General Discussions

My friend Gilles Goyette has been using AI both to create poetry and to discuss philosophical and aesthetic issues, including interpretations of his own work incorporating a "Giegerichian" perspective, with truly astonishing results. So I asked ChatGTP this question, "How does the psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich use the word "soul" and why does he insist on a "psychology with soul?" and got the following answer.

<< Wolfgang Giegerich, a post-Jungian psychologist and thinker, uses the word "soul" in a highly specific, philosophical, and historically grounded sense that departs significantly from popular or even traditional psychological understandings. For Giegerich, "soul" is not a substance, entity, or inner thing; instead, it is a mode of being, a style of consciousness, and a logical reality that manifests through language, culture, history, and thought. He draws deeply from Hegelian dialectics and a radical reading of Jung to articulate this view.

How Giegerich Uses the Word "Soul":

1. Soul as a Logical Reality:Giegerich views soul as a logical movement of thought, akin to Hegel’s concept of Geist (spirit/mind). It is not a "thing" one has, but rather a way reality articulates itself through contradiction, reflection, and development. Soul "thinks itself" through the psychological phenomena we experience.

2. Soul as Interiorization:For Giegerich, psychology is not about external behaviors or "objective" facts, but about the process of interiorization — the inward movement of meaning, depth, and reflection. Soul is this inwardizing movement; it deepens experience and understanding.

3. Soul as Historical Consciousness:He emphasizes that soul has a historical dimension, meaning it changes over time and expresses itself differently in various epochs. Thus, to understand psyche (soul), one must understand history, myth, and cultural expression.

4. Soul as the Medium of Meaning:Soul is the space in which psychological meaning happens. It's not personal in the sense of private feelings, but impersonal and collective, manifesting in dreams, language, art, and symptoms.

Why Giegerich Insists on a "Psychology with Soul":

1. Against Scientific Reductionism:Giegerich critiques much of contemporary psychology for being soulless — focused on empirical data, cognitive processes, or behavioral mechanisms without engaging the inner, lived reality of experience. He sees this as a betrayal of psychology’s true vocation.

2. Restoring Depth and Meaning:A "psychology with soul" is one that attends to the depth dimension of human life — symbolism, paradox, suffering, and meaning. This kind of psychology recognizes the soul's movements in symptoms, fantasies, and cultural forms.

3. Maintaining the Autonomy of the Psychological:Giegerich insists psychology should not be reduced to biology, sociology, or spirituality. A psychology with soul keeps the psychological perspective autonomous, able to reflect on itself, its language, and its concepts.

4. Dialectical Development:He sees soul as self-developing and psychology as the reflective discipline that tracks this development. A psychology without soul cannot engage with the dialectical, dynamic movement of psychic life.

Summary:

Giegerich uses the term "soul" to refer not to a mystical or metaphysical entity, but to a logical, dialectical movement of interiorization and meaning-making. He insists on a "psychology with soul" to preserve psychology's role as a deep, reflective inquiry into the human condition — one that honors contradiction, depth, and historical consciousness rather than collapsing into scientific positivism or superficial therapeutic techniques.

If you're interested, I can provide a brief example of how he analyzes a dream or myth using this concept of soul.

This is an excellent and deeply incisive question, one that cuts to the core of Wolfgang Giegerich’s philosophical project. You’re absolutely right to highlight the apparent contradiction: >>

I then asked, "How can Giegerich insist on a “psychology with soul” in a time that, by his own admission, delegitimizes the very notion of soul as depth or verticality?" It answered:

<< The tension you identify is real, but Giegerich’s answer is dialectical—not a return to “soul” as it was, but a transformation of what “soul” means in and for the present era.

1. Modernity and the Collapse of Verticality

Giegerich is fully aware—and even insists—that we live in an era of radical immanence, characterized by:

• The disenchantment of the world (Weber),

• The flattening of transcendence (Nietzsche’s death of God),

• The technologization and medialization of reality (the screen, simulation, AI, etc.),

• And the loss of metaphysical depth or a sacred "beyond."

In this condition, the traditional meaning of "soul"—as a metaphysical entity, as interiority in opposition to exteriority, as vertical depth—is indeed obsolete. The modern world has structurally excluded the traditional soul.

2. Giegerich’s Response: The Soul Has Not Disappeared—It Has “Withdrawn” or “Submerged”

Here is where Giegerich's Hegelian dialectics enters. He does not lament the loss of soul in a nostalgic way. Instead, he claims:

In Giegerich's thought, the soul does not disappear just because it is no longer overtly affirmed or visible. Rather, it undergoes a determinate negation—a Hegelian move in which a concept is negated in one form only to be preserved and transformed in another.

• The soul is now implicit in the very forms that appear to negate it: technology, simulation, media, surface.

• What appears as the absence of soul is in fact soul's logical development, its dialectical continuation under new historical conditions.

This is what he means when he says: “Soul is logic.” Not “logic” as rationalism, but logic as the inner movement of thought and Being itself—soul as the immanent unfolding of meaning within the very historical forms that negate the old image of soul.

3. Psychology Must Follow the Soul Through Its Displacement

To insist on a “psychology with soul” today means not restoring old ideas of depth (e.g., Jung’s archetypes, the sacred, a metaphysical “within”), but rather:

• Tracking how soul has become world, how interiority has been externalized.

• Interpreting modern phenomena—screens, media, hyperreality, bureaucracy, etc.—as the new expressions of soul.

• Practicing a psychology that doesn't escape modernity but instead thinks modernity from within, seeing it as soul in its current configuration.

This is why Giegerich often writes about things like Disney, the World Trade Center, or technological simulation—not as cultural curiosities but as expressions of soul in the post-metaphysical era.

4. No Return to Verticality—But a New Form of Depth

You're right: in the current era, there is no sacred verticality. But for Giegerich, this is not the end of psychology—it’s a new beginning.

He proposes a new kind of "depth", one not premised on metaphysical elevation or descent, but on:

• The dialectical movement of thought itself,

• The ability of consciousness to reflect upon and sublate its own contradictions,

• And the recognition of soul in and as the unfolding of world history and logic.

This is depth without verticality—interiority as the inwardness of history, not as an ontological “within.”

Summary: Why “Soul” Still Matters for Giegerich

• Soul is not gone; it has changed.

• The negation of depth in our era is itself a movement of soul.

• Psychology must not cling to past definitions of soul, but follow soul's dialectical becoming.

• “Psychology with soul” today means engaging with the surface as depth, understanding the modern world not as soulless but as the soul’s current form. >>

Not bad, eh?