The Soul's Logical Life : Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology

C.G. Jung's authentic notion of soul was only intuitive, implicit, not conceptually worked out, and he was not always true to what his own notion would have required. His followers forfeit his heritage, often turning psychology into pop psychology or reducing it to a scientific and clinical enterprise. Psychology is not one of the sciences and not a branch of medicine, but sublated science, sublated medicine. It is the merit of James Hillman's archetypal or imaginal psychology to have brought back the question of soul to psychology. However, a critical analysis shows that a psychology based on the imagination cannot truly overcome the positivistic, personalistic prejudice that it set out to overcome. As polytheistic psychology it also succumbs to nostalgia and misses the real plight of today's soul. Because it has no notion of truth, its «Gods» are shown to be virtual-reality type gods. One has to go beyond imaginal psychology and advance to a notion of soul as logical life, logical movement. Only then can psychology be freed from its inherent positivism and cease being a subdivision of anthropology. The notion of soul is logically released from its attachment to the notion of the human being.