"Dog-paddling into the waters of archetypal psychology #3

 Returning to the perspective and the processes of archetypal psychology….let’s take a look at the concept of ‘the soul’…a concept often taken for granted and often also reduced to and conflated with spirit in the discourse of practical sense (to borrow a phrase from Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination).

Hillman writes:

By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things rather than a thing itself….The soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought….we are not able to use the word in an unambiguous way, even though we take it to refer to that unknown human factor which makes meaning possible, which turns events into experiences, and which is communicated in love.’ (another aspect of soul is its religious concern, and three further qualifications have been added)…’First, ‘soul’ refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by ‘soul’ I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy—that mode which recognized all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p. 16-17)

(Soul) ‘bestows rich imagery, pathologies, and feeling qualities to what otherwise might become only a philosophical concept….The human being is set within the field of soul; soul is the metaphor that includes the human…Even if human life is only one manifestation of the psyche, a human life is always a psychological life-which is how archetypal psychology reads the Aristotelian notion of soul of life and the Christian doctrine of the soul as immortal, i.e. beyond the confines of individual limitation. A humanistic or personalistic psychology will always fail the full perspective of soul that extends beyond human, personal behavior. This move which places man within psyche (rather than psyche within man) revisions all human activity whatsoever as psychological. Every piece of human behavior, whatever its manifest and literal content, is always also a psychological statement….Speech about soul itself-what it is, its body relations, its origins and development, what it consists in, how it functions—are psychology’s concern only because these are the enduring ways the soul gives account of itself in conceptual form…The soul can be an object of study only when it is also recognized as the subject studying itself by means of the fictions and metaphors of objectivity.
(Ibid, p. 17-18)

 This perspective seems, at least to this scribe, to extend protractedly, an earlier concept of the psychologist Rollo May, the existential psychologist associated with humanistic psychology, in which May argued that a core ‘problem’ of being a human being is that, at one and the same time, the human being is both subject and object, both studying, reflecting and observing, while also being observed, studied and reflected upon, in May’s view, by the subjective self. May determined that human beings fear death because we cannot comprehend our own lack of existence. However, May believed that facing these feelings of anxiety and fear was a necessary experience if personal growth and meaning were to be achieved in life. (study.com)

Hillman’s depiction of archetypal psychology, on the other hand, integrates death into the fullness of the human psychological experience, and brings those images, dark and imposing and even threatening as they may be, into the fullness of the range and circle of what it means to be human, in a way different from, while deriving from May’s clinical and theoretical work. The permeation of psychology into all fields of human experiences extends previous notions of the psyche ‘within’ human to the human within psyche. This inversion, or reversal, seems to be somewhat radical, reliant as it is on the cornerstone of myth, as its primary rhetoric.

It is this movement to myth that ‘locates psychology in the cultural imagination. “These myths are themselves metaphors…so that be relying on myths as its primary rhetoric, archetypal psychology grounds itself in a fantasy that cannot be taken historically, physically, literally. Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all ‘archetypalists,’ the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures….Myths do not ground, they open. The role of myth in archetypal psychology is not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of possible behaviors or to circumscribe the forms of transpersonal energies, but rather to open the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection. We may thereby see our ordinary lives embedded in and ennobled by the dramatic and world-creative life of mythical figures. The study of mythology allows events to be recognized against their mythical background…(and) the study of mythology enables one to perceive and experience the life of the soul mythically. (Ibid p. 19-20)

There is much to ponder in these sentences of insight and challenge from Hillman. First, we are potentially encouraged and enabled to begin to see our lives through the lenses of those myths that comprise the foundational structures of human culture. It is not so much about seeing our lives from a more heroic or epic dimension and proportion; rather, we could be perceiving through the lens of the myth, as well as through our private perceptions so that we might be less likely to be submerged in our own feelings, personal trauma, therapeutic attempts to transform into some more moral, socially acceptable, politically correct ‘thing’…

In another work, Revisioning Psychology, Hillman writes that these mythic images are not to be considered as merely allegory:

Allegory is a defensive reaction of the rational mind against the full power of the soul’s irrational personifying propensity. Gods and demons become mere poetic allusions. The use of allegory as a defense continues today in the interpretations of dreams and fantasies. When images no longer surprise us, when we can expect what they mean and know what they intend, it is because we have our ‘symbologies’ of established meanings….If the mother in our dream, or the beloved, or the wise old counselor, says and does what one would expect, or if the analyst interprets these figures conventionally, they have been deprived of their authority as mythic images and personal and reduced to mere allegorical conventions and moralistic stereotypes. They have become the personified conceits of allegory, a simple means of persuasion that forces the dream or fantasy into doctrinal compliance. The image allegorized is not the image in service of  teaching. In contrast, archetypal psychology holds that the true iconoclast is the image itself which explodes its allegorical meaings, releasing startling new insights. Thus, the most distressing images in dreams and fantasies, those we shy from for their disgusting distortion and perversion, are precisely the ones that break the allegorical frame of what we think we know about this person or that, this trait of ourselves or that. The ‘worst’ images are thus the best, for they are the ones that restore a figure to its pristine power as a numinous person at work in the soul. (Hillman, op. cit. p 8)

In a cultural epoch in which literalisms not only abound, they ‘enshackle’ both the mind and the heart and curtail the potential for the full imaginative exploration of the fullness of their unique freight. And, archetypal psychology is one theoretical and even useful path and lens to arrest that erosion of the potential of soul.

