He has lectured and taught in many countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, England, Italy, the US, Russia, Japan, and Brazil) and before many professional societies.
As a training analyst and supervisor, he currently writes, teaches, and works on publishing his collected English papers in psychology.
The major goal of this approach is to redefine the notion of psychology (the logos of the soul) as it has emerged as a discipline in Western thought.
Unlike both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Giegerich argues that the methodology of the empirical sciences is an inadequate basis for the study of psychology.
Rather, he draws on the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, the notion of the dialectical movement of consciousness from G. W. F. Hegel, and like Jung, he uses various transformational ideas from medieval alchemy.
Additionally, in contrast to modern academic psychology and to the various schools of psychotherapy, Giegerich argues for a shift in focus from the individual, whose very definition has changed radically throughout history, to a focus on the cultural mind, evolving zeitgeist, or as he prefers, “the soul,” which is what ultimately gives rise to the changing understandings of what it means to be an ‘individual’.
Accordingly, in Giegerich's theory, the idea of soul does not function as some kind of objective or empirical substrate producing psychological phenomena.
The desired outcome is the emergence in thought, and eventual articulation, of the logical structure or concrete concept as which the phenomena ultimately become intelligible.
He is critical of Jung for theoretically locating archetypes within the ‘collective unconscious’ since such a move effectively removes the notion of archetypes (which Jung posited as unknowable in themselves) from the arena of what can be subjected to critical evaluation, and instead gives them the status of a “mystification.” The term “unconscious,” when it is used by Giegerich, is an adjective likely to simply mean not conscious, rather than referring to some sort of ‘container’ of repressed or unknown psychological material or a special ‘place’ within the mind.
His preference for the word “soul” results from his seeing the term as carrying many of the subtle meanings and connotations from within the historical development of Western philosophy and psychology.
Whether one starts with a dream, a symptom, or a cultural production, the phenomenon is allowed to present itself to consciousness, and it often does so through a series of positions and negations.
Giegerich's theoretical premises have no account of clinical efficacy for mental health purposes in psychoanalytic practice, beyond philosophic thought.
[15] Giegerich's work has also been controversial within the Jungian community, where the criticisms generally have been that his focus is too much on the intellect, that his writing style is unnecessarily opaque, and that it is difficult to relate his theory to the practice of psychotherapy.
There is no documentation delineating the psychoanalytic efficacy of Giegerich's philosophical views in light of phenomena presenting for the clinical practice of psychology.
[17] Whilst Giegerich appeals to Jung's definition of feeling as an "ego function" that negatively interferes with objective thought, he fails to elaborate on the role of physiological affect which, by contrast to Jung's feeling-function, is not an ego function and which nevertheless accompanies the human organism at all times in the form of moods that shape perceptions and influence logic in a way that cannot be simply dismissed as Giegerich recommends.