Category: Jung, Soul, and Modernity
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A History of Depth Psychology: Crisis of the Subject
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…
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Between Subjective and Objective Soul in Jung’s Psychological Project
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…
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Christianity’s Symbolic Limit
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…
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Alchemy’s Necessity
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,…
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Wolfgang Giegerich’s Answer to Jung
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…
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Does Jung’s Research Reveal Patterns in the Historical Unfolding of the Psyche?
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,…