Lesson 11: Archetypal Psychology and Religion
Introduction
In this Lesson, we will continue our evaluation of Jung by looking at the ideas of a very innovative and provocative Jungian analyst, James Hillman. Hillman is an American who studied with Jung in Switzerland in the 1950s. He then moved back to the U.S. in the 1970s and developed his original ideas. Hillman is both enormously influenced by Jung, yet also offers serious challenges to many of Jung’s central ideas. Hillman is regarded as the founder of “archetypal psychology,” even though Hillman himself would caution against calling this a “school” of psychology. To call it a school would invite the very sort of reification that he is continually trying to oppose. The word “reification” comes from the Latin word “res” which means “thing.” To reify something means to turn it into a thing. So from the perspective of archetypal psychology, to call archetypal psychology a school would turn it into a static thing thereby losing its dynamism and vitality. Archetypal psychology represents not so much a body of theories and concepts, but a way of seeing. This way of seeing will be elaborated in this Lesson.
Click here to see a picture of James Hillman.
Hillman put forth the basic tenets of archetypal psychology in his four Terry Lectures delivered at Yale University in 1972—the same lecture series to which Jung contributed when in 1937 he gave his lectures on Psychology and Religion. Hillman’s four lectures were reprinted in his book Re-visioning Psychology. This Lesson summarizes the main ideas from these lectures.
Hillman’s task in these lectures is to “re-vision” Jung’s basic concepts and challenge some of the sacred cows of his psychology including the claim that the unconscious must become conscious and that the self must integrate.
Instead of “psyche,” Hillman prefers the term “soul.” If we look at how he defines “soul” we get a flavour of his evocative style: the soul can’t be defined (an example of how he resists reification referred to above); it’s what makes meaning possible; it turns events into experiences; it is communicated in love; it has a religious concern; it’s what deepens things; and it has a special relation to death. Soul is not a thing so much as a perspective. It is aliveness itself, “anima,” or that which animates.
By the term “psychological” he means “soul-making,” an idea he took from the 19th century poet, John Keats. To be psychological means to bring the imagination down into the mess of the darkness, not to bring the darkness into the light of consciousness as Jung would put it. Consciousness sees through the metaphoric to the literal; soul sees through the literal to the metaphoric, the poetic basis of the mind.
Hillman’s task is to critique what he calls “spiritual” religion and psychology and champion “soul” religion and psychology. The spiritual psychology he is challenging here is Jungian psychology, specifically, how Jung’s psychology came to be used and practiced by many of his followers. Hillman is trying to recover the dynamism of Jung’s psychology, that Hillman thought Jung’s followers, and sometimes even Jung himself, lost sight of. “Spirit” for Hillman seeks transcendence, strives for consciousness without imagery, strives for unity, and is associated with the masculine. “Soul” by contrast, is expressed in pathologies, and pathologies take us to the “gods”—a more dynamic and less reified way Hillman had of talking about the archetypes. The gods reach us through our suffering. Hillman thought therapy, or “care of the soul,” was about holding and reflecting upon these pathologies without heroic efforts to cure and purify, or egoistic hope of freedom from suffering. Hillman on this count loves to quote Wallace Stevens here who said “the way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”
But suffering is endemic to life, Hillman insists. We all fail, we all struggle with powers beyond our control. Insight is impotent in the face of these pathologies. Pathologies get classified under “abnormal” psychology, but they are hardly abnormal, in Hillman’s view. They are a regular part of our lives. We love our problems and suffering. In fact without them there would be no life or love. Still, he says, we insist on growth without decay, nature without catastrophes, love without the madness of love, psychology without the shadow.
Archetypal psychology is a challenge to what Hillman calls our spiritual vision of perfectibility. But he reminds us that modern psychology came into existence with the encounter with pathologies. For Freud, it was his encounter with hysteria. For Jung, it was schizophrenia. What we’ve lost sight of is that it is the soul that is the patient and the pathology is the healer. Again, what Hillman is saying here is that the illness will take us to the cure. If we try to “cure” the illness, we will miss the opportunity for healing.
