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Like Volumes I and II of Giegerich's Collected English Papers, Vol. III, Soul-Violence, is astonishing and exciting for its depth and breadth of understanding of Jung, and especially for its advancement of Jung's seminal thinking. In Vol. I, The Neurosis of Psychology: Primary Papers towards a Critical Psychology, Giegerich subjects Jung's psychology to Jung's own dictum ‘that in psychology the means by which you judge the psyche is the psyche itself’ (Jung 1976, CW 18, para. 277) and rigorously argues for Jungian psychology to fully embrace Jung's insight (which he did not always stick to) that requires it to be the discipline of interiority and immanent relations. In addition, ‘staying with the phenomena’ dictates, Giegerich argues, the impossibility of an empirical and positivistic scientific psychology as a methodology for exploring the ‘reality of the objective psyche’, or ‘the reality of the soul’. In Vol. II, Technology and the Soul, Giegerich extends Jung's dictum that ‘staying with the phenomena’ means that all phenomena are to be apprehended as the expressions of ‘the soul's logical life’, including, in Vol. III, history.
Soul-Violence, which treats of the genesis of psychology in historical process, is astonishing for its compelling explication of the transformations of the ‘Other’ in the unfolding of psychology as the discipline of interiority, as psychology with ‘soul’. This discipline is the result of a process involving ‘the psychological demise, first of myth and ritual (the sacrificing cultures) and, secondly, of religion and metaphysics, which produced a compelling necessity for Western man to ‘become psychological’ after all epochs before, as Jung said, had been decidedly ‘unpsychological’ (p. 3).
The key to understanding Giegerich's hyphenation of ‘soul’ and ‘violence’ is to grasp violence as meaning the soul's logical violence, the transformation of consciousness from one logical form1 to another within consciousness. Thus psychology's method, as