Category: Jung, Soul, and Modernity

by Brenton L. Delp The Difference Between Philosophy and Psychology The comparison between Hegel’s Begriff (The German verb begreifen means “to grasp” or “to comprehend.” Thus Begriff carries the sense of an act of grasping intelligibility). Jung’s Archetype becomes most illuminating precisely at the point where they diverge. Both thinkers reject the modern empiricist assumption…

by Brenton L. Delp Jung matters after the war not because he floated above history as a timeless sage, and not because he merely reacted to catastrophe after the fact. He matters because the catastrophe of Europe made certain psychic and symbolic problems impossible to avoid, and his later work is one of the most…

by Brenton L. Delp Jung’s notion of the archetype becomes weakest when it is made too clear. The temptation is always the same: one wants a stable object, a symbolic inventory, a small theology of psychic figures. One wants to say that the archetype is this image, this motif, this mythic personage, this recurring pattern,…

Catastrophe, spiritual poverty, and the necessity of the later works by Brenton L. Delp Jung’s later writings are too often approached in one of two inadequate ways. They are either revered from a distance, as though they belonged to a sacred but inaccessible chamber of his thought, or they are appropriated in fragments, flattened into…

by Brenton L. Delp Carl G. Jung did not emerge in a world still secure in the old image of man. He became possible only after a long weakening of inherited unity had already taken place. What had once been assumed with relative confidence—that the human being formed a legible whole, that consciousness stood in…

One of the persistent difficulties in reading Jung with conceptual clarity is his use of the word soul. Jung never defines the term systematically, nor does he confine it to a single register of meaning. Yet this is not a failure of rigor. Rather, it reflects the structural position Jung occupies between philosophy, psychology, and…

Christ, Totality, and the Turn to Alchemy in Jung Jung’s engagement with Christianity begins neither as polemic nor as apology, but as diagnosis. Christianity, for Jung, represents the most complete symbolic articulation of psychic unity the Western world has produced. The figure of Christ functions psychologically as an image of wholeness, reconciliation, and meaning—what Jung…

JUNG: Totality, Process, and the Recovery of the Excluded Jung’s turn to alchemy does not arise from antiquarian curiosity, mystical inclination, or dissatisfaction with Christianity as such. It arises from a psychological necessity generated by his clinical and theoretical work. By the late 1920s, Jung had become convinced that modern individuals were encountering symbolic material—dreams,…

Completion, Not Compensation Any serious contemporary account of addiction that still draws on depth psychology must reckon with the fault line between C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Giegerich. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. Giegerich’s work represents a direct intervention into Jungian thought—one that corrects, completes, and in crucial respects overturns Jung’s…

Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology is often misunderstood as ahistorical, inward, or mythological in a purely symbolic sense. In fact, one of Jung’s most radical and consistent claims is that the psyche unfolds historically and becomes intelligible only through its historical manifestations. Jung does not treat history as a backdrop against which psychic life happens; rather,…