What is Soul? Where is Soul? Report from Berlin
Guild for Psychological Studies
© February 16, 2013
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
Faith Mason, MA
Introduction
I often say that the writings of Giegerich bear rereading. They not only bear rereading, but it is
necessary to reread his writings, because any understanding comes from the repeated, layered
encounters. The first book by Giegerich that I read was The Soul’s Logical Life (2001), and the
first two times I tried to read it, I could not get half way into it. I could not make him out. Still, I
had a sense of encountering something valuable, and on the third try it began to hang together.
Moreover, as I read others of his writings, I began to have the idea that his thinking, and
psychology as the discipline of interiority, might offer a frame within which some of the
befuddling experiences and observations of my life might make sense, even serve a creative end,
instead of seeming absurd, stupid, intractable or bleak.
Long before I considered becoming a psychotherapist, I read psychology books on vacation;
relevant to remarks on the way, one could even say that was a hobby of mine. Giegerich is a
Jungian analyst, and so I am curious about his views on psychotherapy. By the way, while
“psychotherapy” and “psychoanalysis” are not the same thing, either word may be used here,
with both referring to depth work in the tradition of Carl Jung, and not to the ego-based problemsolving that is often the focus in psychotherapy.
I am particularly prompted to address my topic today by several startling statements by
Giegerich, about therapy and psychology for individuals. Consider these:

Psychology has no higher status and collective significance than has a hobby or pastime. Just as
hobby and pastime have their place in the private life of individuals, so psychology has its place
only in the interiority… (2012a, p. 307-308)

As long as psychology is in fact acted out as one’s private self-indulgence, it is truthless. Just fun,
entertainment, or self-stabilization. (2010, p. 581)

If it is a question of no more than an infinitesimal grain that is put in the scales of humanity’s soul,
then Jung is right in asserting that psychotherapy may make such a contribution – because any
action, omission, thought might be such an infinitesimal grain; psychotherapy here is not
privileged. But as far as Menschheitsproblematik [the problem of humanity] is concerned,
psychotherapy is insignificant. It is fundamentally a private matter, fundamentally sublated,
disengaged, belonging at best, as it were, into what Husserl called the ‘life-world,’ but more
appropriately expressed into the sphere of spare-time entertainment, into a playground (that
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
playground that often is in psychotherapy, with an ennobling word, called temenos). The opus
magnum is somewhere else …(2010, p. 252)
What startling comments! Hobby! Pastime! Indulgence! Spare time entertainment! Insignificant!
A playground! What can he mean by these remarks? Is he minimizing the work of therapy? One
would think that Giegerich would think more highly of psychological healing work than these
statements suggest. After all, he is a Jungian analyst! And so, I have wondered: what else might
Giegerich have to say related to the doing of psychotherapy that would seem more serious than
these shocking words? What might be some of the implications or outgrowths from his style of
thinking for doing psychotherapy?
In assembling these quotes and ideas from Giegerich’s writings, I do not mean to say, to borrow
words often used in a question at Guild1 seminars, that these things are true because he says so.
Rather, I have searched in his writings for what his responses might be to the implied questions:
of what use is psychotherapy? What happens in therapy? Giegerich has some things to say that
go beyond the individual.
About psychological phenomena
So, let’s begin by asking: what brings people into therapy? Or maybe we should ask, what drives
them into therapy? People become discontent with their lives; sometimes that discontent focuses
on a particular aspect of life, or sometimes it is vague, with no specific problem to point to. Or
chaos has broken out. We find ourselves in a wilderness without a path. Old patterns of thinking,
believing, feeling, doing, choosing and relating do not work. We experience “discontinuities,
ruptures, inconsistencies, incoherencies” (2010, p. 18). Something intrudes, disrupts, and
disturbs and cannot be explained based on previous knowledge or experience (2012a, p. 89). A
will counter to our own insists, obsesses, wrecks our plans (2012a, p. 90) and appears as neurotic
symptom (2012a, p. 91).
When a client comes to therapy, we listen to the story, of the distress and the history
behind it. Giegerich suggests that we consider these phenomena as Soul speaking about itself and
not just the personal distress of the client. In describing psychological phenomena, he says they
are:

human statements like poetry or works of art, inasmuch as they are expressions of the soul’s speaking
to itself about itself. (2008, p.176)

the invisible “soul” or logic express[ing] itself in symbolic garb. (2010, p. 340)

the phenomenal aspect of the symbol push[ing] itself off from itself and point[ing] to some other,
something hidden. (2010, p. 340)
In therapy we can regard whatever presents itself as a phenomenon. We start where the client is.
This is a basic principle of psychotherapy. Giegerich states, “For me, the meaning of phenomena
1
Guild for Psychological Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
2
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
(that is, that they have a meaning) is a fundamental methodological presupposition of my
work…. Psychological phenomena are events of meaning.” (2008, p. 175). The emphasis here is
that we are listening for what of Soul is showing itself through the medium of the phenomenon.
One way to work with a psychological phenomenon is to treat it like a guest, invite it in, make
space for it, and welcome it (difficult as that may be). One way we may know that a phenomenon
needs attention is through the presence of fear. Giegerich points out that fear
is the first way in which the guest is both received and at the same time held off, in the sense of a
psychoanalytic defense. Why are fear and the guise of “enemy” the first glimmerings of
psychological awareness? Because they are evidence of the fact that consciousness is no longer
self-contained in a state of innocent, pleromatic harmony with itself, in which it knows of no
conflict with some Other, the unconscious or the non-ego. The existence of the enemy and the
threat he poses mean for consciousness that it has suffered a tear, a rupture. (2008, p. 89)
Elsewhere he adds,
People are usually incapable of understanding that, in themselves, symptoms, emotions, dreams,
images are thoughts, although of course ‘imprisoned’ in ‘the physicalness of matter,’ thoughts
sunk and frozen into positive-factual events and mental items. (2010, p. 18).
Therefore, in therapy, we hunt for the thought is that imprisoned in the phenomenon. Giegerich
offers a specific suggestion for finding entry:
Psychogenic body symptoms and affects are at bottom thoughts, but as it were, “materialized”
thoughts, thoughts submerged, sunk into the natural, physical medium of body or emotion. … In
general, we would establish the following series: body symptom is submerged emotion, emotion is
submerged image, image is submerged thought, and conversely, thought is sublated image, image
is sublated emotion, emotion is sublated body reaction or behavior. (2010, p. 334).
Therefore, we may encounter psychological phenomena at several levels: body, emotion, image,
or thought. We can ask at any point: which do we have here? And, encountering a particular
phenomenon, we can ask: what thought is buried or embedded in this phenomenon? If we
welcome this current phenomenon, what other manifestations, on this progression, appear? What
happens when we welcome it and look for what it is saying for Soul? Methods for welcoming
and inquiring include active imagination, drawing, clay, sound and movement. As we attend to
the phenomenon, we would do well to remember that
thinking is not really our subjective thinking, but the thoughts’ thinking themselves….It is one’s following
the thought’s or “matter’s” own internal dynamic, its will to come to its end. … our thinking it is only to
the extent that it is our “thinking-again” of its thinking….Thinking is the art to allow the matter that we are
dealing with to speak for itself. (2010, p. 16).
3
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
Neurosis as phenomenon
One particular kind of soul phenomenon is the experience of neurosis. While the DSM-IV (1995)
does not include this term as a disorder, most of us are well familiar with the term and the
experience of being beset by a neurosis. What does “neurosis” mean? Let’s look at some
definitions. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,
Neuroses are characterized by anxiety, depression, or other feelings of unhappiness or distress that
are out of proportion to the circumstances of a person’s life. They may impair a person’s
functioning in virtually any area of his life, relationships, or external affairs, but they are not
severe enough to incapacitate the person. Neurotic patients generally do not suffer from the loss of
the sense of reality seen in persons with psychoses.
Giegerich offers many different descriptions of neurosis. For example, in The Soul’s Logical
Life, he says that a neurosis is “a neurotic dissociation, invented to protect oneself from the
truth.” (2001, p. 156).
He also suggests that a neurosis is “a person’s unresolved pathogenic conflict, which,
because it is unresolved, is a pressing (but repressed) current, present-day problem for him or
her.” (2005, p. 104). In addition, he also says that
Neurosis comprehended as a project means the soul wants something, it wants to establish “The
Absolute” as an unshakeable powerful truth and principle … It wants this principle to become real
in lived life: a present reality, an obliging, committing truth, a fact….But usually people like to see
neurosis exactly the other way around, as caused by traumatizing events and by the ego’s defense
mechanisms … which, however, is itself the neurotic interpretation of neurosis….Neurosis is the
soul’s having become stubbornly set on cocooning itself (and together with itself also the person
suffering from it) in a scheme of which it precisely knows that it is its own untruth. (2012a, p.
165)
In another remark, he adds,
Neurosis is not, as many people think, a natural reaction to, or caused by, events or circumstances,
but rather fabricated. …As such, it is contra naturam [against nature, that is,] (a negation of, and
pushing off from, what is given),… which is the distinguishing mark which unmistakably shows
that what produces a neurosis is the soul rather than the ego personality (which only has to dearly
pay the price for the soul’s indulging in a neurosis). But the neurosis is also sick, because it is the
modern exteriorized soul’s deliberate decision against its own truth. (2012a, p. 166)
And finally,
Neuroses… are a devious, insidious plot on the part of the soul, with which it precisely disrupts,
and once and for all, puts a stop to its own self-movement. (2012a, p. 166)
In working with a neurosis that a client is afflicted with, then, we can inquire of it what it wants;
what is the thought or truth that lies behind it.
4
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
Projection as Soul phenomenon
One phenomenon we all are familiar with is the experience of projection. Commonly Jungian
psychology holds that projection is the projecting or throwing of a characteristic or trait of our
own onto someone else, and what is thrown is a disowned part of the self, often an unpleasant,
unwanted aspect but also possibly a positive but unrecognized aspect. A person unconsciously
projects this characteristic because he or she can see it in someone else but not in him- or herself.
Psychology commonly thinks of this throw as a throwing out, away, an ejection out of oneself
(2005, p. 72). But perhaps projection is an invitation (2005, p. 82), and the projected material or
aspect, when worked on, “withdrawn,” comes home to us for the first time (2005, p. 83).
Moreover, it may be Soul that wants to reown the projection, and uses the human to do so. Again
we can look for the truth, for the client and for Soul that is being expressed by the projection.
Transference as Soul phenomenon
Two particular forms of projection that occur in psychotherapy are transference and
countertransference, forms of projection between client and therapist. These are common
experiences in therapy, perhaps even guaranteed. In some forms of therapy it is a methodology
to focus on these projections. Clients are encouraged to be aware of and to work with their
projections upon the therapist as a means of working through wounds of the past.
Similarly, the experience of countertransference – feelings and responses evoked in the therapist
by the client – not only may point to unfinished business that the client evokes in the therapist,
but also can provide information about the client’s state.
Beyond the two people in the room, however, it is important to attend to Soul’s transference.
What truth about itself is Soul trying to bring forth?
