Can/would the church embrace archetypal psychology's perspective?

 Wrestling mentally and emotionally, intellectually and culturally with some of the principles of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a path to a quite different ‘perspective’ than the one we have been taught to honour. Symptoms, seen as problems to be ‘fixed’ in our psychological lives, as they are in medicine and the legal system, renders both ‘symptom-bearer’ and ‘fixer’ engaged both implicitly and explicitly in a transactional relationship. One has a ‘need,’ the other a ‘solution.’ And the matter of the price, cost, reward and context of the engagement is the primary issue in the consideration of that dynamic. The name and the implications of the symptom are conditioned by the nature of the ‘transaction’. Is the ‘fixer’ able to detect, diagnose and comprehend the symptom-bearer in a manner comparable to the orthopod who mends a broken femur? Is the symptom-bearer able to ‘see’ and ‘grasp’ and disclose the full nature of the ‘issue’? Indeed, is the “intervention to fix” model itself as relevant, appropriate and benign as we have to come consider it?

Further complicating that ‘arrangement’ is the obvious question of “outcome”….was the encounter ‘successful’ or not. And then, the next question is what does one mean by ‘success’? Was the symptom removed like a wart to which a chemical compound was added to see it evaporate? Was the ‘symptom’ changed and replaced by some other, that enabled the ‘patient/client’ to change the pattern of his/her life? Was there a different interpretation/perspective available to both client and therapist that, essentially, offered a path to growth, change and both autonomy and authenticity previously unavailable? In an empirical, extrinsic and driven culture, the issue of ‘goals’ and measurable outcomes, in so many of our endeavours, has been elevated to a level that contradicts and contravenes our capacity to deliver.

An internal medicine professional of my acquaintance, once prescribed a ‘non-curative’ pill for a medical condition, only to have to discontinue the prescription and refer a patient to a different internal medicine specialist who had a licence to prescribe radioactive iodine, that had a much more impactful result than the ‘non-curative’. And indeed, many of the legitimate interventions of the medical profession, while partial, and often with considerable ‘side-effects’, demonstrates the full capacity of the profession to provide ‘care’ while also illustrating the  partial and often complicating implications of that care.

The field of psychology/psychiatry, in all of its many valiant attempts to meet and address both the expressed needs/symptoms and the ‘back story’ of those needs/symptoms, similar to the multiple galaxies we are learning about, continues to attract and to warrant revision. Pushing back against literalism, and offering a more fluid, imaginative and imaginal perspective, especially of those moments, memories, acts, and dynamics that beset our okayness (for lack of a better term), archetypal psychology attempts to see those ‘problems’ in and through the face and the story and the dynamic of images borrowed from the legacies of the gods, goddesses, and their mythical stories first. Without ascribing as a starting place in that perspective, whether or not the ‘issue’ is moral, right or wrong, or even abnormal, the image of the god/goddess/myth links the human species in a common psychic heritage. Soul-making, rather than ‘fixing’ a problem is considered the appropriate and universal purpose. Beyond genetics, or at least outside of genetics and biology, and based on one’s fulsome biography, this perspective, way of seeing, lens, (soul) embraces both story and the intimate and inescapable connection of each story to its own death. Rejecting the reductions of both morality and the empiricism/literalism/nominalism of both medicine and law, and the heroic model of ‘fixing’ every problem, along with the demands and expectations that approach lays on professionals first, and patients/clients second, archetypal psychology’s approach offers a “mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing-that psychological attitude which suspiciously disallows the naïve and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul. So the question of soil-making is ’what does this event, this thing, this movement move in my soul? What does it mean to my death. The question of death enters because it is in regard to death that the perspective of soul is distinguished most starkly from the perspective of natural life.” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p.27)

We are not, as humans, akin to, analogous to, or in any way similar to a machine, especially in our psychological life. Even with all of the worthy and honourable research in neuroscience, and the discovery of the various pathways and  relationships in the circuitry of our brain, we have not ‘mastered,’ and for the foreseeable future will not, completely master the totality of either our identity or our various attempts to approach our psychology. Chemistry, physiology, electricity, even if and when measured and calculated, analysed and interpreted, taken together, are insufficient to capture the fullness of our psychology, in spite of our heroic and partial attempts to address the ramifications of the intersection of multiple factors and forces that converge in our lives.

And while our various scholars and theorists have given some clues for further study, and that process is likely to continue, the division between science and the poetic mind, as a dividing line in our academic pursuits, nevertheless, leaves a vacuum and an opportunity for some different perspectives.