Take depression, for example. What does depression mean for this patient? What are the images? Can patient and therapist stay with them? Experience is never raw; it’s always constructed by images. We can never know the illness per se, just the fantasy that captures it. What are the images in which the problem is set? The archetypal psychologist takes them seriously, but not literally. Literalism, in this view, comes from monotheism which wants “one of everything”: one god, one truth, one meaning, and so forth. Hillman writes, “literal meanings become new idols, fixed images that dominate our vision and are inherently false because single” (Hillman 1975, 149). If we follow the image, connections will naturally unfold. We don’t make connections, the god Hermes does. If we jump in and try to understand, our “hermeneutics,” that is, our interpretations, kill Hermes. But we find interpretations irresistible because they takes us away from the pathology. Most of us find it very difficult to stay with the suffering. We’re spooked by depression. We can’t stay there. We take “anti-depressants,” Hillman reminds us. We’re anti-depression. But if we can stay with the depression and its images we might notice: slowness, darkness, impotence, withdrawal. With her background in the images of mythology and culture, the archetypal therapist might hear in these images the manifestation of the god Saturn. Saturn we can deal with and watch, Hillman says, not depression.
If you have the time, you can get a taste of Hillman’s ideas and style by clicking on this link for a summary of a presentation Hillman gave on depression.
So Hillman’s approach is to try to stay with the images and myths that hold our suffering. Freud turned this process upside down, Hillman says. He began by imaging the pathology in terms of the mythic, but then he reduced the mythical to the pathology. And in his monotheistic fashion, he only chose one myth at that: Oedipus. Freud saw through religion to the pathology. Archetypal psychology sees through the pathology to the religious where the suffering can be contained and healed.
Hillman resists giving neat definitions of his central ideas. He prefers instead to evoke the meaning of his terms in the imagination of his listener. Spirit is thus associated with fire, light, speed, vertical, north, dryness, action, masculine, orderliness, clarity. Soul is associated with night, dream, death, feminine, moisture, depth, down, south. Rather than give us clear-cut answers, Hillman is wanting us to think, to question our assumptions, and to give us a taste for what he calls psychologizing, that is, making us more psychological, more adjusted to psychic reality. He wants to persuade us, not by providing scientific explanations for his theories, but by evoking in us a first-hand experience of what he is talking about.
Hillman’s soul psychology also resists all unifying ideals: mental health, stability, adjustment, self-improvement, growth, and happiness. His point here is again to underscore that the soul manifests itself sometimes in depressions, sometimes in exhilirations; sometimes in sobriety, sometimes in excess; sometimes in infantilism, sometimes in maturity; and so forth. Hillman is not promoting mental illness, but defends what he sees as the task of psychological regard for these manifestations of the soul.
He advocates instead a “polytheism.” The soul is polytheistic in that it contains “many gods.” The ego is only one of many complexes. Hillman’s archetypal therapy helps the ego become familiar with the “many gods” rather than thinking it is the monotheist of the soul. The goal of archetypal therapy then is not individuation, as Jung thought, but “animation,” the enlivening of the soul, the ability to contain the soul’s many gods. But even more precisely, archetypal psychology resists identifying an overall goal; rather it tries to let the notion of “purpose” itself capture the imagination. If this happens it will enhance our interest in psychic phenomenon.
So in archetypal psychology the personality is personified. This idea is based on Jung’s notion of the complexes which suggests that every personality is multiple. In other cultures, Hillman points out, these personalities might get named. In most Western psychology, however, these personalities are seen as aberrant or unintegrated introjections. Western psychology identifies personality with ego and thereby merely reflects the monotheism that is dominant in the West.
According to archetypal psychology, then, health is manifested in an awareness of this multiplicity. Health is not about integration curing the multiplicity but multiplicity curing us from our obsession with a unified consciousness. Health is also marked by our ability to take Jung’s injunction to “stay with the image” seriously. We abuse the soul when we translate images into concepts. If I translate the snake in my dream into a reference to sexuality, I kill the snake. Watch the snake, Hillman is saying; stay with the image. Hillman finds this ability present in Islam where Sufi mystics engage in “ta’wil,” an allegorical or symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as described by the scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin. Hillman’s archetypal method follows this method of ta’wil and seeks to revert a psychological pattern back to its archetypal images.
It would be a mistake to read Hillman here as anti-intellectual or against rationality. Rather, he is trying to challenge the privileging of these cognitive functions in psychology and religion (specifically Christianity). He wants us simply to recognize will, reason, logic, and so forth, for what they are: the manifestation of an archetype. Reason marks the presence of Apollo, or the heroic fantasy.
