In his 2021 book, Psychology and Metaphysics, Marco Heleno Barreto boldly claims Wolfgang Giegerich’s conception of psychology as the discipline of interiority to be structurally neurotic. This diagnosis results from the fact that Barreto’s work is driven by a supreme personal interest: to transform this psychology into a “metaphysical psychology”. This lofty purpose and the corresponding standpoint force him to view the psychology he critiques, not from within itself, but from high above and outside, so that his (in themselves intelligent) arguments in support of his diagnosis miss their target. A close analysis of his major arguments nevertheless provides the opportunity to strike sparks from them.
And yet, a mere critique of the critique is only a negative response to his challenge. Therefore, this book proceeds to the task of also providing a positive answer to his thesis by leaving Barreto’s statements completely aside and presenting a novel attempt of its own to derive, and step by step unfold, the inner logic of psychology from its historical origin and source that Jung had discovered, namely, the loss of religion and metaphysics in modernity.
The careful development of the implications and ramifications of this loss and the interiorization of this loss into itself reveal the latter as an historical, epochal cut, as unbridgeable dissociation (the nuclear fission of the present), and as sheer negativity. As such it is the ruling spirit of modernity, its innovative restlessness, and at the same time the Mother of psychology. As “daughter”, so we could say, psychology inherited its “DNA” from this Mother. In its logical constitution it is permeated by this loss as absolute negativity.
JUNGIAN.DIRECTORY