Archetypal psychology, less a clinical, scientific and objective approach, and more of a “lens” through which to perceive some of the behaviours, attitudes, and even beliefs that, in a former universe, were categorized as ‘abnormal’ takes a different starting point. Pop culture throws around the word ‘normal’ in describing an individual while implying that others, different perhaps for each person, are labelled ‘abnormal’. In a culture, too, that obsesses with belonging, fitting in, compliance to the norm, such categories tend to create models of behaviour, and the judgements of ‘difference’ that generate both walls and exclusions of those who do not ‘fit’ the prevailing conventional model. And the exclusions, isolations, scornings and alienations of those who do not ‘fit’ is, itself, a cultural issue which, while seeming to support some kind of ‘order’ and expectations, also limits and potentially even precludes creative ideas from a wide swath of people.

Highways, by definition and in order to offer some degree of safety, need lanes, and lane markings, along with the speed limits and cautions that provide a degree of safety for their use. Similarly, public institutions, depending on their purpose and design, need some defining lanes, protocols, and the requisite supporting methods to achieve those goals and purposes. It is the question of the ‘goals and purposes’ of a human life, that, after centuries of pondering, reflecting, writing and even educating about the best theories, and interventions, remains open for further  imaginative considerations.

Considering the ‘previously unknown galaxies’ of our psyche including what is normal and/or abnormal, however, through the methods and approaches of historic disciplines such as law a medicine, is likely to generate theories and perspective, methods and approaches that replicate, imitate, and even duplicate those that have already attempted to establish a footing in our collective consciousness, as well as our collective unconscious.

The material deemed critical for the kinds of theories and approaches to human psychology, by both medicine and law, will also be constricted by the limitations of the lanes of epistemology, theory, demonstrated and documented evidence of the centuries of their respective ‘lanes’ of both cognition and precedent. And the definitions, diagnoses, treatments and outcomes will continue in patterns that are acceptable, justified and predictable. Indeed, the risk to all of us is that because of the narrowness of the lanes of both theory and methodology, the size of the abnormal lane embracing a relatively high number of human individuals, will expand, as professionals operating in their established field seek to enhance their playing field and the opportunities for further growth. Sickness, so defined, will continue to inflate in numbers, requiring additional interventions, as will abnormal behaviour continue to demand more laws and more restriction.

Adopting as lens, the way of seeing human psychology, as a concerto of the images of the various gods, goddesses, archetypes and narratives that have ‘peopled’ the stories of cultures around the globe, from native and indigenous, tribal and nation, ethnicity and religion, language and myth, warfare and peace, gender and sexuality, is in a word, radical. Embracing easily and openly those multiple images that we all have dancing, arguing, stabbing, hugging, selling, defending, seeking revenge, seeking love, striving (and the list of active verbs continues endlessly) through the biography, seen in the rear-view mirror, makes so much sense, that one wonders why it has not come to our awareness before the last quarter of the twentieth century.

And rather than reduce our psychological life to the enactment of a single diagnosis, or even a single image, (example, Peter Pan, or Lade MacBeth), and also rather than presume that we are fully in charge and control of whatever is going on in our lives including the images playing in our psyche, and that viewed from a primarily moral perspective, as right or wrong, archetypal psychology offers a far more nuanced, complex and perhaps even relevant and applicable “lens”  of images, including fantasies, dreams, nightmares, and the whole range of human experiences, both conscious and not, to consider when taking the whole “picture” through biography, into account. The notion, for example, that the image “has” us, rather than ‘us’ being in control of those images, is first, far more realistic based on the reality that we all know ‘stories’ with images are playing in our ‘heads’ all the time. It is as if, through the perspective of archetypal psychology, we acknowledge that our ‘head-screen’ is alive with images, many of which we simply pass by, considering that they are little more than ‘child’s play’. We permit our children, and ourselves as young children, to explore an imaginative world, through literature, film, fantasy and dream. And then, for adults, we turn the tables on those legitimate “visions” and make them pragmatic, in order to be vetted by a ‘responsible parent or guardian’ and turn them into a vocation, a profession and a way to ‘make a living’.

Essentially, archetypal psychology is confronting the deeply embedded concepts of the human will and ego as being in control of our lives, including especially rationality, logic and empiricism. And without denigrating any of those concepts, indeed offering them each a more legitimate and fruitful and free expression of their insights, archetypal psychology opens the door to a vision of a fully accessible and fully acknowledged and fully tolerated complexity of all. The perspective is not a way out of having to confront the most malicious and injurious and contemptible and nefarious of behaviours, and excuse them, or rationalise them.  Rather it is a different way of ‘seeing’ each human being ‘psychologically’ in a process Hillman dubs ‘soul-making’. And as a process of psychologizing, it does not infer or imply a ‘morality’ as its first consideration. Rather, whether moral or not, each human being carries the stories not so much of conscious imitation, but rather of evocation of those voices that populate the mythologies from around the world.

