This, however, requires that a contradiction in the way that psychology has previously been developed and practiced be overcome. In keeping with the positivistic spirit of recent centuries, most psychologies during this time have been committed to an empirical science approach even though such a methodology was not truly compatible with the discipline’s constituting insight about the psyche both creating and at the same time investigating itself.

​

The consequence of this has been the unfortunate one of psychology’s having saddled itself with a distorted conception of its subject matter. Down to the present day, most psychologies regard what they call “the inner” to be a function of something external in which this “inner” is enveloped. In such conceptions “the inner” is taken for granted to be the inwardness or subjectivity of the human person, of the individual’s personality and its component parts, and of what usual psychoanalytic psychologies call “the unconscious.” This, it is believed, can be reached introspectively, by reflecting upon oneself, for example.

​

But the true inner has no outside, nothing surrounding it. It is not the inside of people. Nor is it some sort of positively existing interior world. On the contrary, having been absolved from having to be yoked in a binary relation as the inner of some outer or the interiority of something external, its inwardness can be described as an absolute inwardness which is produced by a methodological stance that approaches each psychic phenomenon, whatever that may be (an affect, dream, idea, cultural artifact, life situation, or technological innovation) in a speculative manner such that the inner dialectical logic as which each matter of interest exists is allowed to think itself out and to become explicit.

​

At the time of its inauguration The Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority draws mainly upon the theoretical work of the Jungian psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Giegerich. In the course of a prolific writing career that commenced in the early 1970`s and which now spans four decades, Giegerich has made a most incisive contribution to a truly psychological psychology. Though not limited to or restricted by the contributions of this author, the Society has been formed, in part, by the compelling need felt by its founding members to draw the consequences of his theoretical work and to give these a real place within the depth psychological tradition while appreciating, at the same time, the place and significance of that tradition within the broader horizons of a history of consciousness perspective.

​

It is a matter of succession, on the one hand, and of the keeping up of a soulful tradition, on the other. The depth psychology that began with Freud, Adler, and Jung was itself but a late expression of the history of consciousness, the history of the soul. Passing through many stages and statuses on its way to becoming conscious of itself—stages such as the shamanic/ritualistic, the mythological, the religious, the metaphysical, and so on—consciousness only “came home to itself” very recently in such simultaneously phenomenal and theoretical expressions as the philosophies of the subject, medial modernity, and contemporary depth psychology. And to this list there may now be added psychology as the discipline of interiority.

​

Speculatively constituted, at once both the incumbent and anti-incumbent of the tradition to which it is heir, The International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority now welcomes into its membership individuals from any of a wide variety of backgrounds who share in its aims of studying and further unfolding the interiority of our human world-relation in its present determination as mindedness, thought, and logical life.