positivism and cease being a subdivision of anthropology, and can the notion of soul be logically released from its attachment to the notion of the human being.
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Copyright Information
Contents
Preface
1. “No Admission!” The Entrance into Psychology and the Style of Psychological Discourse
a) The “who” of psychological discourse
b) The “how” of psychological discourse
c) The “what” of psychological discourse
2. Why JUNG?
a) The Notion of soul
b) The thinker
c) Implicit vs. explicit thought
d) The name, “JUNG,” as abbreviation for a body of thought
e) The advantage of implicit thought
3. JUNG: Rootedness in the Notion
a) The cat that is not a cat
b) From fiery liquid lava to crystallized stone.
c) Sublated science, sublated religion, sublated medicine
d) Facing “the whole”
e) The question of the age, the great riddle, the burden of the mind
4. Jungians: Immunity to the Notion and the Forfeit Heritage
a) Polemic against the general state of affairs in today’s conventional Jungianism
b) The Notionless conception of psychology
1. The miscellaneous aggregation of observations and ideas
2. Neutralization
3. The “eccentricity” of one’s standpoint
4. The eclecticistic fantasy of completeness
5. Archetypal Psychology or: Critique of the Imaginal Approach
a) The idea of “the human being who has such and such a consciousness”
b) Four presuppositions of truly psychological myth interpretation
1. The “allegorical” presupposition of myth interpretation
2. Excursus: Domesticated wilderness and pre-existence
3. The “tautological” presupposition of myth interpretation
4. Excursus: Is psychology the account we give of the soul’s life or the account we give of “people’s psychologies”?
5. The presupposition of the “self-sufficiency” of myths and fantasy images.
6. The presupposition of the difference between the “subjective” and the “objective” (“archetypal”) meaning of mythical images
c) Dissociation
d) Empty duplication
e) Imaginal psychology as ego-psychology
f) Excursus: Alchemy’s opus contra imaginationem
1. The negated and reflected image
2. The artifex: awareness of the subjectivity and the logical dimension of psychological reality
3. The compelling drive for an end-result
4. The chemistry of matter
5. The sought-for substances as the projected logical form.
6. Psychologism: JUNG’s regressive interpretation of alchemy
7. The mystification of the alchemical mystery
g) The inherent duplicity of the imaginal
h) “Likeness”: the false sense of continuity
1. Myth, the Gods or: abstract forms
2. Our afflictions or: psychological antiques
3. The relation of “resemblances” or: “the simple act of matching”
i) The “middle ground” or: stop-gap and hideout
j) Sublating psychology versus re-visioning psychology
6. Actaion and Artemis: The Pictorial Representation of the Notion and the (Psycho-) Logical Interpretation of the Myth
First determination: The hunter or: intentionality towards the Other
Second determination: The primal forest or: self-exposure to Otherness
Fourth determination: The epiphany of naked Artemis or: the revelation of the Other’s innermost truth
Third determination: The identity of kill and epiphany or: comprehending the Other
Fifth determination: Transformation or: comprehending one’s identity with the Other (= having been comprehended by the Other)
Sixth determination: Dismemberment or: the dissolution of Self (hunter) and Other (game) into Otherness as such (the Notion of the hunt/psychology)
7. Concluding Questions
References
Index
Pages:
282
Year:
2008
ISBN (PAPERBACK):
9783631806630 (Active)
ISBN (PAPERBACK):
9783631569719 (Active)
ISBN (EPUB):
9783631809426 (Active)
ISBN (PDF):
9783631809419 (Active)
Language:
English
Published:
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2008. 282 pp.
The Author: Wolfgang Giegerich is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice near Munich. He has lectured internationally and is author of numerous books.

«... the most important Jungian book since James Hillman’s ‘Re-Visioning Psychology’». (Michael V. Adams in ‘The Round Table Review’)

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