Talk:Wolfgang Giegerich

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It is my hope that others will add their own insights to this entry.John55410 (talk) 05:43, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Article categories

I'll add mine here. The following is from an online discussion forum about Giegerich's ideas and his new "Geigerich club";

Here's a bit of the sales blurb from the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline for Interiority:

"The International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority now welcomes into its membership individuals from any of a wide variety of backgrounds who share in its aims of studying and further unfolding the interiority of our human world-relation in its present determination as mindedness, thought, and logical life."

With the narrowing of focus to 'mindedness, thought, and logical life' a new post-Jungian school of psychology is born: The Cognitive School (which makes three- Develomental, Archetypal, and Cognitive). This school, which Spring Journal is increasingly promoting, stands out by one symptom- It is a disaffected psychology in Joyce McDougall's sense of the term.

In terms of the interest shown, this psychology leaves emotions unattended... or otherwise refers to emotion only tersely and pejoritively as a kind of dirty subjectivism in need of cleaning up (processing) by translating it into objective fact (as if it werent already so). The level of interest given to intellectual cleansing of emotion is where its importance lays, but paradoxically such interest presupposes an inherent emotional force driving the application of dialectical logic; "Apart from a feeling of interest, you would merely notice the doctrine but not uphold it." [Whitehead]

When will the creators and followers of this school admit the (unconscious?) emotional force driving their interest in 'mindedness, thought, and logical life'? I await that disclosure with interest.

Cognitive psychology is everywhere these days- completely dominates the field and so Giegerich's version is in popular company. Call me old fashioned but I'm still waiting for archetypal psychology -the focus on affective-imagination- to come into it's own as a popular disciplined field..... it hasn't happened yet in mainstream psychology.

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On the basis of the above analysis, and the fact that Giegerich is a trained Jungian analyst I have added the categories Jungian psychology and Cognitive psychology to the main article. 121.223.37.124 (talk) 06:34, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Biography

I added, via footnote, a detail about one of Giegerich's intellectual influences while at Berkeley, the philosopher and professor of German literature, Andrew Jaszi. Besides the mention of Jaszi in the Brazilian interview I have cited as documentation, one finds Jaszi's work, in particular his book on Goethe, included among Giegerich's references in several of his articles and books. Since there is a Wikipedia page describing Jaszi in detail, readers can now check out this interesting connection. I hope I've done this properly. (I'm still a bit new at this.) Viktor Ostrovsky (talk) 15:22, 29 July 2016 (UTC) .

Criticism

The Criticism section has been amended of its' promotional overtones, which were not relevant to this section:

James Hillman, among the most accomplished and prolific post-Jungian writers remarked on (some of) the work Giegerich was engaged in prior to 1994: “Wolfgang Giegerich’s thought is the most important Jungian thought now going on—maybe the only consistent Jungian thought at all.” Hillman however qualified such praise by claiming that Giegerich's writings are also "vitiated with fallacies" of which Hillman elaborated three; 'the fallacy of historical models'; 'the ontological fallacy' and 'the fallacy of concretism'. Giegerich’s work has also been controversial within the Jungian community, where the criticisms generally have been that his focus is too much on the intellect, that his writing style is unnecessarily opaque, and that it is difficult to relate his theory to the practice of psychotherapy. He is criticised as dismissive of the role of emotion plays in generating interest in logical process, thinking and doctrine, and also for conflating "emotion" or "affect" with Jung's definition of "feelings" whilst summarily dismissing all three from any consideration of their influence in the dialectical process. Whilst Giegerich appeals to Jung's definition of feeling as an "ego function" that negatively interferes with objective thought, he fails to elaborate on the role of physiological emotion which, by contrast to Jung's feeling-function, is not an ego function and which nevertheless accompanies the human organism at all times in the form of moods that shape perceptions and influence logic in a way that cannot be simply dismissed as Giegerich recommends. Critics have stated that Giegerich's recommendations to "rise above" or to "be free of" emotions amount to the promotion of lack of emotional awareness and outright disaffectation in Joyce McDougall's sense of the term. He has responded to a few of these criticisms in his writings, but not all.

Hopefully this provides a more accurate snapshot of the criticism of his work. 101.162.188.215 (talk) 09:57, 22 December 2011 (UTC)