Wolfgang Giegerich

Wolfgang Giegerich is the German Jungian analyst whose work presses archetypal-psychology-charter past the imaginal horizon at which Hillman halted, into what he calls the logical life of the soul. Trained in the post-Jungian tradition and practicing in Berlin, Giegerich is the philosophical rigorist of the post-Jungian arc — the analyst who insists that the honest continuation of Jung’s project runs through Hegel and the dialectic.

Giegerich’s position is exact and polemical. “C. G. Jung’s psychology was based on an authentic notion of soul, but this notion was only intuitive, implicit, not conceptually worked out” (Giegerich 2020, back matter). The task of psychology after Jung is to complete the Notion that Jung left implicit — to let psychology become what it already is, the discipline of interiority, where interiority is not in any person or thing but in psychology’s own self-relation. The soul’s logical life is the movement by which feeling, image, and symptom are sublated (Hegelian Aufhebung) into thought.

The break with Hillman made the debate public. Giegerich charged archetypal-psychology-charter with stopping at the imaginal, producing “virtual-reality type Gods” — and Hillman replied in “Once More into the Fray: A Response to Wolfgang Giegerich’s ‘Killings’” (Spring 56, 1994). The quarrel is one of the defining fissures in the late archetypal school. Andrew Samuels locates Giegerich as the post-Jungian who first named developmental Jungianism genetic fantasy (Samuels 1985).

Giegerich’s position in the Seba Lineage is that of the tradition’s internal critic — the voice that will not let the depth tradition settle into nostalgia, insisting instead that the soul has a historical task that the modern age demands it meet in thought.

Key concepts

Major works

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