The apophasis of mental images — the negative movement that strips, negates, or sublates the image as a cognitive and psychological vehicle — occupies an unresolved tension across the depth-psychology corpus. The term names a practice and a problem: the deliberate refusal to rest in the image as terminus, treating imaginal content not as destination but as something that must undo itself in order to release what it carries. Wolfgang Giegerich prosecutes this most rigorously, arguing that archetypal and imaginal psychology halt precisely where soul-work demands continuation — at the frozen image — failing to press through the image toward what he calls the soul’s logical life. For Giegerich, images must be sublated, not venerated; they are necessary scaffolding that must eventually decompose from within. James Hillman, by contrast, insists on dwelling within the image, finding in its autonomous life the very currency of soul. John Welwood, drawing on contemplative epistemology, raises the question of whether a self constituted by self-representations can possess genuine reality, pointing toward an awareness that bypasses images altogether. Antonio Damasio, from the neuroscientific side, treats mental images as the fundamental substrate of mind itself, making their negation cognitively inconceivable. The tension between Giegerich’s logical sublation and Hillman’s imaginal fidelity defines the central axis of this term’s significance in the contemporary depth-psychological literature.
We need the images, because without them we would not be able to think anything — the mind would just be blank. But we need them only to sublate them.
Giegerich formulates the apophasis of mental images as structural necessity: images are indispensable but must be negated and interiorized rather than preserved as psychological objects.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The image destroys itself within itself. It self-sublates. We do not have to do it to the image.
Giegerich argues that apophasis of the image is not an external critique but an internal fate immanent to the image’s own logic, which archetypal psychology suppresses by freezing images as eternal Forms.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
it also stops or freezes their inherent dynamic towards their Dionysian telos … if they were not frozen, they would head for their decomposition
Imaginal psychology’s failure to allow images their internal fate constitutes a refusal of the apophatic movement that alone carries images toward their proper dissolution.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
the more we propagate mythical images and the more we seek to connect with the Self or the daimon, the more we fall into the ego … Today’s psychological problem can no longer be dealt with on the level of contents
Giegerich diagnoses the contemporary psychological impasse as a failure to move beyond imaginal contents, making the negation of the image a historical and dialectical imperative.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
the short-cut of merely imagining, pictorially conceiving (vorstellen), the life of the soul is a trap. It is working with frozen images and holds itself, its own life, in suspension.
Giegerich identifies pictorial or imaginal thinking as constitutively opposed to dialectical movement, arguing that reliance on frozen images forecloses authentic psychological reflection.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Soul is not only, not primarily, image, and image is not soul as such, but one favorite form of expression or manifestation for the soul.
Giegerich subordinates the image to the soul’s logical life, establishing the theoretical basis for a negative theology of mental images within depth psychology.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
That one thing is in itself the opposite of itself cannot be understood by modern man, since it cannot be imagined … The fact that modern man
Giegerich identifies the limits of imaginal perception as structurally incapable of grasping dialectical self-contradiction, establishing the cognitive necessity of moving beyond the image.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
If there is a true self beyond ego, it would have to be a reality that can be directly known and recognized, without recourse to images — an I beyond I, as it were.
Welwood articulates an explicitly apophatic move within depth psychology, arguing that authentic selfhood requires an awareness that bypasses image-formation entirely.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
The imagination of imaginal psychology, however, is in itself no more than the freezing of that moment … As frozen motion, it is not movement any more; it is reified motion.
Giegerich diagnoses imaginal psychology’s suspension of the apophatic movement as a reification of the image, converting dynamic soul-process into a static ontological object.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Gods now are only ‘imaginal,’ ‘fictions,’ ‘as-if’s,’ Virtual Reality type ‘Gods,’ since the notion of truth has been eliminated with systematic intention.
Giegerich argues that reducing divine figures to imaginal status without apophatic negation empties them of truth, producing a pseudo-theology of images devoid of genuine cognitive force.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
needed, but to sublate them and think them … negated and reflected … ‘Image is soul’
Giegerich’s index entries crystallize his dialectical position: images are necessary and must be negated, holding both poles simultaneously within the soul’s logical movement.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Images require a cosmology that gives them value and holds them in order from within.
Hillman defends the apophatic negation of images’ literal status while simultaneously insisting on their cosmological embeddedness, resisting their reduction to mere mental contents.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
images are the currency of our minds … any symbol you can think of is an image, and there may be little leftover mental residue that is not made of images.
Damasio’s neuroscientific account of mental images as the universal substrate of mind represents the position against which apophatic approaches must define themselves.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
There is no way man can know what God is. But one thing he doe
McGilchrist’s reading of Eckhart situates the apophasis of images within a neurological and theological framework, linking the limits of serial image-processing to negative theology.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
it can never do what it longs to do, namely to say ‘this is this, it is such and not otherwise’. It carries on in ‘questioning and expectation; it does not settle down or rest, but labours on, seeking, expecting and rejecting
Eckhart via McGilchrist describes the intellect’s apophatic restlessness — its inability to fix the image as final — as the structural condition of any approach to transcendent knowledge.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the entrance or opening is in itself the goal. There is nothing additional behind or after it. The opening is in itself heaven and hell.
Giegerich’s figure of the soul’s inverted logic — where the negating gate is itself the entrance — supplies the structural metaphor underlying his apophatic treatment of images.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside
Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite ‘No Longer I’
The historical precedent of Dionysian apophasis and its treatment in the patristic corpus frames the theological genealogy within which depth-psychological apophasis of images operates.
, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, 2003aside
Apophasis, or negative theology, is at the heart of the spiritual tradition of Eastern Christianity, and indeed it is ‘the fundamental characteristic of the whole theological tradition of the Eastern Church.’
This passage situates apophasis within the Eastern Christian tradition from which depth psychology partially draws, providing the theological backdrop for its psychological application.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside