Within the depth-psychology corpus, positivism functions less as a philosophical school to be evaluated in its own right than as a diagnostic marker for a mode of knowing that the tradition regards as constitutionally incapable of grasping the soul. The critique is overwhelmingly negative and cuts across otherwise divergent thinkers. Giegerich, its most sustained critic, deploys 'positivism' and its cognate 'positivity' as technical terms denoting a logical stance in which reality is conceived as present, determinate, and transparent to empirical or representational thought—what he calls the soul's opposite. Against this, he argues that psychological truth demands a negative, dialectical logic that positivity forecloses. The charge ramifies: positivistic psychology collapses into narcissistic introspection, surrenders the naked truth of the soul, and mistakes the reliability of the technological stance for genuine knowing. Hillman's attack on the 'naturalistic fallacy' in normative psychologies approaches the same target from the imaginal direction, insisting that phenomena of the soul cannot be naively understood as merely natural. McGilchrist's epistemological arguments—that certainty is purchased at the expense of content—provide a broader philosophical context for these critiques. Together, these voices converge on the judgment that positivism, in all its guises, is the structural enemy of a rigorous depth-psychological enterprise.
The soul and its life is invisible, intangible, and, as long as there is a positive (positivistic) conception of knowing, also unknowable, therefore unspeakable.
Giegerich identifies positivistic epistemology as the precise logical barrier that renders the soul unknowable and psychological discourse mute, establishing the term as the foundational antagonist of his project.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The problem is the mindless positivistic idea we ordinarily have about truth ('scientific truth,' 'dogma,' etc.).
Giegerich argues that the obstacle for psychology is not truth as such but the positivistic concept of truth—fixed, dogmatic, and scientifically bounded—which must be replaced by a negative, non-positive notion.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Ourselves as people, domesticated, positivized: narcissistic self-observation and introspection. This is a way to escape the soul, to cheat it by presenting something to it that only seems to be what it indeed needs.
Giegerich diagnoses 'positivized' self-knowledge—introspection and narcissistic self-observation—as a culturally sanctioned evasion of the soul's genuine demand for self-cognition.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
positivism, positivity 174, 189, 195, 215, 226, 232, 234
The index of Giegerich's work reveals the systematic and pervasive deployment of positivism/positivity as a structuring conceptual pair throughout his argument, appearing at every major juncture of his critique.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
'Events,' of course, not within the logic of science and positivism, but within a logic that grants events the capability of being in themselves (as facts) meaningful, in themselves speaking events.
Giegerich contrasts the positivistic logic of science, which renders events mute, with a mythological logic in which events are intrinsically meaningful—establishing positivism as the historical foreclosure of the mythological mode of being-in-the-world.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Chemistry resulted from the radical exclusion of the 'world serpent'... from the definition of all substances, so that it could exclusively focus on what is logically positive or 'cat, nothing but cat' about the substances.
Giegerich uses the historical emergence of chemistry from alchemy as a parable for how positivistic thinking excludes interiority and dialectical depth, attending only to what is logically positive and determinate in its objects.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
God is not a positivity. But is 'imagining Gods' an improvement? Or is it not much rather inferior to taking God literally by believing in him?
Giegerich extends the critique of positivity to the imaginal solution itself, arguing that replacing literal belief with imaginal 'as-if' Gods does not escape positivism but merely displaces it onto a different register.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
knowledge not only does not imply certainty, but is actually incompatible with certainty. Certainty resides only in our concepts, not in the reality to which we apply them.
McGilchrist provides the broader epistemological ground for the depth-psychological critique of positivism by demonstrating that the positivist demand for certainty is philosophically self-undermining and systematically distorts knowledge of reality.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
This idea Hillman (1975a) follows further by attacking the 'naturalistic fallacy,' which dominates most normative psychologies.
Hillman's assault on the naturalistic fallacy in normative psychology constitutes a parallel critique to Giegerich's attack on positivism, targeting the assumption that psychological phenomena can be adequately described within the categories of natural fact.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
We are not in a kind of 'imaginary museum'... having all the images, Gods, and forms of thinking of all ages as atemporal options or Platonistic Forms available to us.
Giegerich's rejection of an ahistorical supermarket of archetypes implies a critique of the positivistic reification of psychological contents into static, eternally available objects of choice.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside