Returning to track the Soul of the thing

A Little Light, to Be Carried Through Night and Storm Comments on the State of Jungian Psychology Today Wolfgang Giegerich (Wörthsee near Münich) The century of psychology is over. The great expectations have been shattered that the emergence of psychology, in particular therapeutic or depth psychology, had given rise to at the beginning of the 20th century. Even Freudian psychoanalysis today is faced with a hostile spirit inmainstrean1 thinking. For psychology in the tradition of C.G. Jung the situation is, on the one hand, a little easier, but on the other much more difficult. It is easier because for the most part it operates leeward of other psychologies, hardly being taken note of; it is more difficult because its innermost substance is fundamentally threatened.  This threat comes from different directions. It is, firstly, already inherent in the very way Jungian psychology itself is construed. Inasmuch as Jung's high claim that his psychology was in the status of a strictly empirical science has proven untenable, and as his hope that psychology might provide an answer to the psychological-spiritual predicament of the age failed, as we are now forced to understand (W. Giegerich, "The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man" Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004). The threat to the substance of Jungian psychology comes, secondly, also from the adherents and friends of this psychology, all the one hand from the professional Jungians under whose hands it has been turned into something completely different from what Jung himself intended with his 'complex psychology,' as above all Sonu Shamdasani has demonstrated (Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, Cambridge University Press, 2003). No one is likely to want to say that what Jung had struggled with is still alive among them and has fruitfully been further developed by them.  Still today one would probably concur with Hillman when he stated years ago that the Jungians "really are mostly second rate people with third rate minds" (Hillman, Inter Views, New York [Harper & Row] 1983, p. 36).  Jungian psychology has the misfortune not to have been able to attract great minds, in contrast, e.g., to Freud's psychology, which produced a psychologist like Lacan and was able to inspire many philosophers and poets. On the other hand, the threat comes also from the adherents of Jungian psychology in the wider public, among whom Jung's work degenerated into "pop psychology," in other words into a commodity, which has above all the function of satisfying private ideological-spiritual and emotional needs and thus of compensating for a feeling of lack. Recently the threat comes, thirdly, from outside, from the Zeitgeist, which with tremendous power pervades the political climate, indeed even affects legislation and administrative regulations.  Depth psychology, which would actually have the task of being, in a certain way, "subversive” with respect to the prevailing collective trends, has meanwhile been taken under the state's wings, controlled and thus "pocketed" by it.  Whereas the state legitimately approaches what it has to regulate from purely external viewpoints, in the case of psychology comprehended as the discipline of interiority, such treatment from an external perspective is fatal.  All the more fatal inasmuch as today this external way of looking at things has become hardened and much more radical: an abstract, completely utilitarian, scientistic, technicistic, quantifying approach. What is essentially wanted today is standardization (enforced conformity, i.e., Gleichschaltung) and control. The supreme guiding principle is that of the distribution of the available money.  A few keywords for this powerful tendency are: certification of practices, quality management, mandated standard treatment procedures for specific illnesses, efficiency, evaluation, evidence-based medicine. ICD-10, provision of health care for the population. This is the one aspect. The other is that the prevailing attitude bases all its hope on biological factors, brain physiology, genetics, behavior therapy, but excludes the mind, the soul, hermeneutics. In this situation Jungian psychology, as a psychology "with soul," finds itself in a position like that in which the dream ego found itself in the following dream of Jung's: “It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a might wind. […] I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment.  Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. [...]" (Memories Dreams Reflections. pp. 87f..). But what is that substance that in fact is still left of our Jungian heritage and that today needs to be carried through night and storm as a little light?  Apart from numerous individual insights, it is a twofold treasure, something that carries a tension between its two aspects within itself: Jung's gift to us of a concept of "soul” and of a concept of “individuality.” After Jung's death Karl Kerényi wrote. "If I now, looking back upon the phenomenon C.G. Jung, put into words what was most characteristic about him, also on the basis of personal contacts during the last twenty years, then it is taking the soul for real.  For no psychologist of our time, the psyche possessed such a concreteness and importance as for him" (K., Wege und Weggenossen, vol. 2, München [Langen Müller] 1988, p. 346, my transl.). The decisive point here is what is meant by "soul."  A marginal comment on this passage by Kerényi himself makes this clear.  Quoting sentences from a letter of his to C.J. Burckhardt of December 18, 1961, he states, "Jung wrote me [...] citing an alchemist, ‘maior autem animae [pars] extra corpus est' and he really meant it.  He stands out as the only one among his colleagues—at least I have not found a second one among the not confessionally bound psychologists—who firmly believed in the existence of the soul" (ibid., p. 487, my transl.).  The greater part of the soul is outside the body.  With this thesis Jung breaks through the anthropological, biologistic, personalistic prejudice that as a matter of course and without the least critical reflection prevails in, probably, all psychology today.  Man is with “soul,” not the other way around.  "The soul" is a real Universal, and a concrete Universal at that.  Now the door is opened up to the insight that it is logical life, the spiritus rector of man's world relation.  This entails two important additional aspects, namely insight into the essential historical character of "the soul" and into the fact that it is not merely concerned with functionality and mechanisms (reactions, processing of experience, the psychic apparatus), but also with substantial contents or meanings—a fact that is of course in greatest opposition to the nihilistic presupposition of probably all other psychology.  Above all, this concept of soul means that it has been comprehended that the subject matter of psychology cannot be positivized, but is logically negative. It may seem paradoxical, but is in truth consistent, that precisely because he has a concept of “soul” as a real Universal and as something that cannot be positivized, Jung is able to have real knowledge of true individuality in its singularity and uniqueness.  Both sides (the Universal and the individual) are interdependent, since they both stand on this side of the prevailing abstractness, for which even what is individual is subsumed under an abstract Universal (under a diagnosis, a theory, a definition., a "case report," a statistic, a technique to be applied to it, or merely under the abstract universal concept “individual”), for which however, it must not be individuum ineffabile and must not be apperceived as such.  Because if it were seen as such, it would escape from the (today sublimated) concentration camp of a thinking in terms of control that rules over the entire logic of our age.  But this is precisely what the Jungian approach demands of us in therapy: to meet each person, indeed each moment, in its singularity, in other words, outside of that concentration camp; to release ourselves, without logical safety nets, into the freshness and newness of each present moment and into the atomic subjectivity of our-selves—in order to discover in it, only in it, our true universal humanness. This is not a lofty program for the illumination of the world, but a little light that is to be carried, in the silence and unseenness of what we as individuals do, through the night of our present. Wolfgang Giegerich 2004. All rights reserved.