I have enjoyed many of the discussions here, especially those that have contributed a more critical spirit to the approach of Jungian psychology. So far, however, I have not encountered any reference to the work of Wolfgang Giegerich, a Jungian analyst who above all must be credited with the introduction of a more rigorous critical approach to Jungian psychology, a dialectical "Hegelian" spirit of analysis, which does run counter the devotional or dogmatic Jugianism that has clustered around analytical psychology over the decades. It is for this reason, because Jung's work is threatened to become a pop-culture ideology (via Campbell), that a critical approach such as Giegerich offers seems indispensable to the further development of Jungian theory. For whereas devotional Jungians want to worship his theory where Jung left it 70 years ago, critical Jungians such as Hillman and Giegerich are working to further develop its critical frontiers beyond the isms of Jung's time and ours.
Has anybody else in this "alliance" had the critical experience of Giegerich's work? Or is Giegerich's voice, like my own voice often sounds among official card-carrying "Jungians," condemned to be the voice that cries from the wilderness of the archetypal psyche?
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Although Giegerich dismantles this "myth of meaning" as itself obsolte psychologically, we should not forget that on the otherside Giegerich believes in the capital Notion of Truth. He even takes to task both Hillman and Campbell for attributing to myth the logic of "make believe" that has turned Jung into another pop ideology. Giegerich understands that living myth, where it was truly functioning, is taken to be a reality of its own, self-evident, the palpable expression of Truth. In this way I would say Giegerich deploys an existential hermeneutic of myth in the primordial understanding vera narratio, which is the very opposite of non-committal PLAYING with the images in aesthetic contemplation:
“And implicitly archetypal psychology admits as much when it stands up for the “as-if” character of its relation to the Gods. This is very close to imputing a “logic of make-believe” even to myth and ritual, as e.g., Joseph Campbell did. What a slander! What conceptual confusion! Real myth is the simple expression of truth, of the truth. The Greek word mythos = ‘word’ ( as opposed to other Greek words for ‘word,’ e.g., logos) means ‘the true word,’ the word that did not need to be proven inasmuch as it carried its truth within itself; it came as unquestionable truth (W.F. Otto, with Kerényi concurring. Cf. Vico: “similarly, mythos came to be defined for us as vera narratio, or true speech…”) (The Soul's Logical Life 171)
"Truth is the ultimate repressed" (The Soul's Logical Life 217).
The problem is not that truth figures in psychology. The problem is the mindless, positivistic idea we ordinarily have about truth ("scientific truth," "dogma," etc..) (The Soul's Logical Life 220).
"My response to the whole sale rejection of truth in archetypal psychology is to claim that nobody is exempt from having to give his answer to the question of the truth of the soul's ideas and images. The question of truth is not academic" (The Soul's Logical Life 221).
"Dodging the question of truth can be seen as a defense, as an attempt to remain at a distance to the soul, to stay out of it as ruthless wilderness, and instead to restrict oneself to mere imagining things and envisioning the whole range of the pandemonium of images. To be sure, this kind of envisioning must be evaluated as a kind of peeping into the realm of "pre-existence" but only from the safe side of ego country. Psychology then joins the mainstream of our civilization heading for Cyberspace and the world of multimedia (The Soul's Logical Life 222).
Norland
A group of us in Minnesota have been closely studying Giegerich's work for 3-4 years now. It is my understanding that an International organization to study his work (there will be a website that publishes articles, perhaps conferences etc. . .) is being formed by Greg Mogenson (Analyst who has edited a number of Giegerich's works) and others (including John Robertson who is part of our group). That group is at its very beginning stages. You could contact Greg Mogenson through his website (there is an e-mail address there) and ask to be included in the list of potential members for this group. Cathy Gnatek
As I explained in my earlier post, no. What Giegerich announces to the chagrin of card-carrying Jungians is the End of Jungian IDEOLOGY, this un-Jungian BELIEF in a system of ideas that has foreclosed--sometimes by absorbing-- any other interpretive strategy. Hillman too has saluted Giegerich for being perhaps the last authentic Jungian (besides himself, of course). John Beebe also concurs in reference to END OF MEANING:
“For Giegerich, who explains this more fully in
The Soul’s Logical Life, thinking is not a function of consciousness; it is consciousness, the soul’s way of being fully out there in the world. For him, the awkward moments come when thought is replaced by one of its attributes—and that is what happens when Jung, having implicitly promised not to do so, gets into one of his Jungianist modes, insisting that life has to mean something, and something particular,as if it were not enough to engage with life as it is. I think, with Giegerich,this is Jung the senex speaking (he himself called the wise old man “the archetype of meaning”), and I think, also with Giegerich, that we can move Jungian thought, and Jungian thinking, past that moment of itself into something more related to life as it is without any real contradiction of our identity as Jungians.”
Seems there seems to be a desire to know more, I would make this discussion an introduction to Giegerich's work and dialectical mode of thought. It is in fact this dialectical feature of all his thinking which prevents any easy, stereotyped understanding of his thought, for instance, that he is a thinking type and Hillman feeling or intuition, and someone else is sensation, etc... Any statement that Giegerich makes, in authentic depth-psychological and Jungian fashion, can be reversed dialectically, depending on the line of approach you take to his work. This is, in fact, what I consider the authentically Jungian element of his work, for Jung despaired of being stereotyped into a "Jungian" and thanked God that he had to courage to be himself rather than to become his own ideology. That is why, in a sense, being a "Jungian" is already an ideology, already a misunderstanding of his work as the courage of being yourself rather than a follower, or a proud "believer," an ideology, or any other ism. And it is because Giegerich is often considered on the outside an "anti-Jungian" that he DEMONSTRATES a much better understanding of Jung's work and his psychology of individuation.