Giegerich believes that transference should not necessarily be a focus or standard methodology
of therapy. He says,
Transference and countertransference feelings with a Jungian analysis only need to be attended to
when they either make themselves felt in analysis of their own accord or when unconscious
transference fantasies or emotions conversely interfere with the smooth movement of the
therapeutic process. There is a great difference between on principle basing one’s therapeutic work
on the transference relationship, using it as the essential horizon of therapy, on the one hand, and
therapeutically attending to transference phenomena as they in fact spontaneously manifest
themselves, on the other hand. (2012a, p. 248)
He also says,
One important example [of transference] is when, in the relationship with the therapist, the
neurotic soul restages some theme of which it actually, deep down … already knows that it is no
longer true, but that needs to be dramatically staged once more for the benefit of consciousness
and in fact relived and spelled out in all its brutal detail as if it were absolutely real, this for the [s-
5
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
o-u-l] soul purpose of enabling consciousness to explicitly depart from it and in full awareness
finally own up to its obsolescence. One always has to know what that which is a thing of the past
is in order to be able to psychologically leave it behind. (2012a, p. 249)
The phenomenon of failure
A more startling possibility for a Soul-phenomenon is that of failure. We human beings
do not like the experience of failure. In spite of our efforts, some task or goal we have attempted
has not been met. We commonly have the ego-based response of distress, embarrassment,
shame, reduced self-esteem, a sense of being defective, and often anger. But perhaps failure
could be considered, on a Soul level, as Soul speaking about itself, beyond the personal trials of
the client.
There is a story about failure that Giegerich recounts in The Soul’s Logical Life, paraphrased in
part here:
The god Thor travels to Utgård [literally, the realm without, what is outside the garden] to visit the
king Utgårda-Loki. The king and his men, all giants, greet him with scorn because he is only a
small human, and demand that he demonstrate his reputed skills of enormous strength. He agrees.
With chuckles, they ask him to lift the king’s cat, who is reclining on the floor in front of the king.
Thor thinks “oh, that will be easy!” He grasps her under her belly, and tries with all his might, but
the cat only arches her back and settles back on the floor. Thor tries one more time, and fails again
to lift her, although he does manage to get one paw off the ground. It is time for Thor to leave, and
he is distressed and confused that he has been unable to lift a mere cat. But as he reaches the gate,
Utgårda-Loki reveals to him the reason for his failure. What Thor saw as a cat was in fact a small
section of the Midgard Serpent, the serpent that circles the entire earth. Utgårda-Loki and his
giants were frightened because, with the lifting of the paw, Thor was dangerously close to tearing
the serpent loose from the earth, almost breaking the uroboric circle that held the earth together.
(2001, p. 55, paraphrased)
Clearly, Thor “did not realize beforehand what he was really dealing with….It was only his
failure that forced him to realize that what he had been struggling with must have been more than
an empirical cat…. In this sense his failure is testimony to the archetypal nature of his
experience.” (2001, p 56.)
For our clients, it may be through the experience, the phenomenon, of failure that he or she
comes to realize that what he or she is grappling with is more than a personal matter. It may be
that through his or her failure, he or she becomes aware that there is “an invisible and
unfathomable depth” (2001, p. 57) to the issue that has arisen in therapy. Then the task is again
to ask “where does this belong?” and “what is Soul’s speaking here?” These questions provide
the beginning of a different frame for what the client has seen as a personal failure. The client’s
so-called failure may be a necessary part of Soul’s unfolding. In listening for Soul’s speaking,
“we hold our place in the absolute contradiction of dead end and continued faithfulness to our
purpose.” (2010, p. 172)
6
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
Doing therapy
What is the role and responsibility of the therapist in confronting Soul phenomena with his or her
client? Often the client arrives wanting to be rid of his or her symptoms, his or her suffering, and
may not be interested in listening for Soul’s speaking in his or her experience. Our clients may
not like this at first, but working with Soul phenomena means to give up the goal of being free
from symptoms (2005, p. 109); the symptoms are a piece of Soul worthy of attention. Therefore,
to affirm soul always means to affirm psychopathology. (2005, p. 109) This is an especially
difficult pill to swallow. It may fall to the therapist to hold this consciousness before the client is
able to do so. The therapist and client need to shift their emphasis away from the goal of cure and
“not ask how…[the phenomenon or neurosis] could be removed, but where it belongs.” (2005, p.
110). Giegerich speaks of the importance of drawing forth the thought of the phenomenon:
The question is not how the person in each case would have to develop in the sense of finality, but
how the psychic impulse can unfold and “complete” itself. What is the final aim and end (telos) of
the symptom? …Which structure of consciousness is necessary for it to receive a home in us? ….
