Archetypal psychology
Encyclopedia
Archetypal psychology is a vein of inquiry into the psyche inaugurated in the early 1900s by Carl Gustav Jung. Jung and his followers, as well as Mircea Eliade
, imagined the psychology of the archetypes
from studying anthropology and archeology reports of their times and weaving it into their understandings of the psyche. They studied how the hierarchy of ancient gods, polytheistic religions, and archetypal ideas found in tales might influence modern life with regard to soul, psyche, dreams and the Self.
Aristotle described an archetype as an original from which derivatives or fragments can be taken. In Jung's psychology an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
Jung and his followers followed Sigmund Freud
and others of Freud's generation, who also investigated, analyzed and put forth theories about how ancient myths, legends, sagas, and religions mimicked some of the broad impulses and drives in the psyche.
There are many psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists who are sometimes called neo-Jungians and who take various approaches to archetypal psychology. These include Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman
, with her inquires into the archetypes and dreams of the feminine and how these are affected by clashes and supports from masculine archetypes, therefore influencing soul and psyche in women's development. Jean Shinoda Bolen
, a Jungian analyst psychiatrist, has also made a lifetime inquiry into the psychology of archetypes for men and for women, and their basis in conscious growth of the soul. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
, Jungian psychoanalyst, holds that insights into soul and psyche, archetypes and dreams were preserved specifically and handed down by indigenous people worldwide, they being the original archetypal theorists.
The inquiry into archetypal psychology has many different subsets, many different progenitors. Archetypal psychology as a basis for developing theory, and especially, down-to-earth applications, is ongoing and evolving constantly.
In the mid-1970s, James Hillman
, a psychologist who trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, also called his work Archetypal psychology. He reports his is in the Jungian tradition and most directly related to Analytical psychology
, yet departs radically. His "archetypal psychology" relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Hillman's archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths
—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. To him, the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Hillman's archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post-Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels
(see Samuels, 1995).
's analytical psychology
. It is strongly influenced by Classical Greek
, Renaissance
, and Romantic
ideas and thought. Influential artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists include: Nietzsche
, Henry Corbin
, Keats
, Shelley
, Petrarch
, and Paracelsus
. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for the psyche
—the soul.
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology.
’s teaching that he “portrays the psyche as inherently multiple”. In Hillman’s archetypal/polytheistic view, the psyche or soul has many directions and sources of meaning—and this can feel like an ongoing state of conflict—a struggle with one’s daimones
. According to Hillman, “polytheistic psychology can give sacred differentiation to our psychic turmoil.…” Hillman states that
Hillman qualifies his many references to gods as differing from a literalistic approach saying that for him they are aides memoires, i.e. sounding boards employed "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of life." Hillman further insists that he does not view the pantheon of gods as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
, cognitive psychology
) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. His main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman’s oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to its proper place in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology
, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Hillman has his own definition of soul. Primarily, he notes that soul is not a “thing”, not an entity. Nor is it something that is located “inside” a person. Rather, soul is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things… (it is) reflective; it mediates events and makes differences…”(1975). Soul is not to be located in the brain or in the head, for example (where most modern psychologies place it), but human beings are in psyche. The world, in turn, is the anima mundi
, or the world ensouled. Hillman often quotes a phrase coined by the Romantic poet John Keats: “call the world the vale of soul-making.”
Additionally, Hillman (1975) says he observes that soul:
The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.”
Hillman (1983) describes his position succinctly:
The snake in the dream does not become something else: it is none of the things Hillman mentioned, and neither is it a penis, as Hillman says Freud might have maintained, nor the serpent from the Garden of Eden
, as Hillman thinks Jung might have mentioned. It is not something someone can look up in a dream dictionary; its meaning has not been given in advance. Rather, the black snake is the black snake. Approaching the dream snake phenomenologically
simply means describing the snake and attending to how the snake appears as a snake in the dream. It is a huge black snake, that is given. But are there other snakes in the dream? If so, is it bigger than the other snakes? Smaller? Is it a black snake among green snakes? Or is it alone? What is the setting, a desert or a rain forest? Is the snake getting ready to feed? Shedding its skin? Sunning itself on a rock? All of these questions are elicited from the primary image of the snake in the dream, and as such can be rich material revealing the psychological life of the dreamer and the life of the psyche spoken through the dream.…
or soul or acorn and the acorn's calling to the wider world of nature. It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere—a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence.
Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self. Hillman sees Jung as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try to grow properly.
Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the acorn of their soul. He has written that he is the one to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world. Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer aeternus
or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats
and Byron
and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley
or Kurt Cobain
. Hillman also rejects causality
as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul or acorn in question.
