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: “Soul is not gone; it has moved, it has changed its mode of being.” 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?

I'm sure everyone is too busy to check this Forum, but I wanted to say how much I miss not being at the conference and seeing you all. It's the first one I've ever missed! Think hard and have a grand time! Michael

In his essay, “A note on ‘soul’, ‘man’, anthropology and psychology”, Marco Heleno Barreto writes that "sometimes (nay, very often) we tend to hide from ourselves the obvious necessary presence of a human agent in order to perform the making of psychology, as if bringing any sign of human presence into our understanding of psychology-making would ipso facto throw us back into the personalistic notion of psychology, ego-psychology." This is a conundrum that comes up often in our ISPDI discussions and surely in our own wrestling with these notions. How does the actual, empirical human "I" relate to the practice of psychological thinking, when we know from Giegerich that this practice is precisely a "non-I" discipline, in which ego is as if dead? How do we take responsibility for our interpretive activity ("Hic!") while ensuring that it represents what we would call the phenomenon thinking itself out through us? This is just the kind of apparent duality that stops our thinking up short. Yet we readily accept that a "human agent" named Wolfgang Giegerich has indeed performed in his writings "the making of psychology". So we do actually recognize a reality that exceeds the terms of either/or thinking, yet that is not merely something other than its two apparent options; and we know intuitively that any complete sense of this reality will somehow require both truths to be fully actualized: it must be acknowledged as being 100% Wolfgang Giegerich doing his thinking and his writing, and 100% the phenomenon thinking itself out through him. The two somehow dissolve into each other through the production of a single psychological interpretation. We still have trouble articulating how this can be the case, however, and even more challenging is how to conceptualize such an approach for ourselves, in our own thinking. This manifests in the kind of thing Marco describes: that "we tend to hide from ourselves" – that is, bracket out of our thinking – one side of the conflict, focusing instead on a catch-phrase like "letting the phenomenon think itself out through us" without a clear grasp of just what this means in reality, just what it entails for the activity of psychological thinking. I'm not proposing an answer to this particular question here, merely using this as an example of the sort of phenomenon that calls for dialectical thinking. Its two sides must be thought together, and this entails that our thinking transform itself, becoming dialectical in order to be true to the reality it seeks to articulate. Whatever this might mean in practice, such must be our goal, must represent the form toward which our thinking strives. This may seem daunting or confusing, but if we go back to what is before us and acknowledge that it does in fact embody these two sides (e.g., that Giegerich does indeed make psychology by letting the phenomena think themselves out through his writing), then we have a chance at clarifying this living reality through our conceptual efforts, at developing a structural understanding of a reality in motion – including how to repeat it in our own efforts.

Hegel's notion of aufheben is "dialectics in a word". His particular (though not linguistically incorrect way) use of the common German term itself contains the key to understanding what constitutes "dialectical movement". It is now generally understood that aufheben is not a simplistic "thesis + antithesis = synthesis". This old method of explaining sublation has long been discredited, not only because it's simply not what Hegel meant (most of the time). He and the Idealists would reject it because it's a prime example of "finite thinking" (or "the Understanding" or "the natural mind"), which his philosophical Science aims to overcome (indeed, to sublate): a finite "1" is added to another finite "1" (even if they may be defined as being "opposed" to each other) to produce a finite "2" (a sum or melding or "conjunction" of the previous finite quantities.). But thinking itself is not transformed by this kind of movement (unless one imagines a mystical sort of experience from a mystified notion of "conjunction"), and Hegel's ultimate goal is the transformation of our thinking of Being. We're also familiar with the more accurate and truly Hegelian definition, in which three seemingly contradictory notions are taken together: to "sublate" is to negate, to preserve, and to elevate. Our "natural" understanding tends to place the three terms in a sort of time sequence: first we "negate", during or after which we also somehow "preserve" (despite having "negated"), and this allows us to "elevate" the original notion. This sort of seems reasonable, but it remains very difficult to grasp just what's going on in these movements. Instead, there's another way of understanding the relationship of the three terms that demystifies dialectical thinking very neatly. At the outset, we are in a situation of wishing or needing to move from a point at which two figures or positions are stuck in opposition, and to one in which this deadlock has been broken through, the stalemate resolved, and our understanding refined. This is the situation that calls for a resolution by means of dialectical thinking, and the movement required here is to bridge the aporia, the seemingly insurmountable difference. But how? We neither combine nor neutralize the two "sides", but (merely!) come to realize how they are already combined precisely in their stance of mutual opposition. We "negate" the entirety of the terms' own first-level negation (of the terms by each other) not by rejecting it, but by elevating our own viewpoint – or to put it the other way around: once we've seen the two sides in their function as mutually defining, we have elevated our viewpoint. The "elevation" is something that occurs to our position, to the stance from which we do our thinking, and this is what it allows us to see that the two sides were always-already dialectically interconnected, indeed that they are constituted precisely in and by their interdependence. The opposition of the "sides" is negated as such, but is in the same movement (i.e., not afterwards or as a consequence) preserved as the manner in which they together form one figure, one "shape of consciousness". Once the two "sides" are recognized as the whole (if inherently dirempted) figure they together constitute, our original position (which at first consisted only of these two sides and their opposition) has been "sublated". And this newly achieved position is now itself ready to be "negated" and "preserved" by being identified as "one side" of a more comprehensive whole, and thereby "sublated" or elevated into the next stage of dialectically-driven development. So the very word aufheben, in Hegel's usage, is itself a perfect example of "the dialectic". It contains two moments, one made up of "negate and preserve" and the other of "elevate". The first moment constitutes what happens to our original position and its two opposed sides: they are negated and preserved, and this simultaneous negation/preservation itself is the second moment, sublation as such, in which the two sides are recognized as mutually determining aspects of a single, internally differentiated figure. To elevate IS "to negate and preserve", or again the other way around, to negate and preserve IS "to elevate"; the meaning of "elevation" is "negation-and-preservation", and the combined result of "negation-and-preservation" is "elevation".

Hi! Just wanted to drop by and say congrats to the Exec and to all who helped get the site up and running. Looks nice! And it's great to have all that material available - the archived threads, conference presentations, galleries... Sweet! Michael