The alteration that psychotherapy wants to bring about is thus not a modification of behavior
through our development, but the fulfillment of the phenomenon that at first appeared only in
distorted or stunted form. (2005, p. 110).
He adds,
It is essential to realize that it is I (and no-one else) who has to pay the bill for whatever was done
to me or whatever I was deprived of, and it is essential that I finally pay it! Because nobody else
can pay this price. (2012a, p. 246).
This sounds like a difficult prescription indeed! Clients are usually quite dedicated to their state
as victim. This work “requires our ‘taking the trouble’ to learn to grasp and appreciate in detail
what is really said and meant, our getting down to brass tacks….” (2012a, p. 251)
Remember one of the definitions of neurosis: “a neurotic dissociation, invented to protect
oneself from the truth.” (2001, p. 156). In therapy, then, client and therapist can look, via the
phenomena, for the truth Soul might be speaking. And these efforts are not primarily for the sake
of the patient, but for Soul. “One does precisely not do justice to the patient if one considers him,
i.e., the patient in his positivity, to be the true patient of therapy. Who is the true patient? It is the
prima materia… as they play through the life of the singular patient in the consulting room.”
(2001, p. 71). The healing for the patient is secondary:
Therapy does not overcome, but on the contrary fully initiates into, that (archetypal) world that is
called neurosis (and which is embodied in psychology). It is this initiation that relieves the
individual person. (2005, p 56)
7
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
Conclusion
When Hal Childs, Harry Henderson, Richard Naegle, Janet Petroni, John Petroni, and I met
informally with Giegerich during the ISPDI conference in July, 2012, we asked him about his
remark about psychology as a hobby. He said simply that it is his hobby because this form of
thinking is what he likes to do. (2012b). This use of the term “hobby” is not dismissive. What
does it mean, to “like to do something”? Perhaps something more than ego entertainment,
distraction, or relaxation, perhaps alignment with the life of Soul. Perhaps the thought of
“hobby” itself has sublated itself to a new level.
In considering the perspective of Soul in psychotherapy, we can consider an invitation, a Zen
koan: How is this phenomenon giving voice to Soul? How is Soul using us human beings as a
voice for its speaking? Referring to sorting out at which level the work of psychotherapy should
be addressed, the human, all-too-human, or Soul, Giegerich suggests that “we have to know
when it is a question of the one and when of the other.” (2012a, p. 316). That is a koan in itself.
We can recognize that as humans, we are the stage on which Soul plays out its never-ending recreation.
One last quote from Giegerich:
This is precisely what the Jungian approach demands of us in therapy: to meet each person, indeed
each moment, in its singularity, … to release ourselves, without logical safety nets, into the
freshness and newness of each present moment and into the atomic subjectivity of ourselves – in
order to discover in it, only in it, our true universal humanness…. This is not a lofty program for the
illumination of the world, but a little light that is to be carried, in the silence and unseenness of what
we as individuals do, through the night of our present. (2007, p. 336)
8
Faith Mason, MA
Possible Implications of Interiority for Psychotherapy
© February 16, 2013
References
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM IV: international version with ICD-10
codes.4th ed. (1995) Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Psychoneurosis. In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/481779/psychoneurosis
Giegerich, W. (2001). The Soul’s logical life. 3rd rev. ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Giegerich, W. (2005). The Neurosis of psychology: primary papers towards a critical psychology.
Collected English papers, vol. 1. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.
Giegerich, W. (2007). Technology and the Soul: from the nuclear bomb to the world wide web.
Collected English papers, vol. 2. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.
Giegerich, W. (2008). Soul-violence. Collected English papers, vol. 3. New Orleans: Spring Journal
Books.
Giegerich, W. (2010). The Soul always thinks. Collected English papers, vol. 4. New Orleans: Spring
Journal Books.
Giegerich, W. (2012a). What is soul? New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.
Giegerich, W. (2012b) Private conversation.
Jung, C.G. (1957-1979) The Collected works of C.G. Jung.
9