Newsletter 2008

Soul-Violence: Collected English Papers, Volume III

Wolfgang Giegerich

New Orleans, Spring Journal Books, 2008, 477 pp.

A reviewer will sometimes say about a book that, having picked it up, he cannot lay it down again. I cannot say this here.

This is the third volume of a series in which Wolfgang Giegerich, a Jungian psychotherapist in Germany, and the U.S. publishing house Spring Journal Books are making his writings available to English. A copy has been on my desk for a year or so. I have laid it down often. But then I have picked it up again.

Like other writings by Giegerich with which I have struggled, Soul-Violence, a collection of essays originally published elsewhere in German, English or both is difficult. I am frequently unsure what he is saying and far from convinced that I would agree if I did understand it.

But I am convinced this book presents challenges that are not to be avoided.

Soul-Violence abounds with paradoxes that the reader may find unpalatable and sometimes incomprehensible.

Giegerich is brilliant and, I am tempted to say, arrogant. He wants a psychology that is nothing less than “the new way of seeing life as a whole and responding to it, psychology as the successor formation to mythology, religion and metaphysics.” (p. 81)

Yet, not the least of the paradoxes is that, while Giegerich is radically revisionist, he leads the reader back to Jung himself with fresh appreciation. As I have sought relief from this book in passages by Jung, I have found my reading of them enriched.

As the title suggests, a central paradox is the juxtaposition of soul and violence. You may see them as antithetical; he insists they are inseparable.

Is this violence literal or intellectual? It’s hard to say. Sometimes, he seems to insist that the violence he means is quite literal: war, animal sacrifice, the harsh reality of money. But he also suggests that his verbal assaults on cherished ideas of Jungian psychology are violent.

Giegerich describes sacrificial slaughter in former millennia as “the primordial soul-making” (p. 32). Although praising James Hillman for introducing the notion of soul-making into psychology, he derides Hillman’s and Jung’s archetypes and images as “a harmless version of the notion of soul-making.” (p. 32)

Yet on the next page Giegerich describes “a violent act” of his own: “I dethrone the untouchable images as what is literally prior and set up the deed of sacrificial slaughter as logically and historically preceding them.” (p. 33) I am not sure why this, as a mental exercise, is not also “harmless.”

It is clear, at any rate, that Giegerich does not advocate or romanticize physical violence as a soul-making activity—not in the modern world, at least.

He has no sympathy for Islamic terrorism.

“We cannot merely charge a small group of misguided people with interpreting their terrorism as an Islamic jihad against individuals. The connection with Islam is, at least to some extent, intrinsic,” he writes. (p. 418)

And in responding to it, “better insights, well-meaning intentions, a good example and friendly complaisance are not enough. Some conflicts have to be fought through and settled through fighting.” (p. 422)

He does not glorify modern violence, but sees it as an inescapable reality. In modernity, “all evil spirits are loose,” and not just through Islamic terrorism. (p. 434)

An even more basic paradox has to do with the relation between psychology and the real, external world. He often seems to suggest that there is none: that true psychology must be uroboric.

“It must have everything it needs within itself, even its own reference point and that other with which it must be compared and contrasted–or else it is not the discipline of interiority, but only another science of something external.” (p. 29)

Yet he insists that psychology does have an external point of reference: history.

Giegerich’s approach is shaped by erudite and Hegelian interpretations of what has gone on in history. He sees animal sacrifice as “the centre out of which human existence acquired its meaning” (p. 196) and “the soul’s or consciousness’s ‘killing itself into being’ or self-bootstrapping.” (p. 219) For him, the later abandonment of such sacrifice, especially in Christianity, was also crucial.

Paradox upon paradox. For Giegerich, the psychological significance of sacrifice may not have been reflected at all in the emotional and mental state of the people wielding the axes.

Similarly, he sees the development of Christianity as an “independent reality” (p. 33)–independent of, among other things, whether the people carrying it forward are themselves Christian believers.

For Giegerich, “a full-fledged interiorization or inwardization has no fear of the outer ... On the contrary, it reaches out and encompasses the real object, because in it too, the soul finds its interiority.”

He continues, “The world in its utter realness needs to be included in psychology.” (p. 26)

Here, he finds Jungian—and archetypal—psychology wanting.

“With work on archetypal perspectives, mythic images and fantasies of consciousness, psychology is dealing only with abstract universal forms, potentialities. The Real is not touched; it is not even envisioned as an open question and concern. On the contrary, what happens in Jungian psychology is that the abstract forms are believed to be themselves the source of the Real: the archetypes (or archetypal images) in their numinosity are seen as the ultimate cause. This means nothing less than that the very concept of the Real is sucked out of the world and absorbed by the world of ideas and forms, of the mythic and archetypal itself: a fundamental de-realization of the Real as such.” (p. 36)

Yet he can also write, “We do not live first of all as children of nature on physical earth and in addition also have a mind or soul. We live, to begin with, in soul, in language and mindedness, and have the task of striving to come down to earth within them.” (p. 216)

Consistent? Convincing? I’m not sure. Challenging? Definitely.

–Harvey Shepherd