Now turning to G's work, since some of you have already read it, and since it's available free on-line (wikipedia), we should take up the article on THE END OF MEANING & THE BIRTH OF MAN and become acquanted with Giegerich's insights. To begin with I would like to leave you with a response by Mogenson "from Inflation to Ordinary” that sums up the basic positions of Giegerich's argument. He begins:
“Wolfgang Giegerich in his important and significant paper situates the precise
moment in our history where modern psychotherapy makes its intervention.
This historical moment might well be summarized as the moment when man
experiences the abandonment and loss of his mythic-religious parents. Man finds
himself in the world of T. S. Eliot’s wasteland, a de-sacralized world bereft of
metaphysical and religious meaning, naked and alone in the cold, cruel, dangerous
world. Modern man is thus defined in a fundamental way by the loss of the
myth of divine parents. Giegerich clearly implies that we must face up to this loss
squarely, unflinchingly. We should not retreat; there is no going back. The only
honest way left is the way forward: we must assume our historical place within
the wasteland of a modern godless, secular, scientific, materialist culture.
Giegerich clearly views Jung as having recoiled from this historical necessity.
His implication of a failure of courage on Jung’s part is palpable. He all but
accuses Jung of a retreat, of a regression, of a debilitating nostalgia for a former
epoch in which we could wrap ourselves in the sumptuous garments of mythic,
religious, and metaphysical meaning.”
The battle cry one can hear between the lines of Giegerich’s text is: “Have the
courage to face the wasteland without the shield of historically obsolete mythologies.”
The only choice we have is to step forward and embrace our modern
predicament of being naked in a material and spiritless world. Such a stance would
entail a radical break from all preceding human history. Prior to the moment of
modernity, man always had the safety and protection of mythological parents. As
Giegerich asserts, “When man is born in a literal sense, he is not really born at all.
He merely exchanges the biological womb of the mother for a second womb, the
spiritual womb, the amniotic sac of the mind, images, meanings. Man is not born
directly into the environment. He is born into his being mind and soul.”
From Inflation to Ordinary.pdf
Mogenson on Giegerich's Whale.pdf
I have a view about the "Thank God I'm Jung and not a Jungian" quote. I think that it is possible to be a classical Jungian (not that I view myself that way) without selling oneself out. I also think it is possible to just imitate Jung and be precisely the sort of Jungian that you (and Jung himself) would oppose. But the former type of intelligent Jungian would include the likes of Marie Louise Von Franz and Wolfgang Pauli. The former tried to move Jungian theory on concerning psyche and matter and she emaphasised the psychology of fairy-tales to a greater extent than Jung did. Meanwhile Pauli said that he didnt belong to any Jungian church, that the Jung institutes should do more fresh research (he was frustrated that not enough of that took place) and that he himself referred to the psychology of the Unconscious as opposed to Jungian psychology. My point is more specifically that it is not only non-Classical Jungians who can claim to live for themselves but Classical Jungians too. Andrew Samuels tried to resolve this issue by making a distinction between Classical Jungians and Jungian Funadamentalists.
Paul.
Point granted, Paul. One can be a "Classical Jungian" precisely AS the courage to be oneself. In this sense, then, Giegerich and Hillman are both classical Jungians in their own right. But the fact that they are not perceived as such but as "radicals" does make me wonder and even doubt whether you CAN be authentically yourself while having to attach the label "Jungian" to your approach. And what is this "classical" suppose to mean but a concealed fundamentalist or ideological structure, the "classical" structure of Jungian theory which is to be protected and preserved, left immune to criticism? The problem of ideology, as Jung also understood as the threat of the various isms, is much much deeper than people think.
For example, Marie vonFranz has also spoke to what extent she eglected her own development in favor of Jung's. She was like a sacrifice to his altar, one who became the life of her Father Jung. For it has also been understood by Jungians to extent to which Jung exploited the powerful women that surrounded him who were devoted to his work and development. Let a feminist critic tell you the untold story of this "classical" Jugianism!
Norland,
Do you consider Giegerich as having worked right the way through and out of Jungian psychology? I think that Jungian theory is wide enough to assimilate quite alot... BUT... if the idea of the UNCONSCIOUS is rejected then I think that the theorist is BEYOND JUNG as opposed to POST JUNG. So Hillman is within the fold (irrespective of what I, you, others think about Hillmans ideas). But Giegerich? For the record when I was part of the IAJS discussion, David Tacey said that Giegerich was no longer part of the Jungian fold in his view. When I reflect on this issue I have to come to the conclusion that for a Jungian to reject the Unconscious is analogous to an American or British Conservative giving up capitalism... or a Socialist giving up equality. They are no longer Conservative/Socialist... or a Catholic giving up God... no longer Catholic.
Paul.
"The Soul always thinks" is something that feeling-oriented Jungians tend to forget. But this whole question is very inadequately dealt with if we reduce it to a problem of psychological types. It is not so simple as that, and neither is the scheme of types meant to tell us anything about the quality or merit of a person or his work.
I actually teach the typological scheme in my class on THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF COLOR, where every individual gets to paint a Mandala reflecting their own individual type. One of the main points I make there, and have to reiterate it each time, is that the scheme is not meant to pigeon-hole people into different stereotypes or behaviors. It is an orientational scheme and does not touch the ethical substance of the individual or individuation; it is merely an aid to find our way through and out of our own prejudices.
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