You Are Here (Now)

Abstract

James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich always acknowledged each other’s contributions toward the advancement of what both considered foundational to C.G. Jung’s project: his insight into psyche’s uroboric logic, soul’s dialectical sense. Psychology therefore necessarily lacks an external “Archimedean” point from which to interpret ourselves and our world, yet it is at the same time absolutely dedicated to the real phenomena which appear to us (and as us). A truly psychological psychology is a contra-natural realism that can bring us home to our very nature and our actual lives, but not without initially subverting our every natural habit of thought and alienating us from the “day-world” perspective via what Hillman called the “underworld,” as illustrated through the author’s own youthful experience of clinical depersonalization. Alternately citing the words of Hillman and Giegerich, the essay brings into relief psychology as syzygy – an eternally revolutionary, self-generating, self-subverting movement. It examines, first, their shared idea of “soul” as methodological rather than substantial, then the duplicitous phenomenology of the dream, and finally the discipline of image as entryway to uroboric interiority, addressing as well the “divergence” sparked by Giegerich’s critique of Hillman in order to conclude with the question of psychology’s response to modernity.