And, in evoking those voices, on reflection, after the fact, possibly long after the fact, we can glean a montage or collage of the images that were energizing our lives, with or without our awareness at the time. Patterns, envisioned in and through the faces/voices/images of gods and goddesses, rather than ‘incident reports of crisis’ uses a wide-angle lens, looking through the telescope into the galaxies of images that have played out in and through our stories. Similarly, through the lens of the archetypes, of the gods and goddesses, we open our lens wide to include those voices that were not so comfortable, so heroic, so altruistic, and so empathetic as our public mask, persona, was wont to display and to deliver throughout our lives. And in opening to those ‘shadow’ figures, voices, perspectives themselves identified with and identifying those gods and goddesses, we naturally see ourselves very differently, from the ways in which ‘others’ saw and considered us in their direct experience of our presence. The archetypes significant to those ‘others’ (from this perspective) are and were also contributing to their psychological lives, in a manner that reflects those imaginal voices, themes, conflicts, reconciliations, assassinations, recoveries, fantasies and dreams that have populated not only our shared literatures and cultures, but also our families, communities and our churches.

And here is the significant rub: where archetypal psychology greets and separates from religion and faith.

In Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, James Hillman, writes a section entitled, Polytheistic Psychology and Religion. He writes;

The polytheistic moves of archetypal psychology occur in four inter-related modes.

1)    The most accurate model of human existence will be able to account for its innate diversity, both among individuals and within each individual. Yet this same model must also provide fundamental structures and values for this diversity. For both Freud and Jung, multiplicity is basic to human nature, and their models of man rely on a polycentric fantasy. Freud’s notion of the child as sexually polymorphous originates the libido in a polymorphic, polyvalent and polycentric field of erogenous zones. Jung’s model of personality is essentially multiple, and Jung correlates the plurality of its archetypal structure with the polytheistic stage of culture. Hence, the soul’s inherent multiplicity demands a theological fantasy of equal differentiation.

2)    The tradition of thought, (Greek, Renaissance, Romantic) to which archetypal psychology claims it is an heir is set in polytheistic attitudes. The imaginative products of these historical periods cannot contribute further to psychology unless the consciousness that would receive from them is able to transpose itself into a similar polytheistic framework. The high achievements of Western culture from which contemporary culture may find sources for its survival remain closed to modern consciousness unless it gains a perspective mimetic to what it is examining. Hence, polytheistic psychology is necessary for the continuity of culture.

3)    The social, political and psychiatric critique implied throughout archetypal psychology mainly concerns the monotheistic hero-myth (now called ego psychology) of secular humanism. i.e., the single-centered, self-identified notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre). It is this myth which has dominated the soul and which leads to both unreflected action and self-blindness (Oedipus). It is responsible also for the repression of a psychological diversity that then appears as psychopathology. Hence, a polytheistic psychology is necessary for re-awakening reflective consciousness and bringing a new reflection to psychopathology.

4)    The perspectivalism of archetypal psychology requires a deepening of subjectivity beyond mere Nietzschean perspective or existential stances. Perspectives are forms of vision, rhetoric, values, epistemology, and lived styles that perdure independently of empirical individuality. For archetypal psychology, pluralism and multiplicity and relativism are not enough: these are merely philosophical generalities. Psychology needs to specify and differentiate each event, which it can do against the variegated background of archetypal configurations, of what polytheism called Gods, in order to make multiplicity both authentic and precise. Thus the question it asks of an event is not why or how, but rather what specifically is being presented and ultimately who, which divine figure, is speaking in this style of consciousness, this form of presentation. Hence a polytheistic psychology is necessary for the authorization of a ‘pluralistic universe’ for consistencies within it, and for precision of its differentiation.

