James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
Sources of Archetypal Psychology
Archetypal psychology, first named as such by Hillman (1970b), had from its beginning the intention of moving beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy by situating itself within the culture of Western imagination.
It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination.
The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work which attempts to solve
psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics.
By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche.
But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes.
Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination
rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
ogy, in distinction to Jungian, considers the archetypal to be always phenomenal (Avens 1980), thus avoiding the Kantian idealism implied in Jung (de Voogd 1977).
The primary, and irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths.
These can therefore be understood as the most fundamental patterns of
human existence. To study human nature at its most basic level, one must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed.
The full implication of this move away from biochemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature and toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman as “the poetic basis of mind” (q.v.).
Support for the archetypal and psychological significance of myth, besides the work of Jung, comes from Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kerenyi, Erich Neumann, Heinrich Zimmer, Gilbert Durand, Joseph Campbell, and David Miller.
The second immediate father of archetypal psychology is Henry Corbin (1903-1978), the French scholar, philosopher, and mystic, principally known for his interpretation of Islamic thought. From Corbin (1971-73) comes the idea that the mundus archetypalis (‘alam al-mithdl) is also the mundus imaginalis.
It is a distinct field of imaginal realities requiring methods and perceptual faculties different from the spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naive formulation.
The mundus imaginalis offers an ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to
the world of sense in their value if not their appearance.
Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtually or potentiality which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits. (As phenomena they must ap
pear, though this appearance is to the imagination or in the imagination.) The mundus imaginalis provides for archetypes a valuative and cosmic grounding, when this is needed» different from such bases as: biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistic and social transmission, biochemical reactions, genetic coding, etc.
But more important than the ontological placing of archetypal realities is the double move of Corbin: (a) that the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination first and first presents itself as image, so that (b) the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative.
Its exposition must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, and its therapeutic aim neither social adaptation nor personalistic individualizing but rather a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities. The aim of therapy (q.v.) is the development of a
sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.
In extending the tradition of Jung and Corbin forward, archetypal psychology has had to go back to their predecessors, particularly the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato {Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium, Timaeus), and most anciently to Heraclitus. (Corbin’s works on Avicenna, Ibn’ Arabi, and Sohrawardi belong also in this tradition as does the work of Kathleen Raine on William Blake [1758-1835] and on Thomas Taylor, the English translator of the main writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists.)
The elaboration of this tradition by Hillman in Eranos lectures and in articles (1973a), by Miller in seminars at Syracuse University, by Lopez-Pedraza at the University of Caracas, and by Moore’s (1982) and Boer’s (1980) work on Ficino gives a different cast to archetypal psychology when compared with Jung’s.
There the background is more strongly German (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Carus, von Hartmann, Kant, Goethe, Eckhart, and Bohme), Christian,
psychiatric, and Eastern. Archetypal psychology situates itself more comfortably south (q.v.) of the Alps.
Especially—this Neoplatonic tradition is thoroughly Western even if it is not empirical in method, rationalist in conception, or otherworldly spiritual in appeal.
This tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea).
Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez-Pedraza 1977), as (i esse in ammo,” (Jung [1921] CW 6, §66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy.
Body, soul, spirit: this tripartite anthropology further separates archetypal psychology from the usual Western dualistic division, whose history goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople), occurring also in the mediaeval ascension of Averroes’s Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism.
Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the
life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology.
A first methodologically consistent attempt to articulate one in a philosophical style belongs also within the perimeters of archetypal psychology (Christou 1963). ~James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, Page 1-5
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