ABSTRACT
Even prior to our having completed psychological research we must explicitly articulate what our concept of soul is that in fact implicitly informs and is at work in our doing psychology. Academic psychology and most schools of psychotherapy do not use, or rather systematically avoid, the concept soul. One talks instead, for example, about “the psyche,” about the “behavior of the organism,” or about “what goes on inside people” as “the subjective aspect of human life,” but not about the soul. The “psychology without soul” prevents us from ontologizing soul as an existing mysterious entity. The mortality of all living beings that Markl emphasized is far more than the fact that every creature has to die sooner or later. It is only over the millennia that biological life is productive, namely in evolution of new species. But on the level of individual existence, biological life rather shows its productivity merely in reproduction, in the multiplication and substitution of the individuals.