The polytheistic analogy is both religious and not religious. The Gods are taken essentially, as foundations, so that psychology points beyond soul and  can never be merely agnostic. The sacred and sacrificial dimension--the religious instinct as Jung calls it—is given a place of main value; and in truth, it is precisely because of the appeal to the Gods that value enters the psychological field, creating claims on each human life and giving personal acts more than personal significance. The Gods and therefore the Gods of religion and not mere nomina,(mere names) categories, devices ex machina*. They are respected as powers and persons and creators of value….The Gods of psychology are not believed in, not taken literally, not imagined theologically. ‘Religion approaches Gods with ritual, prayer, sacrifice, worship, creed…In archetypal psychology, Gods are imagined. They are approached through psychological methods of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of existence and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.’ Mainly the modes of this participation is reflection: the Gods are discovered in recognizing the stance of one’s perspective, one’s psychological sensitivity to the configurations that dominate one’s styles of thought and life. God’s for psychology do not have to be experienced in direct mystical encounter or in effigies, whether as concrete figures or as theological definitions.(Hillman, op.cit, pps 32, 33, 34, 35)

*Deus ex machina (from britannica.com) Latin: ‘god from machine’ a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly  and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty…A  god appears is Sophocles’ Philoctetes and in most of the plays of Euripides to solve a crisis by divine intervention.

What are the implications, repercussions, supports and enhancements of the religious dimension, if viewed through the ‘lens’ and approach of archetypal psychology?

For many years, this scribe has struggled with the relationship between one’s religious life and one’s secular life, partially as a function of an over-active curiosity, and partly as a function of an also over-active scepticism. Of course, many theologians have posited that there is and can be no authentic separation between what one believes and how one interacts in the secular world. Indeed, for many, the secular world is fraught with impurities, sins and horrific people and situations, while the religious, the spiritual, and the matter of one’s relationship with God demands/needs to be sanctified, or at least trending and portending to a degree of sanctification, righteousness, imitation of and emulation of God. In the New Testament, Hebrews 11:1 posits these words: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Paul Tillich writes in Dynamics of Faith, 1957, “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern.” Vincent Williams, in curatingtheology.org, writes about Tillich, “Faith, for Tillich, is indeed the only thing capable of unifying human life among its disparate elements and concerns. But more so, that unifying result is also its definition; faith is simply that state of ultimate concern.”

One of the obvious questions, whether applied to human psychology or faith is the issue of how and whether one can indeed capture a polytheistic and complex reality through a monotheistic lens. And, how does one go about such a pursuit.

Hillman, writing in Revisioning Psychology (p. 167), says this:

By speaking of Gods….it seems as if we have lost the distinction between religion and psychology. Because the movement of our archetypal psychologizing is always towards myths and Gods, our psychologizing may seem actually a theologizing, and this book is as much a work of theology as of psychology. In a way this is so, and must be so, since the merging of psychology and religion is less the confluence of two different streams than the result of their single source—the soul. The psyche itself keeps psychology and religion bound to each other. Therefore our talk of Gods is not merely the use of personified hyperbole for heightening the values of archetypes, which as psychic functions and structures could as well be described more conceptually, or with analogies to physiological organs, physical forces, of philosophical categories. No—we speak of Gods because we are working toward a nonagnostic psychology, a psychology which does not have to operate in the hollow left from the separation of Sunday and weekday, church and interior state of mind…..The difference between psychology and religion boils down to the same as between psychology and science: literalism, Theology takes Gods literally and we do not…..Another way of putting it would be that the difference between religion and psychology lies not in our description of the Gods but in our action regarding them. Religion and psychology have care for the same ultimates, but religion approaches Gods with ritual prayer sacrifice, worship, creed. Gods are believed in and approached with religious methods. In archetypal psychology Gods are imagined…..They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates…Psychologically, the Gods are never dead; and archetypal psychology’s concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of soul. ( Hillman op. cit. p, 165-169-170)

And here lies one of the primary tensions not only between psychology and religion, but also in the tensions that religion faces, in attempting to link, bridge, connect, relate and implement, apply, incarnate religion and personal life. The argument that they by definition are inseparable makes theoretical sense, and yet, in practice, within the domain of the church, there is both a conscious and an unconscious ‘elevation’ and purification and sanctification and righteousness and even a pretentiousness about the various acts. Ironically and paradoxically, this sanctimoniousness is also devoid of any sensibility of or to metaphor. The rules of liturgy, and the performance of the clergy, not only while ‘on duty’ but in all hours of their life, are deemed to be above reproach.

And all the while, the church is praying that ‘we are all sinners’ seeking and needing the saving grace of forgiveness. Naturally, the charge of hypocrisy seems both obvious and warranted. And yet, that is only ‘literal’ and legalistic, moralistic and exclusionary. More importantly, the question of ‘why’ the church deems such ‘superiority’ and righteousness and purity and perfection as essential, and required by and before God, seems in its core and its entirety to be self-sabotage. The pretense and the arrogance to believe and to impose such a belief and practice of the appearance of holiness and sanctimony on its officials, as if it has been ordained by God, undermines the very dynamic of the religious, spiritual and soul-making and salvation processes.

