James Hillman and Archetypal Psychology
James Hillman is an interesting fellow. He is a psychologist who was trained in Carl Jung’s system, but he went on to develop Jungian ideas in his own direction. Depending on who you ask, he’s either seen as a radical Jungian or the initiator of his own school—archetypal psychology.
Archetypal psychology views the ‘ego-complex’ as just one of many different complexes in the psyche. In his magnum opus Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), Hillman writes:
From the bastion of Rome, reactions (that I have not ordered) by other persons in my psyche are alien, and they will be chronicled by the case historian as peculiar personifications of my primitive hinterlands, strange behavior honoring strange Gods… But the Roman central ego is no more “conscious” than are the outlandish styles of the other complexes. Consciousness may be reapportioned without being diminished; it may return to the bush and fields, to its polycentric roots in the complexes and their personified cores, that is, to a consciousness based on a polytheistic psychology. Polytheistic psychology refers to the inherent dissociability of the psyche and the location of consciousness in multiple figures and containers. (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 26)
He considers excessive singleness to be unhealthy, and one major concern of his is the ‘relativization of the ego’:
The egocentric psyche with its one eye fixed on wholes and unities may grudgingly admit personifying as a figure of speech, but never that the imaginal realm and its persons are actual presences and true powers… This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity—that real meaning, real beauty and truth require a unified vision. It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self. Instead of trying to cure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears, we would let the content of this fantasy cure consciousness of its obsession with unity. By absorbing the plural viewpoint of “splinter psyches” into our consciousness, there would be a new connection with multiplicity and we would no longer need to call it disconnected schizoid fragmentation. Consciousness, and our notion of consciousness, would reflect a world view that is diverse and unsettled.
…we would find ourselves no longer alone in our subjectivity… All would depart together: unity and uniqueness, identity, integration and integrity as simplicity, and individuality as undividedness. And with the departing dominant unitary fantasy would go as well its dominant emotion: loneliness. (Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 41–42)
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4 comments December 14th, 2005