Inwardizing Rilke's Dog of Divine Inseeing Into Itself

In this book a glorious passage from a letter of the poet R. M. Rilke is explored in the manner of that speculative turn in analytical psychology that has come to be known as Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority. In the first essay it is demonstrated that, for all its beauty, the account of interiority that Rilke celebrates in his letter is self-contradictory due to its being naively conceived as the undialectical opposite of an external viewpoint that it is unable to overcome. Whereas Rilke merely imagines interiority by means of the visual image of his getting inside a dog as one passes by, the more thoroughgoing interpretative approach taken in this essay thinks interiority by reflecting Rilke's text into itself in the speculative manner that is provided for and required by Jung's insight into psychology's lack of an Archimedean vantagepoint. Taking these reflections a step further, to a consideration of their acuity in clinical contexts, the second essay then offers a spirited rebuttal to a critic who has provocatively charged that the kind of psychology that the author presents in the first essay is "too pure to treat ordinary human beings in the consulting room."