“The entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative. Its exposition must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, and its therapeutic aim neither social adaption nor personalistic individualizing but rather a work in service to restoration of the patient to imaginal realities. The aim of therapy (q.v.) is the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 12)
Archetypal psychology is an art. The typical science-based, “objective”, quantitative modes of acquiring, discerning and shaping data about our lives bear little resemblance to our mood when we are kept up by a persistent memory; an ache in our heart at four in the morning. That sort of data may speak to a particular part of our natures – indeed it’s rather obvious it does based on its proliferation – but it misses something crucial. It doesn’t hit that soft, sensuous nerve, our fixation with our lover’s eyes, that recurring dream with the horrible ending, the state and flux of our lives, or the world’s.
Archetypal psychology begins by placing mind in a much broader context then the trifling and limited capacity in which much of Western/Northern thought has dumbly placed it over the last few hundred years. That mind is a pretty small place and we are universes unto ourselves. Let’s stretch our legs a little.
Let’s dance.
Borrowing from Thomas Moore, it is generally believed that the word psychotherapy means mind-cure. Psycho (root psyche = mind), therapy (therapia) cure. But this is not so. The true roots of psyche show it to mean soul. A crucial distinction. And although there is cure amid the myriad of ways to define therapia it is just one of many and the majority tend toward ideas of caring, nursing, tending.
We are not out here to cure our minds. We are here to Care for our Souls.
“Call the world if you please, the ‘vale of soul-making’. Then you will know the use of the world.” – Keats
And immediately, we enter a radically different experience. Imagine we left all ideas about fixing our lives. Fixing our “selves”. Fixing our minds. A note on the counter, pack the kids in the car, burn the house to the ground. Leave. And instead we turned our attention towards our souls. Souls as primary reality. To be responded to with the same conviction one would have when jumping out of the way of an oncoming car. Conviction on which your life depended.
Imagine a child – I’m sure we’ve all seen this at one time or other – acting out, getting into trouble, being violent perhaps and you can feel that sense of control coming from the parent. That need to fix this child so that it does what the parent wants. But somewhere you know that if that child were simply paid attention to, listened to, heard, seen, felt – given some soup and a warm blanket and some eye contact that things would probably improve pretty quickly. Perhaps that child has some valid concerns. Perhaps that child has some basic needs that aren’t being met. Perhaps it’s not the child at all. We live in a world that would prefer to anesthetize that child. To shut that child up. To diagnose that child. To label that child with something called an illness from a very large diagnostic manual next to which there is a prescription pad given to the doctor for free by a very large pharmaceutical company on an all expense paid golf trip. We prefer simplicity and order to messy uniqueness.
We have a world of tender, volatile and vulnerable things we treat with the same severe hand. And we have fires that we douse, savage dogs that we muzzle and Gods that we claim are dead inside us all.
“What is divine escapes men’s notice because of their incredulity.” – Heraclitus
It is to these things that Archetypal psychology speaks. Not to colonize. Not to teach cricket. Not to be smarter then.
But to listen to, learn from and move with.
To be present to.
To care for. And to be cared for.
Soul is a difficult idea to describe and yet simple in its understanding. When you read the word
– SOUL –
you have an immediate sense as to what is meant. Perhaps an image occurs to you. That, I would argue, is the soul itself, responding like raising its hand in class during roll call.
The intellect has a very hard time with the term soul. It is impossible to quantify and defies logical definition and therefore we are quick to say it is not “real.” As soon as you try and define it, you lose it. You have to use your imagination, your imaginative eyes; hands; to find your way in. Like digging in moist earth. It’s almost like the idea of soul itself puts you in closer contact with it. Triggers it. Awakens it. It seems archaic and out of sync because it is and that is just what we want. We want to hearken back eons. Through our ancestors. We want that depth. We are part of the poem of history that stretches back millennia. We want that connection. We need that connection.
Jung (1971):
“The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things” (p. xxi).
We also want to step out of sync. We march to the beat of an over-saturated, over-worked, hyper-vigilant ego amidst a sea of other lonely, isolated egos teeming despair and filled to the brim with diet coke and mcdonalds. We buy disposable everything, including our selves. We consume people like they were a two-for-one at wal-mart and about as well built. On this path we are desperate, lonely and starved.
We want to step out of sync.
Soul, or psyche (from here on out the terms will be used interchangeably) is “constituted of images…the soul is primarily an imagining activity” (Hillman, 1983, p. 14). A perspective towards things rather than a thing itself. A place from which perspectives arise. Hillman called this the
poetic basis of mind.
Both at and beyond the roots of our being is a self-generative, irreducible, non-symbolic mass of polymorphous complexes from which images arise very much like breath from the body.
