Wolfgang Giegerich

Wolfgang Giegerich (born 1942) is a German Jungian analyst and theorist who has developed one of the most rigorous and controversial currents within post-Jungian thought, which he calls “psychology as the discipline of interiority.” Trained in the Jungian tradition and a practicing analyst near Munich, he is the author of a large body of work, including his major theoretical statement The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology and the multi-volume Collected English Papers (whose titles include The Neurosis of Psychology, Technology and the Soul, Soul-Violence, and What Is Soul?).

Drawing heavily on Hegel’s dialectical logic alongside Jung, Giegerich argues that the proper subject of psychology is the soul or “objective psyche” itself, not the personal ego, and that psychological life must be grasped as a self-moving logical process rather than as a set of empirical or clinical facts.

Giegerich’s relevance to this lineage is twofold. First, he stands as a deepening and radicalizing of the imaginal and soul-centered stream that runs through Jung and James Hillman: he insists that the soul has its own interior logic and that thinking the image “all the way through” — not merely sticking to it as a picture — is the true work of psychology.

Second, he is a famously rigorous critic of Hillman’s archetypal psychology and of much popular “soul” and self-development discourse, charging it with sentimentality, literalism, and a failure to follow the psychological movement to its logical conclusion.

His insistence on what he calls the “psychological difference” — the distinction between literal, positivistic reality and the interior, self-relating life of the soul — makes him both an heir to and a sharp corrective within the depth-psychological tradition, prizing inner gnosis and the autonomous life of imagination while refusing any easy, ego-flattering use of them.