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Mark Saban's article—‘Another serious misunderstanding: Jung, Giegerich and a premature requiem’—surprised me negatively. I regard Saban as one of the intelligent minds at work within the Jungian field. But the argument he offers in his paper is not only constructed on the basis of misinterpretations and lack of understanding of the complex thought of Wolfgang Giegerich and of my own paper (some of which I will address in a moment), and—horribile dictu—even of Jung, but it also reveals a hidden goal, which would not be justifiable to an open-minded scholarly forum of Jungian studies such as the Journal of Analytical Psychology. Hence, I would like to start my response to his paper by exposing its deeper nature.
Saban declares that his intention is, ‘merely to show that, contrary to Giegerich's repeated protestations, the “rigorous notion” at [the] centre [of his psychology] finds no source in Jung's psychology, implicit or explicit’ (Saban p. 95). This rigorous notion is the notion of soul, which has as its corollary another fundamental notion in Giegerich's thought, namely that of psychological difference. Now, let us suppose for a moment that Saban would have succeeded in accomplishing his initial goal. Let us grant hypothetically that Giegerich would, in fact, be mistaken in his claim of assuming Jung's notion of soul to be the conceptual matrix of psychology as the discipline of interiority. Then let us read the verdict presented at the end of Saban's paper as its final conclusion: Giegerich's psychology is irrelevant to ‘modern Jungians’, as my paper succeeds ‘triumphantly in demonstrating’ (Saban, p. 110). And this irrelevance is presented as a natural consequence of the supposed exteriority of Giegerich's psychology (and my paper) to their Jungian foundations.
But, on the other hand, Saban seems to acknowledge critiques coming from ‘an honestly and clearly established external position’ (Saban, p. 95, my italics), such as Slavoj Zizek's. As a matter of fact, th