Archetypal psychology

Archetypal psychology was initiated as a distinct movement in the early 1970s by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in analytical psychology and became the first Director of the Jung Institute in Zürich. Hillman reports that archetypal psychology emerged partly from the Jungian tradition whilst drawing also from other traditions and authorities such as Henry Corbin, Giambattista Vico, and Plotinus. Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Archetypal psychology likens itself to a polytheistic mythology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals – that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. In this framework the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels (see Samuels, 1995).

The main influence on the development of archetypal psychology is Carl Jung's analytical psychology. It is strongly influenced by Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Influential artists, poets, philosophers and psychologists include Nietzsche, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for the psyche – the soul.

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist who was the first father of archetypal psychology. Jungian archetypes are thought patterns that find worldwide parallels in individuals or entire cultures. Archai appear in dreams, religions, the arts, and social customs in all people and they manifest impulsively in mental disorders. According to Jung archetypal ideas and patterns reside within the collective unconscious, which is a blueprint inherent in every individual, as opposed to the personal unconscious, which contains a single individual's repressed ideas, desires and memories as described by Freud. What differentiates Jungian psychology from archetypal psychology is that Jung believed archetypes are cultural, anthropological, and transcend the empirical world of time and place, and are not observable through experience (e. g., phenomenal). On the contrary, Archetypal psychology views archetypes to always be phenomenal. In Hillman's archetypal/polytheistic view, the psyche or soul has many directions and sources of meaning – and this can feel like an ongoing state of conflict – a struggle with one's daimones. According to Hillman, "polytheistic psychology can give sacred differentiation to our psychic turmoil " Hillman states that
The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. The Greeks knew this so well, and so they had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths – instead, depth psychology and psychopathology. Therefore psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress." Hillman qualifies his many references to gods as differing from a literalistic approach saying that for him they are aides memoires, i. e. sounding boards employed "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of life." Hillman further insists that he does not view the pantheon of gods as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness. His theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself. It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns. Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimon or soul or acorn and the acorn's calling to the wider world of nature. It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere – a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence. Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self. Hillman sees Jung as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life maps by which to try to grow properly. Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal of each individual's childhood and present life to try to find the individual's particular calling, the acorn of the soul. He has written that he is the one to help precipitate a re souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world. Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer aeternus or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul or acorn in question.