ABSTRACT
Mainstream psychology has cleaved to a narrative of adherence to empirical, scientific procedure, which is painful to those educated in the philosophy of science. The rise of evolutionary psychology is an important development in evolutionary theory. The undeniable success of such recent theory shows how important it is to demarcate the properly psychological so as not to lose it to an important and essentially accurate empirical science. Many in the field of depth psychology do not realise how successful are such modern evolutionary theories and attempt to compete on empirical grounds. I argue that attempts to accommodate depth psychology to the framework of empirical theory are conceptually confused and doomed to failure as they give up the fundamentally psychological, right out of the gate. Therefore, we must agree on a definition of the psychological that stands apart in a motivated sense from the framework of evolutionary theory and which does not pander, as Giegerich has so famously urged, to the irrelevant and logically limited framework of standard empiricism. The reflexive nature of human consciousness is the root of the properly psychological and embodies a structure that does indeed have an evolutionary genesis but which, once extant, can no longer in principle be addressed by evolutionary theory.
