Wading into the waters of the river of archetypal psychology...again...

 For years nearly two decades, I have been sipping the wine of something called archetypal psychology, through the writing of James Hillman’s ‘The Soul’s Code, Revisioning Psychology, and Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account.

In this space, I have haltingly and sputteringly and tentatively attempted to explore some of the major tenets of Hillman’s thinking. The concept of a daimon, some kind of ‘acorn’ that influences, without directing or dominating, a central energy in one’s life, was attractive, perhaps because some of the models of biographies Hillman discloses were surprising, somewhat unpredictable, and clearly impactful on those individuals. Menuhin’s childhood demand for a ‘real’ violin and not a miniature after attending a symphony concert, for example, was riveting. The tight fit of a psychology of unification, normality, and ultimately politically correct, in which the ego dominated, within highly structured and conventionally enforced boundaries, rendering all other human behaviour unacceptable always seemed quite harsh, inhuman and possibly in need of further study and reflection. The squeezing of psychology between the legal and the medical epistemologies, theories, methodologies, including pharmaceutical interventions, electric shock therapy and ‘talk therapy’ were the chosen modalities of addressing whatever human psychological needs presented, also seemed somehow too limiting. Fiction and biographies seemed replete with stories of human “excess” while garnering attention of readers and scholars, criminologists and legal heavy-weights, as well as pharmacists and psychiatrists. Most of their respective interpretations were regarded by many as “abnormal”. The categorizing of human behaviour as “abnormal” has many implications not the least of which is ‘social ostracizing’.

Perhaps it was growing up in a house where all-too-frequent judgements were liberally assigned to “characters” for whom one of my parents had no respect or regard. The word “crazy” usually was one of the epithets in the mix of adjectives.  Although a nurse, she had no formal training or reading of any kind in the field of human psychology, and the judgements seem to have been seared in my memory as both hurtful and unwarranted. Attempts to analyze characters in literature, too, were full of attempts to paint a ‘psychological’ portrait of their personality, which paintings were often the application of a theoretical framework from a leading psychological theorist. For example, a psychology professor friend, visited a grade eleven English class to introduce the students to the application of Freud’s ego-id-libido tri-partite distinctions of human personality to William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies. Piggy, in that novel, was depicted in this application as “super-ego” attempting to balance ego and id of the choir boys.

Later, differentiations of human personality appeared, for example from Jung’s complex theory:

 “which holds that every personality is essentially multiple. Multiple personality is humanity in its natural condition. In other cultures, these multiple personalities have names, locations, energies, functions voices, angel and animal forms and even theoretical formulations as different kinds of soul. In our culture the multiplicity of personality is regarded either as a psychiatric aberration or, at best, as unintegrated introjections or partial personalities. The Psychiatric fear of multiple personality indicates the identification of personality with a partial capacity, the ego, which is in turn the psychological enactment of a two-thousand-year monotheistic tradition that has elevated unity over multiplicity.” (James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, Spring Publications, Dallas, 1983, p. 51-2)