It is self-generative in that it needs no stimulus whatsoever in order to create. Much like breath it happens of its own accord. It can be influenced, but whether influenced or not, it goes on imagining.
It is irreducible in that it is not symbolic. The images do not stand in place of something else they are beings unto themselves.
“The metaphorical perspective which revisions worldly phenomena as images can find ‘sense and passion’ where the Cartesian mind sees the mere extension of de-souled insensate objects. In this way, the poetic basis of mind (q.v.) takes psychology out of the confines of laboratory and consulting room, and even beyond the personal subjectivity of the human person, into a psychology of things as objectifications of images with interiority, things as the display of fantasy.
For archetypal psychology, ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ change places and values. First, they are no longer opposed. Second, fantasy is never merely mentally subjective but is always being enacted and embodied. (Hillman, 1972a, xxxixxl). Third, whatever is physically or literally ‘real’ is always also a fantasy image. Thus the world of so-called hard factual reality is always also the display of a specifically shaped fantasy, as if to say, along with Wallace Stevens, the American philosopher-poet of imagination on whom archetypal psychology often draws, there is always “a poem at the heart of things.” Jung stated the same idea (C.W. 6, 18): “The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I can say for this activity is fantasy.” And he takes the word “fantasy” from “poetic usage” (C.W. 6, 743)” (Hillman, 1983, p. 32).
At the bottom of the well and beyond; through the dark earth of our beings and theirs, there is a welter of polymorphous complexes. Polymorphous in that they are many-formed and many-styled. Complex, in that they are “psychic fragments” (Jung, 1961, p. 393) which “interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance…they appear and disappear according to their own laws; they can temporarily obsess consciousness, or influence speech and action in an unconscious way. In a word, complexes behave like independent beings” (Jung, 1961, p. 394).
Archetypal psychology does not have as its mission any designs to unify this welter. The psyche is made up of a multitude of forces, each with a distinct character, language, logos. It’s interests lie in allowing for, opening to and strengthening this diversity.
Ego is one of these forces.
One of these forces.
One amidst many.
Imagine a room filled with people and only one of them having a say. The others – not even fed most of the time. No clean drinking water.
Ego rules with an iron fist. It is a king or queen on high, ruling all by itself in the image of the other lonely ruler on high – the Judeo-Christian monotheistic God.
Hillman once spoke of ego as being more like a janitor or a secretary. That was its thing. It was to do the paperwork. Take care of the mundane details. Remember to take out the garbage. But much like Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, it got unwittingly turned into the king and I find that so sad. I imagine this being, ill-equipped and unprepared to be saddled with all of that responsibility – too much for any one. Of course it would be frightened. Paranoid. Angry. Self-loathing. And in its hyperactive fear it insists on going even further. On claiming more and more territory. It even moves out of body and out of time, expecting to be able to control outcomes it has absolutely no say in. Inflated out of all bounds; all the more vulnerable to injury it lives to avoid. We take it as a first principle that we are the captains of our ship in spite of an abundance of evidence to the contrary, both inside and out. A tertiary glance at the daily paper should provide ample evidence of how little control we have over just about everything. Our need and desire to control itself indicative of a paranoid, uptight, scared-to-death ego.
Whereas a more spirited response to the matter typically consists in a relativizing of ego in relation to a universal oneness, an opening to a higher power, Hillman preferred the approach of Wallace Stevens in his poem “Reply to Papini” “The way through the world is more difficult to find then the way beyond it.” And in the tradition of depth psychology, Hillman goes down and in instead of up and away.
The life of the soul is “most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream. For it is in the dream that the dreamer performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer” (Hillman, 1983, p. 13).
As Hillman (1983) says
“From the dream, one may assume that the psyche is fundamentally concerned with its imaginings and only secondarily concerned with subjective experiences in the dayworld…The very nature of the soul in the dream…shows its inattention to and disregard for mortal experience as such… receiving into its purview only those faces and events from the mortal world that bear upon the opus of its destiny” ( p. 37).
And in the dream, so in life.
An ego relativized means we take the ego needs less seriously. One of those needs of the ego is literalism. The idea of soul is not meant to be taken literally. Nothing is to be taken literally. Perceptions and ideas are held with a very loose grip. Taken seriously, but never taken to be THE TRUTH rather taken to be A PERSPECTIVE. Imagining in this case meaning a capacity for broader vision, disregarding classifications of “real” or “unreal.” Our insistence on the concretization of everything – the distinction between “real” and “imaginary” is for the most part a waste of psychic time. And really fucking boring in the first place.
