Some Reflections on Barreto's Response

Disappointingly, Barreto's lurid claim to have revealed a nefarious ‘hidden goal’ within my paper turns out to merely underline his failure to grasp the full nature of my argument. In fact, the conclusion my paper reaches (that Giegerich's psychology is irrelevant to modern Jungians) is quite clearly implicit in my stated intention (to show that ‘the ‘rigorous notion’ at [the] centre [of Giegerich's psychology] finds no source in Jung's psychology’).

Giegerich explicitly grounds his own importance to Jungian psychology upon a single claim: that he alone provides an immanent critique of Jung. By casting doubt upon such a claim, I have therefore also cast doubt upon his relevance to analytical psychology—the very relevance which Giegerich claims for himself.

Given this context, the broad question of ‘who owns Jung’ as Barreto puts it, does indeed dominate my paper, precisely because this is the subtext of much of Giegerich's own work. Let me remind the reader that Giegerich's key work, The Soul's Logical Life (Giegerich 2008) expounds his, Giegerich's, claim to have identified the ‘Notion’ at the heart of Jungian psychology and therefore to be its true inheritor. Readers of the chapter entitled ‘Jungians: immunity to the Notion’ (Giegerich 2008, pp. 79-101), and particularly the section entitled ‘Polemic vs. conventional Jungianism’ (Giegerich 2008, pp. 81-87) (in which Giegerich attacks Jungians for having betrayed this implicit ‘Notion’) may be amused by Barreto's hilarious representation of Giegerich as a tolerant pluralist who welcomes many different approaches to Jung. This improbable depiction is also conspicuously undermined by Giegerich's numerous and ferocious polemical attacks on those individual Jungians who have had the temerity to offer approaches alternative to his own. (See, for example, Giegerich 1975, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2012a, 2012b).

Strangely, I am the one Barreto accuses of ‘fundamentalism’ and of ‘moralism’. Let me be clear: I have done my best to