While replying to Study of Carl Jung facebook entry I thought my reply could have value here. Since it was posted close to December 7, I suspect the bombing at Pearl Harbor influenced the post. I would appreciate others interested in James Hillman and Archetypal Psychology to provide assistance to further my understanding.
Thank you,
Bud
World War II: Nature of Engagement
When the Allies defeated the Germans and the Japanese, power WITHOUT a myth (unless it was the ‘myth’ of freedom) triumphed over power FROM myth (of…racial-ancestral POWER?).
Hello,
I just finished James Hillman’s “Re-Visioning Psychology”. James invited me into a 218 page introduction to offer his conclusion. My understanding is modern psychology is distracted, limited, and wrong in its pursuit in its logos of psyche. Psyche is Greek for soul, and Hillman’s premise is psychology must know polytheistic models. Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler all launched depth psychology from a Germanic, 19th Century monotheistic perspective. This conflict (poly vs. mono) presents the challenge to modern western mind to assimilate the power of each system. Alliance, in my opinion, had little to do with a conscious “deep” mythos influence, but dominated by expansion of an empire. Therefore, this orientation must reside in the unconscious. Thus, the image expressed, allowed Hitler to live out a messiah complex; and the people to celebrate messiah’s return. Likewise, Emperor Hirohito was acting out the complex, but from an Oriental worldview.
James Hillman presents Archetypal Psychology as a means to re-introduce the gods of Greece. His intention is not to re-create a polytheistic religion, but recognize the value they offer our investigation of soul. To this end, Hillman offers an irreducible component of soul in the form of image. Quotes from “Archetypal Psychology”, Chapter 2, Image and Soul: The Poetic Basis of Mind, which Hillman presents for consideration:
- ‘The image was identified with the psyche by Jung (“image is psyche”, CW 13:75), a maxim that archetypal psychology has elaborated to mean that the soul is constituted of image, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream. For it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer.’ Italics added for emphasis.
- ‘In archetypal psychology, the word “image” therefore does not refer to an afterimage, the result of sensations and perceptions, nor does “image” mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings it expresses.’
- ‘“Images don’t stand for anything” (Hillman 1978). They are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible’.
- ‘Such notions of “visibility” tend to literalize images as distinct events presented to the senses. Hence Casey (1974), in his ground breaking essay “Toward an Archetypal Imagination,” states that an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees.’
- ‘The noetic and the imaginal no longer oppose each other (Hillman 1981 a,b). “Yet this is still ‘psychology’ although no longer science, it is psychology in the wider meaning of the word, a psychological activity of creative nature, in which creative fantasy is given prior place” (CW 6:84).’
- ‘Corbin’s theory of creative imagination of the heart further implies for psychology that, when it bases itself in the image, it must at the same time recognize that imagination is not merely a human faculty but an activity of soul to which the human imagination bears witness.’
- ‘Empirical approaches of analyzing and guiding images strive to gain control over them. Archetypal psychology distinguishes itself radically from these methods of image control as has been cogently argued by Watkins (1976, 1981).’
- ‘For archetypal psychology, images are neither good nor bad, true nor false, demonic nor angelic (Hillman 1977a), though an image always implicates “a precisely qualified context, mood and scene” (as Hillman 1977b has on one occasion defined the image).’
- ‘To suspend judgment, therefore, is to fall into the objectivist fantasy. Judgments are inherent to the image (as a work of art brings with it the standards by which it can be measured or a text brings with it the hermeneutics by which it can be interpreted). Archetypal psychology examines the judgments about the image imagistically, regarding them as its further specifications and as psychological statements not to be taken literally from a spiritual, purely noetic, vantage point detached from the context of the image judged.’
- ‘”Stick to the image” (cf. CW16: 320) has become a golden rule of archetypal psychology’s method, and this because the image is the primary psychological datum. Though the image always implies more than it presents, “the depth of the image – its limitless ambiguities…can only be partly grasped as implications.’
- ‘An image always seems more profound (archetypal), more powerful (potential), and more beautiful (theophanic) than the comprehension of it, hence the feeling, while recording a dream, of seeing through a glass darkly. Hence, too, the driving necessity in the arts, for they provide complicated disciplines that can actualize the complex virtuality of the image.’
- Finally, ‘The ”poetic basis om mind” was a thesis Hillman (1975a) first set forth in his 1972 Terry Lectures at Yale University. It states that archetypal psychology “starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in processes of imagination.” The inherent relation between psychology and the cultural imagination is necessitated by the nature of mind. The most fecund (fertile) approach to the study of mind is thus through the highest imagination responses (Hough 1973, Giegerich 1982, Berry 1982) where the images are most fully released and elaborated.’
Whew, foundational concepts from which discussion can orient to subscribe judgment, and reach an understanding adequate of depth psychology. Returning to your initial observation concerning combatants of World War II, the unconscious myth from which destruction reigned. Individual, society, and world caught in this psychological complex present great illusion of power. Justification for war based on the inflation of this perspective of ‘being right’. Possession of an object onto which the shadow is projected relieving the need for reflection. Nationalism emerges with an enemy pre-ordained for destruction. This captures the dilemma for me when the myth of exceptionalism paraded before the masses leads to a predictable outcome.
The racial-ancestral POWER suggested during WWII does not ever go away. Wilhelm Reich, “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” asserts fascism is not a political position, but a phenomena waiting to emerge. Preface to the 3rd edition, page XV states, ‘An extensive and thorough study of the suppressed little man’s character, an intimate knowledge of his backstage life, are indispensable prerequisites to an understanding of the forces fascism builds upon.’
Thank you for your insight, and willingness to share.
Bud
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