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person1975–present

Wolfgang Giegerich

Disciplines:
jungian psychology
germany
jungian psychology/soul
clinical psychology/dialectical psychology

Summary

German Jungian psychologist who developed a radical critique of mainstream analytical psychology — arguing that Jungian psychology must move beyond its therapeutic/personal orientation toward a psychology of the soul as objective, dialectical process — whose work represents the most philosophically sophisticated development of analytical psychology.

Core Contribution

Argues that the soul is not a subjective experience but an objective logic — 'the soul's logical life' — and that Jungian psychology's tendency to locate the unconscious inside the individual is a fundamental error: the collective unconscious is not in us, we are in it, and psychology must become the discipline that thinks the soul's own movements.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Psychology Must Cease Being Personalistic (Giegerich's core challenge: Jungian psychology's fatal move is treating the psyche as something inside the individual person — the soul is not mine or yours but the objective self-movement of spirit through history, and therapeutic psychology that focuses on individual healing is therefore actually psychology's evasion of its proper subject)

Notable Works & Achievements

The Soul's Logical Life

What Is Soul?

Neurosis: The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness

Historical Influences

C.G. Jung Hegel Hillman

Intellectual Lineage

Germany C.G. Jung Institute Zurich Hegel

Contemporaries & Peers

Hillman Murray Stein

Minds Influenced

Post-Jungian theoryJungian tradition

Intellectual Posterity

Soul's Logical LifeGiegerich's dialectical psychologyJungian critique

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