So as we re-enter our own souls, give acknowledgment to the latent universe living inside of us – unfathomable – we also acknowledge living inside a soul. That our souls are both inside of us and more than us. Outside and around us and that we are kept within and participate with the world soul – anima mundi. Thus, “the noetic and the imaginal no longer oppose each other” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15). Real and imaginary become indistinguishable as outside and inside blur in a non-literal appreciation of the fantastic in everything.
John Keats called it a “Negative Capability” when offering a definition of poetry and the poetic perspective: the capacity to exist amongst uncertainties without the need to make or find “fact.” And as David Miller (2008) points out “There is in this a dying of ego certitude, epistemological arrogance, and narcissism” (p. 252).
Archetypal psychology grounds itself in myth. If “fantasy is the archetypal activity of the psyche” (Hillman, 1983, p. 33) and “psychic reality is inextricably involved with rhetoric”(Hillman, 1983, p. 28) then “the primary rhetoric of archetypal psychology is myth.” (Hillman, 1983, p. 28).
Myths and the Gods intrinsic to them – particularly, but in no way exclusively Greek myth and figures – are utilized as they are metaphors themselves; communicating in the same way the soul itself does. In its own language. Moving outside of ego, you are unable to take them “historically, physically, literally” (Hillman, 1983, p. 28). They break a language barrier in a way and open the soul up to its own native reflection. “We may thereby see our ordinary lives embedded in and ennobled by the dramatic and world-creative life of mythical figures (Bedford 1981)” (Hillman, 1983, p. 29) and “most importantly…the study of mythology enables one to perceive and experience the life of the soul mythically” (Hillman, 1983, p. 29 ).
We are, ourselves mythical.
We are, ourselves divine.
If the personality is inherently multiple, we need a theological fantasy appropriate to the wilderness of our imaginations. Monotheism – which pairs brilliantly with ideas of oneness and unification – can seem tyrannical when the many voices – and not just the one – are howling at the gates to be heard. Enter polytheism. A brilliant framework from which to contain and differentiate the teeming horde of life.
“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 …It is this myth which has dominated the soul and which leads to unreflected action and self-blindness…It is responsible also for the repression of a psychological diversity that then appears as psychopathology. Hence, a polytheistic psychology is necessary for reawakening reflective consciousness and bringing a new reflection to psychopathology” (Hillman, 1983, p. 43).
In moving ever deeper into living things, images, predicaments we need perspectives with equal depth, resonance and ground. “The Gods are places, and myths make place for psychic events that in an only human world become pathological” (Hillman, 1983, p. 46). “Mainly the mode 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” (Hillman, 1983, p. 45).
Hillman was never concerned with answering the question “why.” Explanations are of little significance when you get right down to it; often mixed up with moralisms and then used as ways to fend off the event rather than directly experience or deal with it.
So fuck WHY.
WHAT and WHO are the questions we will be concerned with. “What specifically is being presented?” (Hillman, 1983, p. 43). Take a second to actually see what is going on around and within you. “And ultimately who, which divine figure, is speaking in this style of consciousness, this form of presentation” (Hillman, 1983, p. 43). What divine spark is alighting within you? To what alter should your head be bowing towards?
And although knowledge of myth is helpful to a grounded relationship with psychic imagery it is of utmost beauty to simply acknowledge that what is happening is archetypal – at base your suffering (and you’re joy) is one rivulet vein that leads back to a vast sea of likened suffering (and joy) – and it is universal. It is divine.
This framework naturally presumes an inherent divinity in all things. Even – and perhaps most especially – in the dark things. Much of our personality is shut away. Holed up in cupboards and under floorboards while nazi egos march goosestep above, looking for dogs to bring to workhouses or slaughter. Archetypal psychology insists on the divinity of the pathological. Despite the contortions or the vileness of forms they have had to mutate into in order to be heard they are Gods, one and all.
If you are perceiving the world in such a way that acknowledges soul at the heart of everything – in and around and through – and if we imagine these soul to have innately God-like forces and characters in them, the world is alive with the divine.
It is everywhere.
Inescapable.
And it is religious. As William James (1902) defined religion in his lectures on the Varieties of Religious Experience “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p. 31). In as much as this is the case, psychology is religious. Hillman placed what Jung called the “religious instinct” at the center of psychological work.
“The healthy or mature or ideal personality will thus show cognizance of its dramatically masked and ambiguous situation. Irony, humor and compassion will be its 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; morality as dedication to crafting the soul (soul-making, q.v.); sensitivity to traditional continuities; the significance of pathologizing and living at the “borders;” aesthetic responsiveness” (Hillman, 1983, p. 64).