Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority

"The Psychological Difference" in the Work of Wolfgang Giegerich

Jennifer M. Sandoval, John C. Knapp, Jennifer M. Sandoval, John C. Knapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138120785
• eBook ISBN: 9781317309840
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority is the first collection of essays dedicated to the study and application of Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority—a new 'wave' within Analytical Psychology which pushes off from the work of C. G. Jung and James Hillman. The book reflects upon the notion of psychology developed by German psychoanalyst Wolfgang Giegerich, whose Hegelian turn sheds light on the notion of soul, or psyche, and its inner logic and 'thought', forming a radical new basis from which to ground a modern psychology with soul.

The book's theme - 'the psychological difference' - is applied to topics including analytical theory, clinical practice, and contemporary issues, ranging from C. G. Jung's Mysterium, to case studies, to the nuclear bomb and the Shoah. Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority expounds upon the complexity, depth, and innovativeness of Giegerich's thought, reflecting the various ways in which international scholars have creatively explored a speculative psychology founded upon the notion of soul. The contributors here include clinical psychologists, Jungian analysts, and international scholars.

With a new chapter by Wolfgang Giegerich and a foreword by David Miller, Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority will be essential reading for depth and clinical psychologists, Jungian psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and academics and students of post-Jungian studies. It is also relevant reading for all those interested in the history of philosophical thought and what it means to think in the highly sophisticated and technological world of the twenty-first century.

PART I

“The psychological difference” in theory

1

“Geist” or: What gives Jungian psychology its absolute uniqueness and is the source of its true life

Wolfgang Giegerich

At the end of his chapter on Sigmund Freud in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung states

It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality. On the contrary, it plays a large part in my psychology as an essential—though not the sole—expression of psychic wholeness. But my main concern has been to investigate, over and above its personal significance and biological function, its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus to explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp.¹

He adds by way of corroboration that the works in which his thoughts on this subject are contained are “The Psychology of the Transference”² and the Mysterium Coniunctionis,³ both studies of his late period. A difficulty posed for us by this quote lies in the translation. By saying this I do not refer to the inaccuracies or mistakes it contains, because in this particular case they do not really change the basic meaning that Jung wants to convey. The serious problem is caused by the translation, “ihre geistige Seite” as “its spiritual aspect”. Although not a mistake (“geistig” is really untranslatable), it is nevertheless misleading. We encounter the same problem a few pages earlier in the same chapter where Jung discusses Freud’s attitude toward sexuality in more detail. I quote only the following passage:

Although, for Freud, sexuality was undoubtedly a numinosum, his terminology and theory seemed to define it exclusively as a biological function. It was only the emotionality with which he spoke of it that revealed the deeper elements reverberating within him. Basically, he wanted to teach—or so at least it seemed to me—that, regarded from within, sexuality included spirituality and had an intrinsic meaning. But his concretistic terminology was too narrow to express this idea.⁴

Jung’s text reads, “daß, von innen her betrachtet, Sexualität auch Geistigkeit umfasse, oder Sinn enthalte” (that regarded from within, sexuality also comprehends Geistigkeit, or contains meaning). “It comprehends Geistigkeit” is equivalent to “its geistig side” (“side”, rather than “aspect”) in the first quote. “Spirituality” does not capture the particular meaning of Geistigkeit. Both “spiritual” in the former quote and “spirituality” in the latter are a stopgap solution for the rendering of a not really translatable word. This is not merely a translation problem and not only locally relevant for these particular passages about sexuality. What Jung says here illustrates, by way of this one example of sexuality, his general approach and “main concern”. The understanding of Jung’s entire psychology is at stake.