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
, imagined the psychology of the archetypes
Jungian archetypes
Carl Jung created the archetypes which “are ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious” Also known as innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic symbols or representations of unconscious experience emerge...
from studying anthropology and archeology reports of their times and weaving it into their understandings of the psyche. They studied how the hierarchy of ancient gods, polytheistic religions, and archetypal ideas found in tales might influence modern life with regard to soul, psyche, dreams and the Self.
Aristotle described an archetype as an original from which derivatives or fragments can be taken. In Jung's psychology an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
Jung and his followers followed Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and others of Freud's generation, who also investigated, analyzed and put forth theories about how ancient myths, legends, sagas, and religions mimicked some of the broad impulses and drives in the psyche.
There are many psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists who are sometimes called neo-Jungians and who take various approaches to archetypal psychology. These include Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman is a Canadian mythopoetic author and women's movement figure. She is a Jungian analyst trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland. She is one of the most widely read authors on feminine psychology, focusing on psyche and soma. She is also an international lecturer...
, with her inquires into the archetypes and dreams of the feminine and how these are affected by clashes and supports from masculine archetypes, therefore influencing soul and psyche in women's development. Jean Shinoda Bolen
Jean Shinoda Bolen
Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. is a psychiatrist and author. Bolen has written several books on the archetypal psychology of women and men in the development of spirituality, and is one of the women featured in the 1986 film Women - for America, for the World and 1989 National Film Board of Canada...
, a Jungian analyst psychiatrist, has also made a lifetime inquiry into the psychology of archetypes for men and for women, and their basis in conscious growth of the soul. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst.-Biography:Similar to William Carlos Williams and other poets who also worked in the health or other professions in tandem, Estés is a poet who uses her poems throughout her psychoanalytic books,...
, Jungian psychoanalyst, holds that insights into soul and psyche, archetypes and dreams were preserved specifically and handed down by indigenous people worldwide, they being the original archetypal theorists.
The inquiry into archetypal psychology has many different subsets, many different progenitors. Archetypal psychology as a basis for developing theory, and especially, down-to-earth applications, is ongoing and evolving constantly.
In the mid-1970s, James Hillman
James Hillman
James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27,...
, a psychologist who trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, also called his work Archetypal psychology. He reports his is in the Jungian tradition and most directly related to Analytical psychology
Analytical psychology
Analytical psychology is the school of psychology originating from the ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. His theoretical orientation has been advanced by his students and other thinkers who followed in his tradition. Though they share similarities, analytical psychology is distinct from...
, yet departs radically. His "archetypal psychology" relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Hillman's archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. To him, the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Hillman's archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post-Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels
Andrew Samuels
Andrew Samuels is known internationally as an influential commentator on political and social themes from the standpoint of 'therapy thinking'. He has worked with politicians, political organizations, activist groups and members of the public in Europe, US, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia and South...
(see Samuels, 1995).
Influences
The main influence on the development of archetypal psychology is Carl JungCarl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
's analytical psychology
Analytical psychology
Analytical psychology is the school of psychology originating from the ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. His theoretical orientation has been advanced by his students and other thinkers who followed in his tradition. Though they share similarities, analytical psychology is distinct from...
. It is strongly influenced by Classical Greek
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BCE and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire...
, Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, and Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
ideas and thought. Influential artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists include: Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.Corbin was born in Paris in April 1903. As a boy he revealed the profound sensitivity to music so evident in his work...
, Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
, Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
, and Paracelsus
Paracelsus
Paracelsus was a German-Swiss Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist....
. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for the psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...
—the soul.
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology.
- By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, DiltheyWilhelm DiltheyWilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...
, ColeridgeSamuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
, Schelling, VicoGiambattista VicoGiovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
, FicinoMarsilio FicinoMarsilio Ficino was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism who was in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin...
, PlotinusPlotinusPlotinus was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition...
, and PlatoPlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
to HeraclitusHeraclitusHeraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
—and with even more branches yet to be traced (p. xvii).
Polytheistic psychology
Thomas Moore says of James HillmanJames Hillman
James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27,...
’s teaching that he “portrays the psyche as inherently multiple”. In Hillman’s archetypal/polytheistic view, the psyche or soul has many directions and sources of meaning—and this can feel like an ongoing state of conflict—a struggle with one’s daimones
Daemon (mythology)
The words dæmon and daimôn are Latinized spellings of the Greek "δαίμων", a reference to the daemons of Ancient Greek religion and mythology, as well as later Hellenistic religion and philosophy...
. According to Hillman, “polytheistic psychology can give sacred differentiation to our psychic turmoil.…” Hillman states that
- The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. The Greeks knew this so well, and so they had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths as such—instead, depth psychology and psychopathology. Therefore…psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress."