Some assumptions underly the personality theory that emerges from archetypal psychology, assumptions that differ from the main views of personality in Western psychology. If pathologizing belongs to the soul and is not to be combated by a strong ego, and if therapy consists in giving support to the counter-ego forces, the personified figures who are ego-alien, then both the theory of psycho-pathology and that of therapy assume a personality theory that is not ego-centred….Archetypal psychology extends Jung’s personified naming of the components of personality-shadow, anima, animus, trickster, old wise man, great mother, etc. ‘Personifying or imagining things’ becomes crucial for moving from an abstract, objectified psychology to one that encourages animistic engagement with the world. Personifying further allows the multiplicity of psychic phenomena to be experienced as voices, faces, and names. Psychic phenomena can then be perceived with precision and particularity, rather than generalized in the manner of faculty psychology as feelings, ideas, sensations and the like. For archetypal psychology, consciousness is given with the various ‘partial’ personalities. Rather than being imagined as split-off fragments of the ‘I’, they are better reverted to the differentiated models of earlier psychologies where the complexes would have been called souls, daimones, genii, and other mythical-imaginal figures….Whereas most psychologies attempt to ban these personalities as disintegrative, archetypal psychology favors bringing non-ego figures to further awareness and consider this tension with the non-ego which relativizes the ego’s surety and single perspective to be a chief occupation of soul-making. Thus, personality is conceived less in terms of stages in life and development, of typologies of character and functioning, of psycho-energetics towards a goal (social, individual, etc.) or of faculties (will, affect, reason) and their balance. Rather, personality is imaginatively conceived as a living and peopled drama in which the subject ‘I’ takes part but is neither the sole author, nor director, nor always the main character. Sometimes he or she is not even on the stage….The healthy or mature or ideal personality will thus show cognizance of its dramatically masked and ambiguous situation. Irony, humor, and compassion will be it hallmarks, since these traits bespeak an awareness of the multiplicity of meanings and fates and the multiplicity of intentions embodied by any subject at any moment.   The ‘healthy personality’ is imagined less upon a model of natural, primitive, or ancient man with its nostalgia, or upon social-political man with its mission, or bourgeois rational man with its moralism, but instead against the background of artistic man for whom imagining is a style of living and whose reactions are reflexive, animal, immediate. This model is, of course, not meant literally or singly. It serves to stress certain values of personality to which archetypal psychology gives importance: sophistication, complexity, and impersonal profundity; an animal flow with life disregarding concepts of will, choice, and decision -making; morality as dedication to crafting the soul; sensitivity to traditional continuities; the significance of pathologizing and living at the ’borders’; aesthetic responsiveness.  (Hillman, op. cit. p. 51-2-3)

How we ‘see’ and ‘consider’ and ‘evaluate’ ourselves, as well as how we see ‘the other’ becomes, through this lens, radically different from the various “templates” that previously have been used as our cognitive and relational perspectives and to beg more reflection. Previous notions of ‘thinking’ feeling, acting, and the notion of ‘components’ of the psyche, evocative of the anatomical/physiological names and functions of body parts, give way, without being excluded, to an over-arching notion of an artistic river that includes those archetypes that seem to ‘have’ us in each situation, and that bear constant reflection without evading, avoiding, denying or shaming, from the psychological perspective. Reductionisms give way to imaginal reflective portraiture. Hillman writes in Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, “archetypal psychology presents the polytheistic structure of a post-modern consciousness. It is a style of thinking, a fashion of mind, a revisionist engagement on many fronts: therapy, education, literary criticism, medicine, philosophy, and the material world. (p. 54)

In his work entitled, Revisioning Psychology, Hillman writes;

I am attempting to de-moralize the psyche from the moralistic fallacy which reads psychic events in terms of good and bad, right and wrong. This requires the fiction of a fixed subject, the Chooser, or a choosing subject, the Fixer, who can repair, amend, atone. The moralistic fallacy is central to the myth of man in the middle, humanism’s psychology of a self-identified ego, the Hero whose decisive sword divides in two so that he may choose between good and evil. Moralism plagues psychology, as it must if we remember psychology’s origins in the Reformation and Melancthon’s+ attempt to bring about the ethical culture of Germany. Even empirical psychology has its moralistic tone, tending to be both descriptive and normative together. Whether in the fantasy of Watson (scientific theory of behaviorism), Skinner (Operant Conditioning), and Mowrer (two-factor theory, learning due to Pavlovian conditioning or the law of effect) or in Freud, Maslow, Laing, and Jung, psychology wants to show in the same demonstration both how we are and how we should be--the ‘should be’ disguised by saying, ‘This is how mankind really is; here is our basic nature; this is what it is to be human.’ What does not fit in becomes inhuman, psychopathic, or evil. Every student of psychology is forced into moralistic positions and every patient of psychology caught in moral judgements about the soul. (Hillman borrows from Kathleen Raine’s writing of William Blake’s view of the moralistic fallacy)….