1 Difference

Before we turn to the question of what Jung’s words geistig and Geistigkeit mean and what precise aspect of the reality of sexuality is Jung’s foremost focus according to his statement, his statement’s logical form alone tells us that Jung operates here with a crucial distinction: between Freud and himself. Already in 1929 he had written about the “opposition” between the two, about “The Freud–Jung Antithesis”.⁵ We do well to comprehend such conceptions as more than merely descriptive historical accounts. Other than historians, as psychologists we are on principle not interested in facts as such; just as in dreams we do not comprehend the figures in them (e.g., the dreamer’s mother or father, the figure of family doctor, his girl friend) on the “object level” as the people they are outside the dream, in external social reality, but rather as personifications of the dreamer’s or the soul’s own different internal tendencies or “voices”, so we can also conceive of the figure of “Freud” in Jung’s autobiographical narrative as an internal other.⁶ As much as this text is ostensibly about Freud and Jung and the difference between them, the difference has its ground not simply in Jung’s empirical observation of facts “out there”.

We are all the more justified in reading the text in this way because Jung himself prefaced his Memories, Dreams, Reflections as a whole with the express comment that “I have now undertaken … to tell the myth of my life. I can however … only ‘tell stories.’ Whether they are true is not the problem. The only question is whether it is my fable, my truth”.⁷ Jung conceives his autobiographical narrative not as factual historical account, but as the self-display and unfolding, in story form, of the inner logic of his life, his life.

By the same token, when Jung ostensibly shows in these passages what “his main concern” is, we have to understand that in a deeper sense he describes psychology’s “main concern” (as he sees it). By referring to the contrast between “Freud” and “Jung” his topic is of course his deepest needs as psychologist (rather than as private personality) and that means the essential theoretical needs of psychology itself. The personal names are abbreviations for different conceptions of the ultimate task and purpose of psychology. And the fact that “this main concern” needs to be articulated by means of the “Freud”–“Jung” antithesis in our passages has the function of suggesting that psychology’s “main concern” can only be described as a fundamental contrast to its (internal) Other. Psychology constitutes itself by pushing off from its one (the “Freud”) side, because only in this way can it come truly into its own, to its “main concern”. It establishes, and operates with, a fundamental difference. This difference (here exemplified by the Freud–Jung opposition) is indispensable for psychology—for a psychology in the tradition of C. G. Jung, a “psychology with soul”—and because it is indispensable (indeed its constitutive principle), we call it the psychological difference.

Freud too knew and worked with opposites, e.g., conscious—unconscious, eros—thanatos, etc. But for intrinsic reasons his psychology did not need to be set off against Jung’s (or any other psychology) in order to push off from it and come home to itself, the way Jung’s psychology within itself pushed off from Freudian psychoanalysis and furthermore from consulting room and personalistic psychology as such. Freud’s psychology was not structured by and did not operate with the psychological difference. The opposites just mentioned are pairs on the same level, alternatives, even mutually exclusive. Each side of any of those pairs of opposites is defined as simply being what the other side is not. Of course, Freud had in a certain sense also pushed off from the previous types of psychology that did not work with the concept of the unconscious. He established his mode of dream interpretation clearly in contrast to former traditional ideas about dreams. However, this kind of “pushing off” was something very different because the earlier theories remained external to and logically irrelevant for psychoanalysis. The latter did not need them in order to come into its own by pushing off from them as from its own internal other. Similarly, Alfred Adler did not need a “Freud–Adler” antithesis for his thought’s coming into its own, although literally he, too, had developed his psychology in open contrast to Freud.

The psychological difference that we discover at work in Jung’s cited passages is characterized by a completely different form of relation between the opposites and a different form of pushing off. Jung’s psychology has within itself the fantasy of being the negation of the Freudian position and this fantasy is, so to speak, its foundation myth. We see this logic of negation also in another instance of the psychological difference in Jung, namely in his crucial distinction between the “personal” and the “collective” unconscious. His psychology does not simply reject (what Jung sees as) the Freudian “personal unconscious”. In order to be able to believe in the “collective unconscious” and the Geistigkeit of sexuality Jung does not deny or simply turn his back on the “biological function” and “personal significance” side of sexuality exclusively seen by (Jung’s) “Freud”. No, both “Freudian” tenets are fully confirmed and accepted by Jung’s psychology and even interiorized into it as referring to an integral part of the complete reality of the human psyche. In other words, there is not a splitting them off and keeping them outside. Jung does not, as Adler did, replace Freud’s psychology by his own. On the contrary, the Freudian tenets mentioned are precisely integrated into Jung’s psychology—but integrated only as sublated realities from which to push off to the standpoint of the “collective unconscious” or to that of the “geistig side”. This means three things:

1 The relation between the opposite sides of the psychological difference is hierarchical or vertical rather than a horizontal relation of alternatives on the same level (the way we speak, for example, of the political left and right). Jung says unambiguously, in the first passage cited, that his “main concern has been to investigate, over and above its [sexuality’s] personal significance and biological function, its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning” (my emphasis). “Over and above”⁸ indicates that its personal significance and biological function are still seen and appreciated as valid, but they are reduced to a sublated moment within psychology proper.

2 Psychology’s pushing off from, and thus its negating and sublating, the one side are not directed at an external, foreign element. They happen fundamentally within itself. The “Freud” from whom Jung pushes off is internal to Jung’s own thinking. His pushing off from him is a strictly internal relation and internal logical move; what it pushes off from is not cast outside, not exiled. Psychology within itself negates it as its own basis; it sublates an integrated and acknowledged element of itself, and within itself rises above this basis to its own true home. With another metaphor, this rising above or negating the prevailing initial standpoint, and thus the beginning of true psychology, is in our second quote represented by Jung as a radical shift from an external view to one’s “regard[ing] [the phenomenon] from within”, or, to say it with a phrase from a late letter of Jung’s, as our “changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side, i.e., not from outside but from inside”.⁹ Psychology has to be the discipline of interiority. In yet other and more succinct conceptual terms, the psychological difference is the difference between seeing a phenomenon “from the point of view of the ego” versus seeing the same phenomenon “from the point of view of the soul”¹⁰ which shows once more why I speak of the psychological difference.

3 To what it pushes off and rises up, cannot be obtained without this negation of its own internal basis. It comes into being only through this act of pushing off from the other “side” or through the shift to the “from inside” standpoint. The “geistig side” and what Jung calls the “collective unconscious” are not always already naturally and factually given, in the same sense that the biological function of sexuality, to stay with this example, is an empirical positive fact. But the “geistig side” and along with it true psychology not only come about through negation, they are also in themselves in the status of absolute negativity. This means that there simply and honestly is nothing to be seen and therefore also nothing to be “grasped” for a strictly empiricist, positivistic approach, or “from outside”, or “from the point of view of the ego” (even if the investigating psychologist is as intelligent and gifted as Freud and, what is more, even if unconsciously he should be personally deeply fascinated by this “nothing”). Furthermore, the geistig side’s and psychology’s absolute negativity means that they need to be “made”: soul-making.¹¹If there is to be psychology, then one has to rise to that “over and above” level and by rising to it create it for the first time since it is not positively given, not always already “there” and merely waiting to be discovered. This is the predicament and distinction of psychology. It is what gives Jungian psychology its uniqueness. (Jung’s) “Freud” did not rise to this level, did not regard things from inside, did not enter true psychology. We could also say: he did not perform the psychological difference. He stayed on the obvious, naturalistic or positivistic level of the personal and biological, that is to say, the level of “the psychic” (in contrast to “the psychological”) and consequently also did not break through what for Jung was the narrowness of “his concretistic terminology and theory”.

2 “Numinous meaning”

2.1 The cold objectivity of substantial contents

If the “geistig side” is first created in the act of our rising to it, it seems to be something entirely subjective. But this is contradicted by the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Sources and abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Foreword: “The psychological difference”
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: “The psychological difference” in theory
• PART II: “The psychological difference” in contemporary life and practice
• Afterword: “...bringing them the plague” 2.0
• Index