Hillman qualifies his many references to gods as differing from a literalistic approach saying that for him they are aides memoires, i.e. sounding boards employed "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of life." Hillman further insists that he does not view the pantheon of gods as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
Psyche or Soul
Hillman says he has been critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g. biological psychology, behaviorismBehaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
, cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. His main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman’s oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to its proper place in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology
Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...
, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Hillman has his own definition of soul. Primarily, he notes that soul is not a “thing”, not an entity. Nor is it something that is located “inside” a person. Rather, soul is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things… (it is) reflective; it mediates events and makes differences…”(1975). Soul is not to be located in the brain or in the head, for example (where most modern psychologies place it), but human beings are in psyche. The world, in turn, is the anima mundi
Anima mundi (spirit)
The world soul is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body...
, or the world ensouled. Hillman often quotes a phrase coined by the Romantic poet John Keats: “call the world the vale of soul-making.”
Additionally, Hillman (1975) says he observes that soul:
- refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.
The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.”
Dream analysis
Because Hillman's archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live (à la Jung). Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the 20th century traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”Hillman (1983) describes his position succinctly:
- For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.…
The snake in the dream does not become something else: it is none of the things Hillman mentioned, and neither is it a penis, as Hillman says Freud might have maintained, nor the serpent from the Garden of Eden
Garden of Eden
The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
, as Hillman thinks Jung might have mentioned. It is not something someone can look up in a dream dictionary; its meaning has not been given in advance. Rather, the black snake is the black snake. Approaching the dream snake phenomenologically
Phenomenology (psychology)
Phenomenology is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conducted their own psychological investigations in the early 20th century...
simply means describing the snake and attending to how the snake appears as a snake in the dream. It is a huge black snake, that is given. But are there other snakes in the dream? If so, is it bigger than the other snakes? Smaller? Is it a black snake among green snakes? Or is it alone? What is the setting, a desert or a rain forest? Is the snake getting ready to feed? Shedding its skin? Sunning itself on a rock? All of these questions are elicited from the primary image of the snake in the dream, and as such can be rich material revealing the psychological life of the dreamer and the life of the psyche spoken through the dream.…
The Soul's Code
Hillman's book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines an "acorn theory of the soul." His theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself. It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns. Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimonDaimon
Daimon is an Ancient Greek word referring to lesser supernatural beings, including minor gods and the spirits of dead heroes.It may also refer to:- People :* Daimon Shelton , professional American football player...
or soul or acorn and the acorn's calling to the wider world of nature. It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere—a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence.
Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self. Hillman sees Jung as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try to grow properly.
Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the acorn of their soul. He has written that he is the one to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world. Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer aeternus
Puer Aeternus
Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation...
or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
and Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...
and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley
Jeff Buckley
Jeffrey Scott "Jeff" Buckley , raised as Scotty Moorhead, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He was the son of Tim Buckley, also a musician...
or Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
. Hillman also rejects causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul or acorn in question.
See also
- Archetypal pedagogyArchetypal pedagogyArchetypal pedagogy is a theory of education which was developed Clifford Mayes. It is in the Jungian tradition and directly related to analytical psychology.- History :...
- Polytheistic myth as psychologyPolytheistic myth as psychologyThe idea of polytheistic myth as having psychological value is one theorem of archetypal psychology as defined by James Hillman, and explored in current Jungian mythology literature. Myth itself, according to Joseph Campbell, represents the human search for what is true, significant, and meaningful...
- Psychological astrologyPsychological astrologyPsychological astrology, or astropsychology, is the result of the cross-fertilisation of the fields of astrology with depth psychology, humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology. The horoscope is analysed through the archetypes within astrology to gain psychological insight into an...
Select bibliography
- Inter Views (with Laura Pozzo), 1983
- Re-Visioning Psychology (based on his Yale University Terry Lectures), 1975
Other writers
- The Power of Soul, Robert Sardello
- Hells and Holy Ghosts, David L. Miller
- Echo's Subtle Body, Patricia Berry 1982
- The Soul in Grief, Robert Romanyshyn
- Technology as Symptom and Dream, Robert Romanyshyn, 1989
- Mirror and Metaphor: Images and Stories of Psychological Life, Robert Romanyshyn, 2001
- Waking Dreams, Mary Watkins
- The Alchemy of Discourse, Paul Kugler
- Words As Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic, by Russell Arthur Lockhart
- The Moon and The Virgin, Nor Hall
- The Academy of the Dead, Stephen Simmer
- Svet Zhizni (Light of Life) (in Russian), Alexander Zelitchenko, 2006
- Samuels, A. (1995). Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge.
External links
- Archetypal Talk
- Spring Publications website
- Brent Dean Robbins' James Hillman webpage
- International Association for Jungian Studies
- Pacifica Graduate Institute - Graduate school offering programs in Jungian and post-Jungian studies
- http://www.archetypalsphinx.net/ - A journal for Archetypal studies and the arts