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In his article, ‘The psychologist who is not a psychologist: a deconstructive reading of Wolfgang Giegerich's idea of psychology proper’ (Marlan 2016, pp. 223-238) published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, Stanton Marlan proposes that Giegerich's understanding of psychology is essentially unpsychological and that Giegerich, to the extent he follows the precepts of his own theory, is ‘…not a psychologist.’
This seems a rather provocative charge against a Jungian analyst who has been practising, supervising, theorizing and writing in the field for over four decades. The evidence for Marlan's claim comes from his ‘deconstructive reading’ of Giegerich's psychology. By deconstructive, he means, ‘…a process by which the author's intention (in this case, to identify the notion of psychology proper) is shown to have an internal self-contradiction that does not redeem itself in an adequate dialectical unification’ (Marlan 2016, p. 124). The claim of a self-contradiction is based on the assertion that in Giegerich's approach the feeling-oriented, personal, or human aspect is left out resulting in an imbalance characterized by a cold, abstract, emotionless conception of psychology. Giegerich's quest, writes Marlan, for a pure, logical psychology characterized as a spiritualized, distilled Mercurius leaves out the coagulatio or the ‘positivity of the soul’ (Marlan 2016, p. 226). Marlan claims that the result is an unresolved dialectic arising from Giegerich's ‘…need to continue to heroically push off from the ego seeking total freedom from neurosis and from our humanity’ (Marlan 2016, p. 223).
The foundational position underlying Marlan's critique is that, in his view, Giegerich's approach does not value this personal, human side of the psychotherapeutic process. Marlan recalls Saban's opinion that Giegerich has ‘contempt for the ordinary’ (Marlan 2016, p. 234) and that personal, human aspects of the analytic relationship are forced to find their way into the consulting