The Soul in Everyday Life

Book excerpt: The Soul in Everyday Life argues that modern psychology has given up on dealing with the idea of soul (or psyche), even though the field is named after it. If psychology wishes to be truly satisfying, it needs to be more than behavioral science, according to Daniel Chapelle. He concludes that psychology can only satisfy the deepest human needs when it can offer a sense of soul in everyday life. He explores ways of restoring this sense of soul to everyday life by examining how talk about something as elusive as the soul is possible and by reanimating a sense for what the notion of soul can mean. Working in the tradition of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Jung's student James Hillman, Chapelle reaches back into millennia of Western thought to reanimate the dying sense of soul in everyday life and put the "psyche" back in "psychology."