You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Giegerich can be relied on to express his contributions in the challenging voice of a seer.
Although some of Giegerich's thoughts about the most important topic of our day had been vaguely on my mind, his provocative formulations came as something of a relief: here, at last, a psychologist takes a fresh look at this awesome phenomenon, the container of destructiveness and of a mighty idea which has become reality. The phenomenon (italics mine) cannot be got rid of by the familiar attitude of ‘call-in-the-experts’, nor by emotionally determined appeals for political action. With his remarkable talent for turning the world upside-down, i.e., the known into ‘the imaginal’, Giegerich wades in and calls the first section of his essay, ‘Rescuing the atom bomb’. This is followed by ‘The atom bomb as psychic reality’. ‘A history of the atom bomb's origin’ makes up the third part in which he compares the terror of our time with the terrors of the seventeenth century. Without omitting the very real possibility of an actual and total destruction of the world, the author draws parallels between the ways in which western humanity met terror as a nocturnal phenomenon. He even suggests a way of meeting it. Categories like ‘for or against’, ‘good and evil’, ‘patriarchal—matriarchal’, or ‘repressed aggression’ just will not do. Much more differentiated work is required on the psychological (spirit and soul) plane to match the scientific-technological development which made the bomb real. We simply deceive ourselves if we believe we can be against something that we, at one and the same time, produce. According to Giegerich, such counterphobic behaviour results precisely in what we arc trying to free ourselves