The Second Conference of the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority

www.ispdi.org

Berlin, July 19th – 21st, 2014

Crowne Plaza Berlin City Centre Hotel

Conference Theme:The Psychological Difference

Special Guest Speakers, Including:

Toshio Kawai

Greg Mogenson

Patricia Berry

Call for Proposals for Conference Presentations

Deadline for submission of proposals is December 15, 2013.
Proposals should be limited to 500 words and should contain an estimate of how much time would be needed for the presentation, usually 20 to 30 minutes is appropriate, but exceptions would be considered.
Please submit proposals to the program committee, tispdi@gmail.com.

The following are some suggested categories and topics for papers, but proposals are not to be limited to them. If you are working on a paper and feel it can be a contribution to the further understanding and development of psychology as the discipline of interiority, please consider submitting a proposal for it.

Suggested Paper Topics

Papers can focus on one or more of the concepts that are of central importance to psychology as a discipline of interiority.  These include: the psychological difference, the psychological as logical life, absolute negative interiorization, dialectical thinking, speculative reason, sublation, soul, truth, consciousness and history, and the psychotherapeutic implications of psychology as a discipline of interiority, to name a few.

There is also a keen interest in the relationship between psychology as the discipline of interiority and philosophy such as that of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and others.

Papers exploring Giegerich’s notion of the psychological difference are especially welcome.

As a critical psychology, psychology as the discipline of interiority encourages any critiques of its underlying assumptions, its utility, accessibility, purpose or validity.

Finally, it may be helpful to read the description of psychology as the discipline of interiority that appears below (“About the Society”) and also on the website (www.ispdi.org).

This call for papers can also be found on the Society’s website.

About the Society

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.

As its name implies, The International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority is dedicated to the furthering of psychology by means of this very same process of rigorous self-application and continuing self-redefinition. Embracing the inwardness of psychology in an absolute manner, its aim is to advance the discipline by subjecting psychology, again and again and 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.

This, however, requires overcoming a contradiction in the way that psychology has previously been developed and practiced. In keeping with the positivistic spirit of recent centuries, most psychologies during this time have been committed to an empirical science approach even though such a methodology was not truly compatible with the discipline’s constituting insight about the psyche both creating and at the same time investigating itself.

The consequence of this has been the unfortunate one of psychology’s having saddled itself with a distorted conception of its subject matter. Down to the present day, most psychologies regard what they call “the inner” to be a function of something external in which this “inner” is enveloped. In such conceptions “the inner” is taken for granted to be the inwardness or subjectivity of the human person, of the individual’s personality and its component parts, and of what usual psychoanalytic psychologies call “the unconscious.” This, it is believed, can be reached introspectively, by reflecting upon oneself, for example.

But the true inner has no outside, nothing surrounding it. It is not the inside of people. Nor is it some sort of positively existing interior world. On the contrary, having been absolved from a binary relation as the inner of some outer or the interiority of something external, its inwardness can be described as an absolute inwardness which is produced by a methodology that approaches each psychic phenomenon, whatever that may be (an affect, dream, idea, cultural artifact, life situation, or technological innovation) in a speculative manner such that the inner dialectical logic as which each matter of interest exists is allowed to think itself out and to become explicit.

At the time of its inauguration The Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority draws mainly upon the theoretical work of the Jungian psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Giegerich. In the course of a prolific writing career that commenced in the early 1970`s, Giegerich has made an incisive contribution to a truly psychological psychology. Though not limited to or restricted by the contributions of this author, the Society has been formed, in part, by the compelling need felt by its founding members to draw the consequences of his theoretical work and to give these a real place within the depth psychological tradition while appreciating, at the same time, the place and significance of that tradition within the broader horizons of a history of consciousness perspective.

It is a matter of succession, on the one hand, and of the keeping up of a soulful tradition, on the other. The depth psychology that began with Freud, Adler, and Jung was itself but a late expression of the history of consciousness, the history of the soul. Passing through many stages and statuses on its way to becoming conscious of itself—stages such as the shamanic/ritualistic, the mythological, the religious, the metaphysical, and so on—consciousness only “came home to itself” very recently in such simultaneously phenomenal and theoretical expressions as the philosophies of the subject, medial modernity, and contemporary depth psychology. And to this list there may now be added psychology as the discipline of interiority.

Speculatively constituted, at once both the incumbent and anti-incumbent of the tradition to which it is heir, 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.

ISPDI Executive Committee

John Hoedl, President
Greg Mogenson, Vice President
Samina Salahuddin, Recording Secretary
John Robertson, Treasurer
Peter White, Web Discussion Moderator
Dan Anderson, G-mail Monitor
Colleen Hendrick, Director of Tele-seminars
Marco Heleno Barreto, Assistant Web Discussion Monitor
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