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Wolfgang Giegerich's latest book The Soul Always Thinks takes its title from Bishop Berkeley. The introduction of this fourth volume of Collected English Papers defines what Giegerich means by ‘the soul’, a term he uses as a methodological assertion not an ontological one. According to Giegerich, the soul is the on-going objective thought or logical life as which psychic phenomena exist, the emphasis being on the lack of a substantiated soul as a separate producing agent behind the psychic phenomena.
Until 1984, Giegerich was an uncritical admirer of Jung and identified with the latter's intent to see the archetype at work in psychic phenomena. Likewise, with the intent of archetypal psychology to view everything imaginally in terms of the Gods. Giegerich is critical of both approaches, though it is noteworthy that Chapter 15 is dedicated to James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, ‘in deep gratitude and in friendship’ (p. 379).
The nub of Giegerich's criticism of Jung is that the latter hypostatized the objective soul by the use of terms such as ‘the unconscious’, ‘the collective unconscious’ and ‘the archetypes’ which Giegerich sees as ideas cut off from their social, cultural and historical context. Despite this, Giegerich insists that he remains true to Jung, in particular to his introduction of the concept of the soul into psychology and his later work on alchemy. Chapter 12, The Study of the Soul's Logical Life, highlights the title of Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry Into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy as an illustration of Jung's later thinking where psyche is envisaged as movement and no longer rests on subsisting entities. Alchemy comes home to itself through the slow, small steps at work in Giegerich's writing. Here the alchemical opus of fermenting corruption, sublimation, distillation is performed on the initial form or prime matter (cultural phenomenon, symptom, dream) that falls within his purview unt