The aim of archetypal psychology is the development of the imaginative powers. If experience is held in images, a small, weak imagination offers little space to hold experience. Hillman writes:
Yes we do need to extend our psychological space. This is one of therapy’s main concerns. The soul has shrunk because its imagination has withered, and so we have little psychological space for fantasying, for holding things and mulling, for letting be. Events pass right through us, traceless. Or they press us into tight corners, no room to maneuver, no inner distance. We can hold more in mind than in soul, so that the contents of our minds are largely without psychological significance, input without digestion. (Hillman 1975, 93)
We lost this psychological space when we turned in the West from the gods to the human. And Hillman says this turn to the human is in large part a result of the Protestant Reformation which came out of Germany. Luther emphasized the priesthood of all believers (i.e., the notion that the individual has direct access to god and does not need a priest as an intermediary) against the perceived corrupt priesthood coming out of Rome. This put an unprecedented focus on the human specifically, on human emotion, morality, and free will. Emotions, he says, make us feel centrally important. We identify with them. Therapy reinforces this personalizing of emotion: “therapy makes its patients individually responsible and personally guilty for universal archetypes” (Hillman 1975, 177). But archetypal psychology says, just as in the case of our souls, our emotions are not ours. We are just their caretakers.
Contemporary humanism trusts feeling, but then only certain ones, and ignores all the feelings of the shadow. Humanistic psychologies and therapies overvalue love and think that therapy is for love’s sake. But for Hillman, therapy is for the sake of soul (Psyche) not love (Eros):
[T]he game is not that psyche should find eros, with love as goal, but that eros should find psyche soul as aim. Love’s arrow, then, is to strike the soul, hit its vulnerability, in order to begin that state of deep pathologizing we call being-in-love. (Hillman 1975, 186)
By de-humanizing Hillman wants to expose the very limited view of “human” that he links back to the Reformation originating in Northern Europe so that we can be rehumanized according to the view of “human” found in the psychology of the Renaissance coming from Southern Europe, especially of a group of Italian humanists centered in Florence who rediscovered the poetry and philosophy of the classical period in Greece and Rome. Hillman is drawn to certain thinkers who lived in the time of the Renaissance (14th – 16th centuries in Europe) because he sees them engaged in caring for the content of the imagination, just like archetypal psychology does.
Psychology that has its roots in the Protestant Reformation is impotent because it is unconcerned with imagination, eloquence, beauty. It’s only concerned with “pietistic hopes of personal salvation and the moral benefit of working on oneself.”
Let’s listen to Hillman’s evocative style as he further contrasts these two psychologies. Psychology, as we know it in the West, has only worked one side of the mountain: the psychology coming out of Germany. What we call Western psychology and consciousness is really not West at all, but “North.” We think the opposite of the West is the East. But this opposition keeps us from seeing that the true shadow in our culture is the South. And we can only begin to see this when we call the West its real name, that is, the North.
From the perspective of Northern consciousness, going South, going down, is extremely terrifying. He notes that Jung fainted at the train station trying to get to Rome; and Freud had a mysterious inhibition that prevented him from visiting Rome. Hillman’s archetypal psychology, as we saw, is a re-visioning of Jung’s psychology. Archetypal psychology and the “South” are a compensation to Jung’s Northern Protestant theological mind.
The North cannot contain the South, the ego cannot contain the soul. It would go psychotic if it tried. The South cannot come North without trouble; but the North can go South. The South can contain the North, but not the other way around.
Psychology, in Hillman’s view, is thoroughly religious. Either it’s the religion of the Reformation or of the Renaissance; the religion of spirit or of soul. Spiritual psychology of the Northern Reformation brings problems up and solves them. Archetypal psychology, drawing on the Renaissance of Southern Europe, deepens them and takes them to their source in the underworld.
To underscore now Hillman’s differential criteria for looking at religion, we have to appreciate how Hillman’s psychology, like Jung’s, sees the psyche (Jung), the soul (Hillman) as religious. So while we can think about how Hillman might look at individual religious experiences in specific religions, it’s more useful to ask what for Hillman would be a religious attitude he would favour, and what religious attitude would he avoid? And it should be clear now that Hillman is advocating soul psychology, challenging what he calls spiritual psychology that has become dominant in the West. And soul psychology is healthy because it is characterized by: personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and dehumanizing. See if you can say for yourself what Hillman means by each of these terms and why for him they are the mark of mental health.
Let’s turn again now to an essay by Naomi Goldenberg, who both has great appreciation for Hillman, but also thinks he went too far with his notion of “dehumanizing.” Ask yourself as you read this essay and consider Hillman’s project, Has Hillman really succeeded in challenging Jung’s central assumptions?
READ:
“Body and Psyche in the Work of James Hillman” by Naomi Goldenberg which you will find in your course reader. What do you think of her criticism that Hillman depicts psyche as the machine that imagines? How do you think Hillman might respond to this charge?