Dear Colleagues, I want to follow-up on my comment about using philosophical consideration of absolute negativity to inform our concept of soul with an example from Hegel, the master-slave dialectic. Hegel is not primarily interested in history here but rather in (what we might call) the logical life of consciousness. He traces the progression of consciousness from its rudimentary status of immediate "sense certainty" to self-consciousness. The progression is driven from one stage to the next by contradiction and negation. At the stage of Hegel's narrative in which the master-slave dialectic appears consciousness needs to establish its autonomy from the body and its survival drive. The need arises to place the demands of consciousness above body. Life must be risked. Contempt for survival must be shown. Hegel’s offers a story in which one consciousness (or person) in this status encounters another consciousness (person) in this status, and there ensues a fight to the death. Hegel explains: • The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the other's death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other.,' it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality. Phenomenology of the Spirit, p. 114. At a certain point in the fight to the death, one of the fighters decides he does not want to die and submits to the other. The victor becomes the master and the defeated becomes the slave, per Hegel. The aim of this process is to move mere consciousness to self-consciousness. The master-slave relationship represents the step in that process whereby the differentiated character of self-consciousness is distributed between two persons, the master and the slave. Hegel concludes, for various reasons, however, that it is the slave, not the master, who rises to self-consciousness through this dialectic.  Phenomenology of the Spirit, pp. 116-119. Hegel addresses an alternate scenario in which (apparently) both fighters kill each other. No dialectic can arise from that, rather obviously. Hegel observes: • Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say, they put an end to themselves, and are done away with as extremes wanting to be for themselves, or have an existence of their own. But with this there vanishes from their interplay the essential moment of splitting into extremes with opposite characteristics; and the middle term collapses into a lifeless unity which is split into lifeless, merely immediate, unopposed extremes; and the two do not reciprocally give and receive back from each other consciously, but leave each other free only indifferently, like things. Their act is an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives in its own supersession. Phenomenology, pp. 114-115. Hegel’s point is well taken. However, there are not only two possible outcomes of the battle to the death—one prevailing, and the other submitting to the other, or both killing each other. There is a third possibility: one kills the other, but lives. It is this possibility I would like to explore because I do not believe that Hegel’s characterization when both parties die applies when one person kills the other and survives. Let me offer an alternate version of the story. (Please forgive the poetic license): A single road traversed a valley enclosed on either side by sheer rock walls. Gunnar, outfitted in his blue tribal colors, entered the narrow valley at one end, and Sigurd, dressed in red, entered from the other. There was no question of what would occur. Neither could cede the road to the other. Only one way led out of the valley: over the dead body of the other. Twenty paces apart, the warriors stopped, gauged the other, and began shouting curses. Their blood burned, boiled, then turned to white hot rage. The warriors charged. Their blades bit metal and frail flesh. The battle raged until the sun lowered into the far end of the valley sending all life into shadow—Sigurd’s life more than any other, for with the light’s waning it became clear Sigurd would die. The moment came. Gunnar lifted high his sword for the death blow. With his last strength, Sigurd straightened and stared defiant hate into Gunnar’s eyes. Gunnar’s blade fell and sliced Sigurd’s head from his body. It thumped to the earth. Left standing, Sigurd’s headless body wavered, stumbled, then fell like a tree. The valley, which moments before echoed with the curses and cries of warriors was imaginably silent. Gunnar stared down at the corpse, and its severed head with eyes that still stared defiance. It lay infinitely still. The image burned into Gunnar's mind like fire. Suddenly, the valley echoed with a laugh. Sigurd! Gunnar spun around expecting to see Sigurd standing over him, sword raised. But there was nothing. Gunnar hurriedly dug a grave with his sword, dragged Sigurd’s headless body into it and settled the head back onto the bloody neck. He shut the staring eyes with a shudder, covered the corpse, spoke the rites of departure and rushed from the valley. But he did not leave Sigurd behind. Not in that moment, nor any moment after. The battle clung to him like a shadow: the staring into Sigurd’s burning eyes, the defiant cries, curses and blows, the severing of the head, the deafening silence of death and Sigurd’s final burning, distant stare. It played through his mind, as victory, then as torment, then as reconciliation, and finally as transformation. Something happened. Flowers never shone as bright for Gunnar after that day. He never sang gaily again. But neither did he ever again steer his mount away from a grave. It was said that from that day forward Gunnar fought with the strength of two men. And when he lay aside his sword he gave his tribe wise counsel until he breathed his last and was laid to rest next to Sigurd. This tale illustrates how a Hegelian killing generates absolute negativity—at least to me. I would welcome your thoughts. Dan

Dear Colleagues, Soul is the central concern of PDI. A difficulty arises in the fact that soul as defined by Giegerich, and as conceived as psychology, is unique to his work. In any field or discipline, growth can be stunted in the absence of complementary views which spur development. This is pure Hegel: only through contradiction--or at a minimum, difference--can change occur. Of course, the difference has to be complementary. A new view of the Hegelian dialectic can only arise by engaging with an adequate understanding of that dialectic and responding to it accordingly. 20th Century philosophy has many such examples of such engagement: Derrida, Bataille, etc. How could that occur within PDI? I believe the possibility exists through the concept of absolute negativity. Absolute negativity is the bridge concept to other disciplines. How? Giegerich clearly defines the soul as absolute negativity: "we arrive at the idea of a logically negative autonomous or objective soul" (Giegerich, What is Soul?). While Giegerich's notion of soul is unique to him--Jung never used the term absolute negativity--the concept of absolute negativity is not. Hegel, of course, defines self-consciousness in terms of absolute negativity. "But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness." Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 117. Starting with Hegel, there is a rich philosophical literature which engages with the concept of absolute negativity. I would suggest this literature could help enrich and develop our concept of soul. Daniel Anderson

Dear Colleagues, I am working my way through Hegel's Phenomenolo9y of the Spirit. There is so much material here, seemingly untapped by psychology. To take one example, in Hegel's renowned master-slave parable, in the fight to the death the slave submits out of mortal fear of death. Hegel notes that while the consciousness of the master apparently successfully differentiates by being supplemented by the consciousness of the slave, in the end it is the slave's consciousness that differentiates more fully. And this is due to the experience of fear: "For this [slave's] consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness." PoS, p. 117. It is an interesting fact that Freud wrote almost nothing about consciousness. I believe that is due to the fact that he worked from the bottom up, from the instincts and the psychic, and you just cannot reach consciousness that way--just as fruitless as the ancient Babylonians' attempt to build a tower high enough to reach Heaven. You can only understand consciousness if you start within consciousness. That is what Hegel did. And he concluded that within consciousness there is what Freud would call a "drive" for self-differentiation. Within this framework mortal fear is manifestly useful. Such fear not only prompts but it reflects the "pure universal movement ... of self-consciousness, absolute negativity." To put it more accurately (again, in Freudian terms) there is a drive within consciousness to self-differentiation alongside a powerful resistance against such reorganization. How many of the assumptions of everyday therapy--which, in the final analysis is beholden to the pleasure principle of minimizing anxiety and depression and promoting adaptation--would change if its stance were not rooted in the body, in the psychic and feelings, but in consciousness itself? Quite a few, I would imagine. But that work of re-imagining psychology from within consciousness would be an undertaking. Of course, Giegerich's work moves in that direction. And he naturally borrows quite a lot from Hegel. But he chose to ground his psychology in soul, certainly in part for historical reasons. His work grew out of his involvement in Archetypal psychology, whose central concept was soul. Obviously, soul as a notion was important to Jung, but it was really Hillman that established soul as the core of Archetypal psychology's revision of Jung's project. So, this gets me to my question for which I would appreciate any thoughts you have. What is the essential difference between consciousness--as framed by Hegel, not Freud, who viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon--and soul? Are there essential differences? Thank you in advance, Dan

First, thanks to the Executive Committee for making available to us Giegerich's 6/23 article responding to Marco's article that included a discussion on the Genesis story of the Fall--which later the Church as interpreted as original sin. Giegerich makes a valuable point that there is a more psychological reading of this story than one of punishment by God for disobedience. He emphasizes the salutary outcome of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit: acquisition of knowledge and an emergence from a dreaming bubble of innocence into real life. But I believe Giegerich overlooks an important aspect of the story. The story of the Fall emphasizes not only the acquisition of knowledge but also the initiation of suffering. Again, this can be looked at simplistically as a punishment for disobeying God, which was later seen by the Church as the first (or original) sin. But more psychologically the story points to the origin of suffering. What is suffering? We have to distinguish suffering from pain and unpleasure. Any animal experiences pain but does it experience suffering in the human sense? Clearly, the Genesis story states that woman will experience pain in childbirth unlike before because of Eve's trespass into knowledge. But it also points to another sort of suffering: women being subjected to and ruled over by men. This is psychological suffering, unknown in the non-human animal kingdom. What then makes for genuine human suffering (apart from simple pain)? I'll leave that unanswered for the moment other than to note that in Buddhism and other Eastern religions suffering is linked to desire (and delusion). And what prompted Eve to eat the fruit? Desire--both in its physical, sensual form and its intellectual form, the desire for knowledge. We have then this tripartite relationship of "desire-knowledge-suffering," as well as expulsion from communion with God. Note that in the Garden, God walked around together with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:8). I would suggest that the story of the Fall is more than just a psychological portrayal of coming down to earth from the "cloud cuckoo land" of Paradise. It also speaks more broadly to the complex relation between consciousness/knowledge, desire and suffering.