Psychology

Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Psychology' functions not as a settled discipline but as a contested site of inquiry whose proper object, method, and even language remain perpetually in question. Jung maps the field's internal differentiation — academic, medical, personal, personalistic, primitive, shamanic, of the unconscious — while insisting that any psychology without soul is a contradiction in terms. Hillman radicalises this critique: he argues that the field emerged from Germanic Protestantism, that its language is a kind of 'Newspeak' requiring poetic redemption, and that its history is itself a psychological fantasy demanding hermeneutic re-reading. Against the inherited model of psychology as neutral observation of inner subjectivity, he proposes an archetypal psychology whose method moves from cognition to aesthetics, whose focus lies beyond the interior, and whose proper interlocutors are mythology, image, and soul. Giegerich presses further still, contending that psychology proper can only exist as its own self-sublation — a discipline that negates its immediacy from within — and that any psychology failing to sustain this dialectic produces a self-defeating conception of its subject. These three trajectories — Jung's encyclopaedic taxonomy, Hillman's poetic revisioning, and Giegerich's logical rigour — define the field's central tensions: science versus art, cognition versus image, soul versus behaviour, therapy versus theory.

In the library 13 passages

Psychology has been mainly a creation of the German language out of the German soul... Former definitions of human existence—religious man, political man, scientific man, economic man—have suddenly given way to psychological man, which means soul-making has become again a general concern.

Hillman argues that psychology is a culturally and linguistically specific formation rooted in Germanic Protestantism, and that its emergence as the defining modern framework signals the return of soul-making as a historical necessity.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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psychology has to be, in itself, sublated psychology... a psychology that comes as its own self-sublation and starts out as one that has immediate psychology as a sublated moment within itself.

Giegerich contends that genuine psychology cannot remain at the level of immediate observation but must negate itself from within, maintaining the dialectical 'psychological difference' as its constitutive methodological principle.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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A history of psychology belongs as much to psychology as to history; it reports not only historical facts but also psychological fantasies. History may be taken as one of the ways the soul muses.

Hillman proposes that psychology's own history is itself a psychological field — a concatenation of events analogous to a dream — requiring interpretive, hermeneutic engagement rather than positivist chronicle.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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AP focus is beyond interior subjectivity... method moving from cognition to aesthetics... whole field 'needs poetic redemption'... speech of soul vs. language of psychology.

Hillman's archetypal psychology is characterised as a programme that moves the discipline beyond introspective cognitivism toward aesthetics and mythological interrelation, demanding the poetic redemption of psychology's impoverished language.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023thesis

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Psychology proper is neither the science 'psychology,' nor the psychology which people have. It is the contradictory unity of both.

Giegerich defines psychology proper as the dialectical unity that refuses to collapse into either a neutral observational science or a merely subjective inner process, exposing methodological dissociation as structurally neurotic.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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therapeutic psychology has an inherent contradiction: its method is Apollonic, its substance Dionysian. It attempts to analyze the collectivity, the downwardness, the moisture of libidinal fantasies... by means of the distance, cognition, and objective clarity of the other structure.

Hillman identifies an irresolvable structural contradiction at the heart of therapeutic psychology, whose Apollonic analytic method is fundamentally at odds with the Dionysian character of its subject matter.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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psychology, 4, 43, 50f... academic, 3; of alchemy, 93; complex, 326; of the East, 8; feminine, 41, 82; masculine, 81f, 269; medical, 3, 273; and metaphysics, 49, 54; modern, 91... of the unconscious, 90, 189, 268; without soul, 238.

Jung's taxonomic index reveals his expansive, differentiated conception of psychology — encompassing academic, medical, cultural, gendered, and metaphysical variants — with the damning category 'without soul' signalling the discipline's potential self-betrayal.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting

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With archetypal psychology, psychological theory has superseded both and reached a new level of reflection. HILLMAN is probably the only one who was responsive to what was germinally inherent in the Jungian project.

Giegerich credits Hillman's archetypal psychology as a logically significant advance beyond both classical and developmentalist Jungian schools, representing a genuine theoretical leap rather than merely another sectarian position.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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Can a psychology that expressly insists on being theoretical have any connection with therapeutic reality... Could the idea of the soul's logical life and of a cognitive psychology ever become practical?

Giegerich confronts the tension between a rigorously theoretical psychology of the soul's logical life and the demands of clinical practice, acknowledging this as a genuine question the discipline must answer.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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I give up the project of psychology and become something reasonable and positive, like a farmer or chemist or engineer or schoolteacher.

Giegerich dramatises the temptation to abandon psychology altogether when confronted with the aporia of speaking about the soul's invisible life, identifying retreat into positivism as the first and most common defence against rigorous psychological thinking.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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Jung's theory is a powerful narrative. It might be correct in the way that a poem or a literary novel is correct; that is, as a whole coherent unto itself, all its elements in perfect relation to each other.

Jones proposes that Jungian psychology operates by a poetic rather than scientific standard of correctness, creating subjective truths through image and connotation rather than testable predictions, a mode fundamentally distinct from behavioural science.

Jones, Raya A., Jung's 'Psychology with the Psyche' and the Behavioral Sciences, 2013supporting

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Curiosity in psychology today shows itself also in psychological testing. There are now thousands of standardized and copyrighted psychological...

Hillman's critique of psychological curiosity — expressed through proliferating standardised tests — signals his broader suspicion that the discipline's positivist instrumentalism substitutes technical measurement for genuine soulful encounter.

Hillman, James, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting

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function of, in psychology, 7... fixed, 93... intellectual, 92... old, alive in unconscious, 25.

Jung's passing remarks on theory's function within psychology — and on old theories persisting unconsciously — reflect his pragmatic view that psychological frameworks are living instruments rather than fixed scientific laws.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954aside

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