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.

This book is about the practice of working with dreams. Rather than presenting a general theory about dreams, it focuses on the dream as phenomenon and raises the question how we must look at dreams if our approach is supposed to be a truly psychological one. So far most essays on, and the practice of, Jungian dream interpretation have paradoxically centered around the person of the dreamer and not around the dream itself. Dreams were used as a means to understand the analysand and what is going on in him or her. Jung's fundamental shift from his earlier person-based psychology and pre-alchemy stance to his mature soul-based psychology, informed by the hermetic logic of alchemy, has not been followed, which was already noted by Jung himself: "My later and more important work (as it seems to me) is still left untouched in its primordial obscurity." The present study is based decidedly on the stance of mature Jung and his very different views about dreams. His most crucial insights in this regard include that in dreams the soul speaks about itself (not about the dreamer), that the dream is its own interpretation and therefore needs to be circumambulated (rather than translated into the language of psychology and everyday life), and that dream images have everything they need within themselves (rather than needing associations from the dreamer's daily life). This book discusses in detail what all this means in practice and what it demands of the psychologist. A decisive transposition away from ordinary consciousness, a "crossing to the other side of the river," is required of the consciousness that wants to approach dreams psychologically. Numerous aspects of dreams and special questions that come up in working with dreams are discussed. At the end of this book our working with dreams is situated in the wider question of the psychological task in general by exploring Jung's insistence that psychology has to transcend the "consulting room," Hillman's move "From mirror to window" and, in Plato's parable, the revolutionary move out of, and return to, "the cave." While limited to the topic of dreams this book may also serve as an indirect introduction to an understanding of psychology as a "psychology with soul" (Jung) or as the discipline of interiority.

This first volume of The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich takes its title from Giegerich's ground-breaking paper, On the Neurosis of Psychology, or The Third of the Two, originally published in Spring Journal in 1977. The third referred to in the title is psychology itself as the theory in which the two, patient and analyst, are contained as they engage with one another in the analytic process. By applying to psychology itself the ideas that analytical psychology draws upon when thinking about the patient, Giegerich establishes the basis for a psychology that defines itself as the discipline of interiority. Topics include Neumann's history of consciousness, Jung's thought of the self, the question of a Jungian identity, projection, the origin of psychology, and more.

This book is about the practice of working with dreams. Rather than presenting a general theory about dreams, it focuses on the dream as phenomenon and raises the question how we must look at dreams if our approach is supposed to be a truly psychological one. So far most essays on, and the practice of, Jungian dream interpretation have paradoxically centered around the person of the dreamer and not around the dream itself. Dreams were used as a means to understand the analysand and what is going on in him or her. Jung's fundamental shift from his earlier person-based psychology and pre-alchemy stance to his mature soul-based psychology, informed by the hermetic logic of alchemy, has not been followed, which was already noted by Jung himself: "My later and more important work (as it seems to me) is still left untouched in its primordial obscurity." The present study is based decidedly on the stance of mature Jung and his very different views about dreams. His most crucial insights in this regard include that in dreams the soul speaks about itself (not about the dreamer), that the dream is its own interpretation and therefore needs to be circumambulated (rather than translated into the language of psychology and everyday life), and that dream images have everything they need within themselves (rather than needing associations from the dreamer's daily life). This book discusses in detail what all this means in practice and what it demands of the psychologist. A decisive transposition away from ordinary consciousness, a "crossing to the other side of the river," is required of the consciousness that wants to approach dreams psychologically. Numerous aspects of dreams and special questions that come up in working with dreams are discussed. At the end of this book our working with dreams is situated in the wider question of the psychological task in general by exploring Jung's insistence that psychology has to transcend the "consulting room," Hillman's move "From mirror to window" and, in Plato's parable, the revolutionary move out of, and return to, "the cave." While limited to the topic of dreams this book may also serve as an indirect introduction to an understanding of psychology as a "psychology with soul" (Jung) or as the discipline of interiority.

"All steps forward in the improvement of the human psyche have been paid for by blood." Further to this statement from C. G. Jung, Wolfgang Giegerich's third volume of Collected English Papers shows that the soul is not merely the innocent recipient or victim of violence: it also produces itself through violent deeds and expresses itself through violent acts. Beginning in primordial times with the ritual spilling of blood in animal and human sacrifice, a light was kindled within the darkness of what would otherwise have been mere biological existence, the light of consciousness, mindedness, and "the soul." And following upon this, in the clearance thus created, the soul attained new statuses of itself on the historic battlefields of war and revolution. First-order killings gave way to second-order killings, the killings of metaphysics and philosophy. Turning around upon itself (even as it violently engaged those adversarial others through whom its self-relation was mediated) the soul learned to self-critically cut into itself. It was in this way, as the inwardness of the blood that was paid out for it, that psychology emerged. Topics include ritual slaughter as primordial soul-making, shadow integration and the rise of psychology, blood-brotherhood and blood-revenge, the alchemy of history, Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," child sacrifice, Islamic terrorism, and the animus as negation with special reference to Bluebeard.

C. G. Jung famously declared that it is not the psyche that is in us, but rather we who are in the psyche. Updating this insight, the second volume of Wolfgang Giegerich's Collected English Papers examines what must be regarded as the most all-encompassing presence of our lives today: technological civilization. Living within technology, we now find that what we had formerly regarded as psychological phenomena-our feelings and emotions, images and dreams-have been superseded by phenomena bearing the predicates "artificial," "manufactured," and "virtual." Television, the World Wide Web, and the nuclear bomb are cases in point. Far from being mere things among things, each of these has transformed the whole of man's world-relation. Though deplored by many as soulless on this account, these phenomena, it may be argued, are the real gods, the real archetypes, of the soul today. Psychologically it is not what we think and feel about them that counts, but what they think, what they feel.

C. G. Jung regarded the soul to be a reality in its own right which reflects itself in all manner of images and events. symbols and traditions. In this fourth volume of his Collected English Papers, Giegerich recalls the soul to the inwardness of its own home territory by bringing out the thought-character of the self-creating, self-unfolding logical life that it is. In addition to clarifying what thought means for psychology and analyzing certain misconceptions surrounding the topic of "soul and thought" a challenging thesis concerning the limitation of an imaginal, "anima-only" approach in psychology (given the essential historicity of the soul) is carefully argued, while examining at the same time such topics as "the end of meaning and the birth of man," "anima mundi and time", "the metamorphosis of the gods," and the logical steps involved in the transition from childhood to adulthood and from a psychological oneness with nature to modern alienation from nature. The book also discusses the notion of the soul's logical life and shows in action the psychological procedure of "absolute-negative interiorization" of phenomena into their soul and truth in a number of in-depth examinations of particular phenomena (e.g. Heraclitus' dictum about the soul's depth, the "leap into the solid stone," the negativity of the "stone which is not a stone"). In thorough-going critical engagements with other authors in the field, it demonstrates specific instances where psychology fails to do its job due to faulty presuppositions, above all psychology's failure to face the modern world. It emphasizes the active role of the mind in soul-making as the making of psychic reality. It addresses the questions of the future of psychology and whether progress in psychology is possible.

Psychological analysis usually sets its sights upon the patient or upon cultural phenomena such as myths, literature, or works of art. The essays in this volume, by contrast, have another addressee, another subject matter: psychology itself. Deeply informed by Jung's insight regarding the discipline's lack of an objective vantage point outside and beyond the psyche, their Jungian author again and again turns Jung's contribution to psychology around upon itself in the spirit of an immanent critique. Cutting to the quick, the question is put: in its constitution as psychology is Jungian psychology up to the level of what its insight into psychology's lack of an Archimedean point would require? Are the interpretations it gives of its various subject matters-alchemy, religion, the unconscious and the rest-matched by its interpretation of itself? Has its meeting itself in them had consequences for itself, consequences in terms of the fathoming of its own truth? Or clinging to the standpoint of empirical observer, did it ultimately demur with regards to the question of their truth and its own - this despite Jung's having characterized his work as an opus divinum? Topics include Jung's psychology project as a response to the condition of the world, the "smuggling" inherent in the logic of "the unconscious," the closure and setting free dialectic of alchemy and psychology, the blindness to logical form problematic, the faultiness of the opposition "Individual" and "Collective", Jung's communion fiasco, his thinking the thought of not-thinking, the veracity of his Red Book, the disenchantment complex, and, as indicated in the title of this volume, Jung's psychology project as a counter-speculative "flight into the unconscious."

