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Dialectics & Analytical Psychology: The El Capitan Canyon Seminar (Studies in Archetypal Psychology)

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This book is a collection of papers presented by Wolfgang Giegerich and Greg Morgensen at a seminar devoted to the post-Jungian thought of Wolfgang Giegerich and it serves as the perfect introduction to Wolfgang Giegerich's dialectical version of analytical psychology. This book is an extremely clear and lucid presentation of Wolfgang Giegerich's dialectical analytical psychology. This is the first book of Wolfgang Giegerich's that I have read and while I have been interested in Jungian psychology for a number of years now I am far from being an expert. Despite my lack of expertise I still found this book to be very accessible. I should point out that I am fairly familiar with the history of philosophy, since I am a philosophy student, and with the development of German Idealism in particular which I have studied fairly extensively. Since Hegel is a major player in this book my fairly basic familiarity with the movement of German Idealism definitely helped me in understanding this book but I think this book would still be accessible even to those who have not studied German Idealism.

Wolfgang Giegerich reenacts within the field of analytical psychology the development that took place in philosophy between Kant and Hegel (the comparison is made explicit in Greg Morgensen's first paper in this volume). Stated briefly Kant's thought was still burdened with an external 'thing-in-itself' that limited thought (an unknown X). Hegel's development of Kant's thought consisted in the insight that this 'thing-in-itself' was itself a thought (an in-itself that was posited by consciousness within a particular form or stage of consciousness); rather then halting at this particular stage in the development of consciousness, a stage at which thought is still burdened with an in-itself that is external to thought, Hegel would have us enter into the phenomenon we are attempting to think and follow its own internal dialectical development in order to know it from the inside. Wolfgang Giegerich enacts a similar movement from what he perceives to be Jung's more Kantian perspective to his own Hegelian perspective.

It is worth quoting Morgensen's essay on this subject fairly extensively because this cuts to the very heart of the nature of psychology and the brilliance and distinctiveness of Wolfgang Giegerich's understanding of psychology. Morgensen writes, "as Kant has shown, the empirically observing mind is not merely the passive register of information received from without. Rather, it actively forms the information conveyed to it via the senses into cognitively amenable representations by means of such transcendental categories as quality, quantity, relation, modality, and the various sub-categories of these" (pg69). Just like Kant modern depth psychology "is rooted, not in images that are derived reproductively or a posteriori from the world...but, rather, in an a priori (Jung would say, archetypal) productive factor...Jung writes that '...images are surely answers to external facts and conditions, but they are the answers of the psyche and therefore produce accurate pictures of psychic facts. If you compare the sun-myth to the actual experience of the senses, then you see the whole difference'" (pg69). Giegerich, in good Hegelian fashion, is critical of Jung's distinction between the psyche on the one hand and the external facts and conditions on the other. The problem is that Jung's thought is burdened with a positive outside that is merely in an external relation to an equally positive inside. We have external reality in all of its objectivity on one side and subjective projections in all their interior positivity on the other side which are simply laid over the external facts. This led Jung to adopt an empirical stance within his own psychology that is inconsistent with his own claim that there is no Archimedean position from outside the psyche from which to view it. Jung simply attempted to turn his empirical gaze inward to see the subjective projections of the psyche as positive realities existing in themselves "He looked, that is to say, from outside, as if the psyche's categories were objects in front of him" (pg.70). Morgensen contrasts this method with Giegerich's method, "Critical of Jung's approach, Giegerich would have us go the other way, the way of entering into the phenomenon in question in such a way that the a priori intensiveness of thought may fathom the logic of that phenomenon from within" (pg70). Psychology, according to Giegerich, has to do with the interior; not the interior understood as what is inside the mind (a positive mental reality to match the positive reality of the external world) but the interior understood as the interiorization that takes place in the development of thought (of the reflection into itself of the concept as it unfolds its various moments as the identity of identity and difference). Psychology no longer refers to what is 'inside' the mind but to this process of interiorization within the concept. This may sound highly abstract but Giegerich provides concrete examples illustrating this process of interiorization that takes place in thought and the concept (and myth is a form of thought for Giegerich so his examples are interpretations of myths).

Giegerich interprets a number of myths in terms of the different stages of Hegel's dialectic (simple negation, the negation of the negation, and something Giegerich calls 'absolute negative interiorization'). Giegerich's interpretations of myth are extremely compelling, much more so in my opinion than most Jungian interpretations of myths that I have read. The distinctiveness of Giegerich's approach lies in his treating myths as veiled thoughts (hence the title of another volume of Giegerich's essays: The Soul Always Thinks). Each myth attempts to think a simple idea (in the first myth Giegerich analyzes the thought is the concept of transcendence which is unfolded in the myth of a glass mountain and the attempts made by a trio of brothers to ascend the mountain a story which unfolds the various logical moments contained in the concept of transcendence in the form of a narrative). Giegerich avoids the simplistic mistake of viewing Hegel's dialectic in terms of thesis-antithesis-and synthesis. As Giegerich rightly points out Hegel's dialectic is not concerned with synthesizing two externally related, contradictory ideas but rather in developing the inner contradictions of a single concept and reuniting them in a concept which is no longer immediate but is mediated by its own internal differences (the identity of identity and difference). Geigerich believes that myth carries through this same process but in the form of narratives and images. Geigerich also believes that the soul develops historically (the objective psyche in Jung's terms). While some Jungians tend to be regressive in the sense that they would like to return us to a mythical form of thought before the advent of abstract, scientific thinking Giegerich does not believe that this is possible. The soul must exist in the cultural world that it finds itself in, and for us this means the world of modern science and abstract thought.

In my opinion there are two groups of people who should definitely read this book: those interested in Jungian psychology, and those interested in Hegelian thought. If you are like me and you are interested in both then this book is simply required reading (it is not optional). Beyond that this book I think would be extremely interesting for anyone with a general interest in psychology, or the interpretation of myth, or simply the nature of human thought [As a sidenote: I would say that this book should also be very interesting to those who are interested in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze is very critical of the Hegelian description of the movement of thought in terms of negation, which he calls false movement, and attempts to develop his own account of what moves thought. Since Giegerich follows Hegel in his descriptions of the movement of thought he provides an excellent foil to Deleuze and vice versa].

In summary, I will simply give this little book my very highest recommendation.