We are delighted to bring a presentation and an interview with Ingrid Riedel by Hedwig Perriard-Maire. With her outstanding contributions to our understanding of images Ingrid Riedel has played a major role in the Jungian community.
If you were to meet Ingrid Riedel in conversation, she would probably not begin with theory at all. She would start with an image — a dream fragment, a painting, a fairy tale — and gently invite you to notice what stirs inside. That instinct tells you almost everything about her.
A life that braided disciplines together
Riedel was born in 1935 in Schweinfurt, Germany, and her intellectual path was never narrow. She studied theology, literature, and social psychology — a combination that already hints at her lifelong fascination: how meaning, symbol, and psyche interweave.
She earned two doctorates — one in theology and another in German literature — and spent her early professional years in the world of Protestant education, working at the Evangelical Academy in Hofgeismar.
But something in that environment wasn’t quite enough. Like many drawn toward depth psychology, she eventually turned inward — training at the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich.
From there, her life settled into a rhythm that would define her: teaching, writing, and clinical practice, largely based in Konstanz, Germany.
The analyst who never left the humanities
Unlike some clinicians, Riedel never separated psychology from culture. She remained, in a sense, a literary scholar and theologian who happened to practice psychotherapy.
She became:
• an honorary professor of psychology of religion
• a lecturer and training analyst in Zurich and Stuttgart
• a prolific author of Jungian-oriented books
Her work consistently moves between inner experience and cultural expression — dreams, art, myth, spirituality — all treated as different languages of the same psyche.
Her central preoccupation: the symbolic life
If there’s a single thread running through Riedel’s work, it’s this:
the psyche speaks in images, not just concepts….
Click HERE to read the full presentation of Ingrid Riedel.
And Click HERE to read the rich interview of Ingrid Riedel by Hedwig Perriard-Maire.