Two observations seem relevant here. The first is that the student of literature is endowed with the pursuit of all of the literary images as his/her pathway to the understanding of the mind and the imagination of the writer in his lens. Those images, selected and displayed in however lyrical or tragical modality, when compared with the images selected and displayed in the works of another author of a similar or different epoch, illustrate some of the prominent themes and memes, fears and aspirations, demons and angels, of the period. And, of course, those literary periods are also comparable with the writing in other times and places.

A second observation comes from the writing done from an historical-cultural perspective, the perspective of one like John Ralston Saul. In his penetrating and insightful work, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, Canada at the end of the Twentieth Century, he opens with this line:

Canada, like other nation states, suffers from a contraction between its public mythologies and its reality…..Mythology often turns into a denial of complexity. That can become its purpose. On a good day it can provide relief from the endlessly contradictory burdens of reality. Mythology thus helps citizens to summon up enough energy to consider the public good—the good of the whole. And that simple act of consideration—of doubting—is an affirmation of their self-confidence as citizens. That self-confidence allows us to question how the public good might be served. In place of fear, and the certitude fear demands, we are able to question and to think. On a bad day, mythology encourages the denial of reality. AS if in a bank of fog, we stumble into illusion, which in turn produces an impression of relief or rather a state of delusion. In that atmosphere a rising undercurrent of fear creates that self-demeaning need for certitude. Absolute answers and ideologies prosper. These are asserted to be natural and inevitable. In this way mythology become snot so much false as mystification. (Saul op. cit. p 3)

For the purposes of dissecting some of the historical and cultural influences on the nation state that is Canada, the pervasive impact of the ‘victim myth’ is indisputable. And the manner of its applications and implications, as deployed by various political and thought leaders, one of the purposes of Saul’s work, is honourably purposed and worthy of further study.

Hillman, the archetypal psychology advocate, is neither adopting nor rejecting either the literary nor the cultural-historical perspective. His purview and perspective is the individual psychology, as considered through the lens of something/some notion/some abstraction he terms soul as metaphor, “transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance. …But this metaphorical perspective also kills; it brings about the death of naïve realism, naturalism, and literal understanding. This metaphorical mode does not speak in declarative statements of explain in clear contrasts. It delivers all things in their shadows. So, its perspective defeats any heroic attempt to gain a firm grip on phenomena; instead, the metaphorical mode of soul is “elusive, allusive, illusive undermining the very definition of consciousness as intentionality and its history as development. Human awareness fails in its comprehension not because of original sin or personal neurosis or because of the obstinacy of the objective world to which it is supposedly opposed. Human awareness fails, according to a psychology based on soul, because the soul’s metaphorical nature has a suicidal necessity, an underworld affiliation, a morbism, a destiny—different from dayworld claims—which makes the psyche fundamentally unable to submit to the hubris of an egocentric notion of subjectivity as achievement, defined as cognition, conation m, intention, perception and so forth. Thus this sense of weakness, inferiority, mortification, masochism, darkness and failure is inherent to the mode of metaphor itself which defeats conscious understanding as a control over phenomena. Metaphor, as he soul’s mode of logos, ultimately results in that abandonment to the given which approximates mysticism. The metaphorical transposition –this ‘death-dealing’ move that at the same time re-awakens consciousness to a sense of soul—is at the heart of archetypal psychology’s mission, its world intention.(Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p. 21=22)

 It is the shift from clarity, and strength of both a critical, rational, theoretical and illustrative perspective that attends the most serious pursuit of academic disciplines, whether they are literary, historic, scientific or even theological, that this perspective challenges, not in order to decimate or degrade any of the other disciplines, but to claim as its own. The sense of the heroic and the diagnostic and the remediative and the clinical and the prescriptive and the descriptive and analytical that lies at the core of the null hypothesis experimental approach in science, while never excluded, are supplemented and complemented with the perspective of soul. And, although abstract ambiguous and far less easily or readily encapsulated, and even still dangling and begging even more questions and myths that might be re-enacting in our lives, this perspective is, nevertheless, worthy of our personal, professional and also our academic profound consideration and reflection.

And we are just beginning to learn to ‘do the dog paddle’ in these waters!