Satan’s first step is to invent a moral code based upon the false belief that individuals can of themselves be good or evil. This is in direct contradiction to the real nature of things, by which the proprium (property, attribute) is merely the recipient of the divine influx. The morally ‘good’ spectre is as satanic in every way as the morally ‘evil,’ since what is alike in both is their negation of the Imagination.

And Hillman goes on: Morality is rooted in psychic images and psychic images are moral powers. These images remind us that we are not alone, choosing and deciding, but that in our choices and decisions we are always reflecting mythic stances. To follow a morality literally is the fallacy that forgets morality’s imaginal background; it is even an immoral or impious stance, for it forgets the God in the morality. So, when Blake says that choosing in terms of good and evil negates Imagination, it is implied that the first step in recovering the imaginative perspective is to set aside all moral points of view toward the images of fantasy, dream and pathology. Images are to be left free of judgements, good or bad, positive or negative. We have been so dominated by the heroic ego that questions of free will and self-determination have become central concerns of Western thought. Let us return morality to the imagination, and instead become concerned with its free play and free workings in order to understand the soul’s images and changes exempt from taxing burdens of moralisms….The horizon of the psyche these days is shrunk to the personal, and the new psychology of humanism fosters the little self-important man at the great sea’s edge, turning to himself to ask how he feels today, filling in his questionnaire, counting his personality inventory. He had abandoned intellect and interpreted his imagination in order to become one with his ‘gut experiences’ and ‘emotional problems’; his soul has become equated with these. His fantasy of redemption has shrunk to ‘ways of coping’; his stubborn pathology, that via regia to the soul’s depths, is cast forth in Janovian* screams, like swine before Perls#, dissolved in a closed Gestalt of group closeness, or dropped in an abyss of regression during the clamber up to Maslovian** peaks. Feeling is all. Discover your feelings; trust your feelings. The human heart is the way to soul and what psychology is all about….The faith in human feeling is nothing other than a new religion, a religion with teachers and terms, rituals and doctrines, but without Gods…..Feelings too are metaphors, expressions of fantasy, indicative of psychic images. They are not immune to ego and its literalizations; feelings are no more truths than are ideas, no more facts than are perceptions.  Feelings too are subject to archetypal powers that govern their ethical values, their aesthetic judgements, their styles of relating expressing and absorbing. Feelings are not a faultless compass to steer by, to believe so is to make Gods of them and then only Good Gods, forgetting that feeling can be as instrumental to destructive action and mistaken ideologies as any other psychological function…..Organizational loyalties can make us commit perjury; class solidarity and military pride can make us intolerant and cruel; and feelings of personal attachment can make us defensive, possessive, and sentimental.

These notions unpack Hegel’s writing (from Philosophy of Mind) about feelings:

Feeling and heart is not the form by which anything is legitimated, moral, true, just, etc., and an appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad…From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder adultery, fornication, blasphemy, etc.’ In such times when ‘’scientific’ theology and philosophy (and therapy) make the heart and feeling the criterion for what is good, moral and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences. (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, pp.178-182)

The transition from the fragile perch of the hero, considering himself and others from the satanic perspective of several ‘good-bad’ templates, to a far more complex and nuanced and shared engagement/enactment (metaphorically and literally) with pulsing archetypes, whose images, like the bank, the rocks, the water creatures, including the acidity/alkalinity of the river, continue to engage in our lives, offer a far more magnetic and soul-searching process than the ‘cardboard cut-outs’ of humanism’s psychology.

+Philip Melancthon, a German Lutheran reformer, collaborator with Luther, first systematic theologian of the Protestant Reformation, asserted justification by faith and rejected transubstantiation

*Arthur Janov authored “The Primal Scream”

# Fritz Perls coined the term “Gestalt therapy”

**Abraham Maslow created a hierarchy of needs