The Soul’s Logical Life

The Soul’s Logical Life is Giegerich’s principal statement and the pivot of post-Jungian dialectical psychology. First published by Peter Lang in 1999 and reissued in 2020, the book performs a double operation: it makes a case that the soul’s life is at bottom logical life (thought, Notion, dialectical movement), and it builds a method for a psychology rigorous enough to think that claim through.

The structure moves from Jung’s implicit thought, through a polemic against contemporary Jungianism, into the long central engagement with archetypal-psychology-charter as both achievement and arrest, and terminates in the Actaeon–Artemis myth — read not as an image to be amplified but as a logical event to be undergone, the instruction to de-imagine the very mode of imagining. “In writing the present book, I am following the procedure of [a] Jung man… throw[ing] the spear as far ahead as possible and then follow[ing] it” (Giegerich 2020, p. 9).

The book is the principal library source for every node in this recon — for souls-logical-life, anthropological-fallacy, dismemberment, psychological-obsolescence, and the critique of the imaginal. Michael V. Adams called it “the most important Jungian book since James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology” (quoted on the book’s back matter).

Concepts introduced or developed

• souls-logical-life
• dialectical-psychology
• anthropological-fallacy
• psychological-obsolescence
• dismemberment

Cited by

• james-hillman
• andrew-samuels