Such a premise can and does and will only lead to an ecclesial genuflection and almost a military and dogmatic insistence on secrecy and a frozen public face while opening the institution to the truth of its own denial and avoidance of the deeper truth that such a proposition and presumption is both unnatural and unsustainable.

‘Walking on eggs’ and sequestering all wildness, savagery, spontaneity, deception,  the sinister and the dark sides of our person as well as the dark side of the church itself, in order to please God (any God of any faith) seems, at its core, to be an act of the most ungodly, deceitful and nefarious premise. Not only is it hypocritical, but it ‘encases’ God in a man-conceived box and then authorizes and permits and sustains a practice of moral, ethical, social and psychological colonialism and domination. To presume that ‘God’ ordains and sanctifies and has already vetted such a twisting of individual humans, and organizational identities, and then to slide openly and willingly and conspicuously into the corporate business model as the path to respectability and credibility (bigger and richer numbers of people and dollars are the signs of God working), is only adding to the theological Achilles heel. At the core of the Christian faith lies the exhortation to humility; at the core of its identity is hubris. And the two are incompatible.

It is the reduction of the spiritual life to the narrow confines of conventional morality, sustained by the achievement of corporate ‘fiscal stability’ that demonstrates the domination of the ‘spirit’ as compared with the proximity to God of soul.

And it is, so proposed here, from the difference between spirit and soul, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, that the church has much to learn, to  integrate, and to begin to ‘see’. Hillman writes:

At times the spirit position with its rhetoric of order, number, knowledge, permanency and self-defensive logic has been discussed as ‘senex’ and Saturnian; at other times, because of its rhetoric of clarity and detached observation, it has been discussed as Apollonic; on other occasions, because of the rhetoric of unity, ultimacy, identity, it has been termed ‘monotheistic’; and in other contexts, ‘heroic’ also ‘puer’. While recognizing that the spirit perspective must place itself above (as the soul places itself as inferior) and speak in transcendent, ultimate and pure terms, archetypal psychology conceives its task to be one of imagining the spirit language of ‘truth’ faith law and the like as a rhetoric of spirit, even if spirit is obliged by the same rhetoric to take its stance truthfully and faithfully, i.e. literally. (Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p.25)

Archetypal psychology does or ought to replace religion or faith; rather it is here intimated and even envisioned that perhaps through the archetypal psychology approach of the poetic mind, the complexity of human beings, first approached from a mythical relevance to gods and goddesses, that the path to faith and faith community can be enriched, enhanced and enlivened.

The literary imagination has given us models of world views that include the ironic, the tragic, the comic and the historic. It has also given us, through each lens, images of God as king, healer, teacher, prophet (i.e Hopewell’s work, Congregation) and modes of worship that, based far too heavily on ‘marketing’ and  ‘growth’ in a corporate model. The literary imagination has also given us models of the hero within, including the innocent, the orphan, the victim, the warrior and the magician, as exemplified in and through movies and novels of development. Freud and Jung have both excavated the human unconscious as integral to our complexity. Hillman opens us to the perspective of the poetic mind and the imaginal in and through the lens of archetypal psychology. And while none of these kernels of theory or ideas or propositions can or will be ultimate or final or absolute, it is the negation of the absolute and the courage to begin to envision the hypothetical, the ambiguity and the numinous through archetypal psychology that has the potential to open doors and windows for theology that have been sealed shut for eons.

The church’s theological ‘pillars’ of thought, tradition, scholarship, and the belief systems that have emerged from those wells, have, at least from a liberal perspective, have embraced the discoveries of science, without throwing the baby our with the bath water. That is the case in the creation/evolution debate, and in the freedom of choice/right to life debate. However, it is in the dualities, and the literal dimensions of our debates, imposing a strict ‘either-or’ quality of certitude that both the secular and the sacred have fallen of the sword of reductionism.

Restoring a perspective of ambiguity, numinosity, multiplicity, while at the same time unleashing the concept of the psychological ‘normal’ from the confines of politically correct, socially tolerable conventionality, and squeezing the notion of the abnormal without abandoning the psychopathic or the sociopathic or the sexual offender….these are all noble and worthy ideals. Archetypal psychology also ‘grounds’ all of its precepts in the question ‘what does this mean to my death’ another revisionary notion that attempts to take the blinders of denial and avoidance off our shared conventional repression of the truth and reality of our mortality. That in itself is a gift for both psychology and religion.