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  • Arkady Plotnitsky in In the Shadow of Hegel and Complementarity  shows how we can understand Hegel's system as a failure because he does not understand the General Economy of Bataille and attempts to produce a restricted economy, or System of Philosophical Dialectical Logic. The result is Nietzsche who rejects system building, and also attempts to allow the Nobles to have some ethical foundation by going to the second order level that asks what is the Value of Value. For Hegel only the Slaves can develop self-consciousness and move toward the level of Spirit through reason. In effect Hegel's starting point is the enslavement of the Greeks by the Romans and the philosophies that came out of that enslavement. But the unconscious in some way is the general economy of awareness that includes both the conscious and the unconscious. Consciousness for Husserl had to have the Intentional Morphe forming the hyle (content) of consciousness. Consciousness must always be consciousness OF something. Consciousness has the unity of the ego and the totality of what is present within consciousness either synchronically or diachronically. Thus the Unconsicous is merely from Bataille's point of view the general economy that is the dual of consciousness. It is what is absent, always absent, and never becomes present. It is outside the monolith of Heidegger that M. Henry complains about. Yet it is full of traces, and those traces (traumatic memories, experiences that are filled away, everything forgotten and consigned to oblivion), and the organization of those traces by our finitude is the Multiple of  the Archetypes.
  • Desan calls Planetary Man the intersubjective  totality of human beings that are alive today. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Desan
  • Now that we have made an attempt to see if anyone else thinks that Derrida and Hillman are similar coming up with mixed results, we can state that what is similar is not so much what they thought, but how they thought about it, i.e. they are approaching their subjects with a focus on Hyper Being, what Derrida calls Differance (differing and deferring). This is the trace level which is beyond the level of dynamics, i.e. Becoming.

    An example of traces is when you write on a pad of paper with a pen or pencil, and then tear off the top sheet, and then shade the second sheet of paper in the pad, you then see the trace outlined. Wild Being on the other hand is like the resistances of the individual fibers to the imprint of the trace. Pure Being is what you have written on the first page taken as a static whole form, say a word. Process Being is the act of writing the word. If you think about it then each of these elements are pretty clear in this analogy. Derrida in Grammatology says that it is about traces and hinges, so things like folds in paper, as in Origami. It is interesting in this respect that you can solve problems in Origami that could not be solved with Euclidean straight line and compass. In other words the traces are more powerful in doing the calculations than the instruments of marking and all the possible marks that an be made with them. So we get the image, that appears in the Purloined Letter that Lacan analyzes of Mathematicians for centuries trying to prove the trisection of an angle or the doubling of a cube and failing, when if they picked up the paper that they were writing on they could have solved the problem. Such is the power of the traces that we so often overlook. Derrida and Hillman are looking for traces. Hillman calls it "seeing through". What are we seeing through? We are seeing through what ever is most obviously presented to us, and looking for the traces of what is absent. It is Heidegger in Being and Time that teaches us to look at presence and absence together, and that every sign is a sign of what is absent. Derrida just takes this idea of Heidegger to the Nth degree as he transforms Deconstruction into Grammatology. And we can see how this relates to the archetypes. What are the archetypes if they are not traces. They are traces of all the mothers, all the fathers, all the young girls, all the young boys, all the old men and old women who have ever existed with our finitude. They leave a trace in us. There have been in all about 70 billion human beings and Six billion or so are alive today. All of them were children, and all had fathers and mothers, as well as grand parents. The trace is the fundamental structure of the Archetypes. It is not an idea, an illusory continuity pointing to a concept. But it is the inverse of that. It is detotalized and disunified rather than totalized and unified. It is what Badiou would call the Multiple of each of these characters that haunt our finitude, whether we know them or not in our actual lives. This is the real brilliance of Jung to have a concept of the inverse of the Idea of Plato and say that it is these traces that inhabit our collective unconscious, not the ideal world of forms that is transcendent.
  • Yes, I think it is very creative. People are obviously doing interesting things at Pacifica. But what I posted here is about all I could find in a couple of hours searching for articles that contained both of their names. I got up to page 6 in the Google results. There were just these few tidbits that I could find that were of interest for the discussion here.
  • The Mixed Texture of Symbolic Thought:

    A Response to and Elaboration of Some Points in Alan Jones’s Paper “Teleology and the Hermeneutics of Hope: Jungian Interpretation in the Light of the Work of Paul Ricoeur”

    By Stanton Marlan, Ph.D., ABP
    http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV4N2p57-66.pdf

    "For Ricoeur, “it remains the categories of philosophical discourse and human reason and not the images, metaphors, and figures of language which allow the philosopher’s metaphors to disclose being” (O’Hara, 1980, p. 339). For Ricoeur, when the philosopher thinks, it does not involve, as Derrida suggests, some other interplay of activities occurring behind the scene. From the analytic point of view, this statement suggests that there is a point at which the philosopher is free from any unconscious activity and has, as Jung might say, no shadow. The
    same might be suggested of the analyst’s interpretation: once freed from
    there is objective intervention, as if interpretations can totally break away
    from the images in which they are rooted. So we have an image of philosophers and analysts no longer vulnerable to the unconscious, practicing a discrete and refined activity. For Derrida, the above attitude reflects a drift toward idealism resulting from the “dissimulation of metaphorical origins.” To move in the above way is to create a metaphysical edifice, which is based on a “trembling ground of double entendre.” For Derrida, metaphysical statements need to be deconstructed, and in so doing, one exposes the “hollow traces and white spaces of dead metaphor” (Derrida, 1972; quoted by O’Hara, 1980, p. 324). Derrida’s deconstruction opens up a trembling ground of poetic undecidables. Hillman too would have us move back from the positivistic constructions toward that unknown expressed in the poetics of image. For Derrida, metaphysics effaces in itself “that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, and invisible drawing covered over by Western metaphysics” (O’Hara, 1980, p. 324). For Hillman as well, traditionalist thought loses touch with what is a fabulous scene, which he sees in terms of the archetypal image. The relationship between “image” and “trace” remains to be clarified; they are not necessarily similar, though both thinkers share an appreciation for that “underworld” (Hillman, 1979) which is not a world in the positivist sense, but a world of shades moving and stirring the soul. The tension between traditionalist thought and its critics might be seen in terms of Derrida’s description of this tension in and through our Western philosophical heritage. Derrida says there is a recurrent interplay between a desire for firm conceptual mastery and the letting be of language, in which the hope of “presence” is continually in a living process of remaking its elusiveness, in a non-linear story (Lacapra, 1980, pp. 25-26). "
  • Playing the Cosmic Game:

    Exploring Play’s Archetypal Aspects Through the Kaleidoscope of Culture

    by

    Karen Pohn

    http://www.cosmicplay.net Pacifica Dissertation on the internet

    From Chapter 2 http://www.cosmicplay.net/Method/Bricolage/methodintro1.html

    "In the “Bricoleur in the Tennis Court,” D. L. Miller (1996, online) discusses bricoleurs and play at some length in the context of postmodern pedagogy. D. L. Miller takes his title from a sketch of the French revolution entitled Tennis Court Oath. In that picture they were improvising a nation, while D. L. Miller is improvising education, and I am improvising a methodology. D. L. Miller notes that the bricoleur is a person of unspecialized artistry who makes do with what is at hand, and that in today’s postmodern world we are all bricoleurs. Indeed the notion of bricolage is found in many different disciplines. It has been cropping up in many places in postmodern discourse since its beginnings in the 60s—you might say bricolage became the “Po Mo” way to go. D. L. Miller follows the bouncing bricolage ball, beginning with Derrida, and includes some particularly notable side shots as well from James Hillman and Mark C. Taylor among others. "

    "D. L. Miller (1996, online) shows that bricolage has even bounced around in our own backyard of Archetypal Psychology. Most recently, T. Moore (2000, online) confesses to be a “spiritual bricoleur,” but Hillman (1975) it seems, was bitten by the bricoleur bug early on. In Re-visioning Psychology, too, after a discussion of Knight Errant, where he discusses the wandering nature of the soul, Hillman (1992) cryptically mentions the bricoleur at the end of his chapter on psychologizing—in a “parting shot” if you will. This sly bricoleur doesn’t develop the concept any further, instead he leaves us hanging, brilliantly leaving the sentence, and paragraph, and chapter unfinished:

    Psychological reflections always catch light from a peculiar angle; they are annoying at the same time as they are perceptive. Psychologizing sees things peculiarly, a deviant perspective reflecting the deviance in the world around. The psychological mirror that walks down the road, the Knight Errant on his adventure, the scrounging rogue, is also an odd-job man, like Eros the Carpenter who joins this bit with that, a handyman, a bricoleur—like “a ball rebounding or a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course” –psychologizing upon and about what is at hand; not a systems-architect, a planner with directions. And leaving before completion, suggestion hanging in the air, an indirection, an open phrase . . . (p. 164)"

    Hillman mentions the Bricoleur . . .
  • Why Hillman Matters

    Bernie Neville, Ph.D.

    Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies Vol. 3, No. 6, 2007,

    Author contact: b.neville@latrobe.edu.au 

     

    "It is conventional enough to suggest that Hillman is a postmodern thinker, or that his writing represents a Hermes consciousness. He has been happy enough to be categorised in this way –“Mars guides me more than Saturn, Hermes more than Athena‟. (1989: 218) However, in his response to my paper he strenuously objected to being put in the same box as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and the rest, asserting that „archetypal psychology is a psychology and not an exercise of the ironic French intellect.‟ (1999: 9). He argues that imagining is a better method forengaging the repressed than analyzing, that while archetypal psychology honours the image, the conceptual language of the poststructuralist philosophers fails it"

     

    Hillman objects to being labeled a postmodernist

    http://www.thejungiansociety.org/Jung+Society/e-journal/Volume-3/Neville-2007.pdf
  •  

    Hillman Speaks:
    The topic is depression and the man is confounding

    by Cliff Bostock 

     

    "As a longtime "Hillmaniac," I was most interested in the performance of the man himself. Although he has visited my classes before, this was my first time to hear him lecture at length - and as someone who has finally become popularly famous. It was also my first time to feel, in his presence, the frustration created by the often stark self-contradictions of his method. 

    These contradictions are often explained now as the effects of "deconstruction," as myth scholar Ginette Paris did at this seminar. But I have no sense of Hillman as a disciple of Derrida's method. I have never known him to cite Lacan, for example, or to use any of the vocabulary of the so-called post-structuralists. If by "deconstruction," Paris and others mean that he attempts to undermine concepts that have seized the imagination and imposed an often unexamined order, I suppose the term fits. As someone standing inside that formal tradition - and history is important to him - Hillman shows no evidence of that."

     

    Here is someone who does not think Hillman is a disciple of Derrida's method.

    Writings
  • I was there when Ginetter Paris gave this talk at the Pacifica Conference but I forgot about her mention of Derrida. She says lets not forget Derrida in all this.


    Giegerich/Hillman: What is Going on? Psychology at the Threshold Pacifica Graduate Institute Campus of: University of California in Santa Barbara, August 31-September 4, 2000 Ginette Paris

     

    "Giegerich happens to be the first to be doing of archetypal psychology a critique similar to that of Lacan for Freud.  Through his now famous cliché  of “the unconsciousis structured like a language”, Lacan was trying to make the point that language can only be a compromise between ourselves and reality.  Ok Lacan, it took me a while, as I flunked all the Lacan seminars I took in my youth, but thirty 22years later, I get it: language is bound to fail us, especially in psychoanalysis. Right. From Lacan, I moved to James Hillman and loved his insistence of the poetic basis of the psyche; here was someone who was  saying the psyche is structured like animage, a myth.  Right! Oh, but let’s not forget Derrida and deconstruction: the unconscious is a text, and one needs to read between the lines, always, and the signification escapes the one writing the text, always. Oh, yes, the older I get, the more conscious Iam of the subtext, the silent unsaid things.Giegerich, with Hegel to support his argument, is now suggesting that life of the soul is not only language, not only image, not only text, it is also logic.Right, I am all in favor of richness."

  • Something interesting I found trying to find something on the internet about Jung and Derrida. I have not found much yet.

    http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/winter02-decoding-hillman.pdf

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Extending the application of Jung's Psychological Types from clinical experience.

The title remains a starter to the notion that it is through the inferior function of the patient/client where insight can be forthcoming. A second point is that the primary notion of psych' Types can be both simplified and expanded to include archetypal identities as well as each type having objectives within their primary function. Thirdly: there is a critical path of decision making that can be both found, recognised and once understood, can offer insight into dis function according to where…

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