The newly inaugurated ISPDI describes itself as “being dedicated to the development of a psychology that is truly psychological in its spirit and conception.”
Its aim is to develop and critique the thinking initiated by Jungian psychoanalyst Wolfgang Giegerich in The Soul’s Logical Life and Collected English Papers.
The Society states the following at the beginning of its Definitional Statement:
“Essential to psychology is the recognition that the psyche is not only the object of psychological investigation, but at the same time, and recursively so, its subject. Having no point of perspective outside the psyche to view it from objectively, and no substrate or pre-suppositional base in anything more substantial, literal or positively existing, a truly psychological psychology, it follows, must be internal to itself, a discipline of internal reflection.”
It goes on to explain that the ISPDI wishes to further psychology by subjecting it “again and again at ever new levels, to its constituting recognition that everything that it asserts about the psyche – all of its insights, theoretical statements, knowledge, claims, and topic choices – are at the same time expressions of the psyche, a part of its on-going phenomenology.” And this, the founders believe, requires that a contradiction in the way psychology has been developed and practised to date be overcome.
The founders see this ground- breaking approach as being the next step in a process began by Freud, Adler and Jung in engaging in the history of the soul.
To read the Definitional Statement in full and to find out more about the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline for Interiority please visit their website by clicking here.
For a more gentle introduction to the writings of Wolfgang Giegerich The Guild of Pastoral Psychology has available papers of two lectures he gave in London: “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man” and”The Opposition of ‘Individual and Collective’ – Psychology’s Basic Fault”. Click here to access the Guild of Pastoral Psychology website.
If you would like to hear Giegerich in person, he will be the keynote speaker at the conference being held in London later this month by The International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS). The Conference is entitled Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation. For more information, click here
