The Soul’s Invisible Life

This essay responds to Wolfgang Giegerich’s assertions as expressed in Daniel Anderson’s “The Soul’s Logical Life and Jungian Schisms” in Psychological Perspectives Vol. 64, Issue 1, “The Star in Man”—that because God has been declared dead the soul cannot be a divine phenomenon, and that C. G. Jung was unconsciously split, agreeing that God is dead but referring to his own experiences of the divine, which in Giegerich’s mind has no place in psychology. I discuss how Giegerich himself perpetuates splits between certain opposites that have been plaguing the Western world for more than 2,000 years, keeping psyche and the divine apart. I present a few of Jung’s own descriptions of the soul to demonstrate how his understanding was not split between psychology and religion, but rather united the two in a way that is still too new to penetrate the rational mind. Finally, I present images from alchemy and contemporary dreams in which the soul expresses its ongoing, autonomous emergence into reality on its own terms.