The fundamental importance of Christianity for Jung is well documented in his writings and letters. For the whole of his long career the great psychologist had wrestled with what he called " ... the great snake of the centuries. the burden of the human mind. the problem of Christianity." By comparison, his statements about Hegel are quite scarce. Both topics, nevertheless, have in common that they elicited from Jung radical accusations, accusations not presented in the calm tone of a psychological scholar but fired by a deep-seated personal affect that propelled Jung to wish "to dream the myth onwards," that is, to move to a new, his own improved and corrected version of Christianity. Rather than merely portraying and elucidating Jung's views, this volume critically examines his theses and arguments by means of a series of close readings and by confronting his claims with the texts on which his interpretations are based. The guiding principle, in the spirit of which the author's investigation is conducted, is the question of the needs of the soul and the standards of true psychology. While constantly bearing these needs and standards in mind, diverse topics are discussed in depth: Jung's interpretation of a dream he had had about being unable to completely bow down before "the highest presence," his thesis concerning the patriarchal neglect of the feminine principle, his views about the alleged one-sidedness of Christianity, the "recalcitrant Fourth" and the "reality of Evil," his understanding of the Trinity and the spirit, his rejection of Hegel and of speculative thought, and his reaction to the modern "doubt that has killed" religious faith. A companion to the preceding volume, The Flight into the Unconscious, the essays collected here continue its radical critique of Jung's psychology project, yielding not only deep insights into Jung's personal religiosity and into what ultimately drove his psychology project as a whole, but granting as well a more sophisticated understanding of the psychological potential and telos of the Christian idea.

Serves as the most accessible introduction to Giegerich's approach to psychology for the first-time reader of his work. Presented in a unique conversational style.

C. G. Jung famously declared that it is not the psyche that is in us, but rather we who are in the psyche. Updating this insight, the second volume of Wolfgang Giegerich's Collected English Papers examines what must be regarded as the most all-encompassing presence of our lives today: technological civilization. Living within technology, we now find that what we had formerly regarded as psychological phenomena-our feelings and emotions, images and dreams-have been superseded by phenomena bearing the predicates "artificial," "manufactured," and "virtual." Television, the World Wide Web, and the nuclear bomb are cases in point. Far from being mere things among things, each of these has transformed the whole of man's world-relation. Though deplored by many as soulless on this account, these phenomena, it may be argued, are the real gods, the real archetypes, of the soul today. Psychologically it is not what we think and feel about them that counts, but what they think, what they feel.

The fundamental importance of Christianity for Jung is well documented in his writings and letters. For the whole of his long career the great psychologist had wrestled with what he called " ... the great snake of the centuries. the burden of the human mind. the problem of Christianity." By comparison, his statements about Hegel are quite scarce. Both topics, nevertheless, have in common that they elicited from Jung radical accusations, accusations not presented in the calm tone of a psychological scholar but fired by a deep-seated personal affect that propelled Jung to wish "to dream the myth onwards," that is, to move to a new, his own improved and corrected version of Christianity. Rather than merely portraying and elucidating Jung's views, this volume critically examines his theses and arguments by means of a series of close readings and by confronting his claims with the texts on which his interpretations are based. The guiding principle, in the spirit of which the author's investigation is conducted, is the question of the needs of the soul and the standards of true psychology. While constantly bearing these needs and standards in mind, diverse topics are discussed in depth: Jung's interpretation of a dream he had had about being unable to completely bow down before "the highest presence," his thesis concerning the patriarchal neglect of the feminine principle, his views about the alleged one-sidedness of Christianity, the "recalcitrant Fourth" and the "reality of Evil," his understanding of the Trinity and the spirit, his rejection of Hegel and of speculative thought, and his reaction to the modern "doubt that has killed" religious faith. A companion to the preceding volume, The Flight into the Unconscious, the essays collected here continue its radical critique of Jung's psychology project, yielding not only deep insights into Jung's personal religiosity and into what ultimately drove his psychology project as a whole, but granting as well a more sophisticated understanding of the psychological potential and telos of the Christian idea.

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.

Accessible introduction to Giegerich's work. Takes up the Jungian commitment to a psychology with soul. Combines philosophy and analytical psychology in assessing the concept of 'soul'.

Giegerich's most clinically relevant work. Interdisciplinary, covering intersection of analytical psychology, the history of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Accessible introduction to Giegerich's work. Takes up the Jungian commitment to a psychology with soul. Combines philosophy and analytical psychology in assessing the concept of 'soul'.

Giegerich's most clinically relevant work. Interdisciplinary, covering intersection of analytical psychology, the history of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Serves as the most accessible introduction to Giegerich's approach to psychology for the first-time reader of his work. Presented in a unique conversational style.