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Archetypal Psychology (as Charter)

Archetypal Psychology (as Charter)

Archetypal psychology is the discipline Re-Visioning Psychology founds. Naomi Goldenberg’s early review (1975) named it “a ‘third generation’ derivative of the Jungian school in which Jung is recognized as the source but not the doctrine” (cited in Hillman, Archetypal Psychology). The charter retains Jung’s discovery of the archetypal image and the autonomy of the psyche while releasing the doctrinal apparatus — the typology machinery, the stages of individuation oriented toward the Self, the hermeneutic drive to resolve images into meanings.

Three formal commitments distinguish the charter: (1) the primacy of image over concept — “fantasy is the archetypal activity of the psyche” and psychology itself is “an activity of poesis” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology); (2) the polytheistic critique of ego-monotheism — “the social, political, and psychiatric critique implied throughout archetypal psychology mainly concerns the monotheistic hero myth (now called ego-psychology) of secular humanism” (ibid.); and (3) the enlargement of soul beyond the human — “the human being is set within the field of soul; soul is the metaphor that includes the human. ‘Dasein as esse in anima infinitely surpasses man’” (ibid., citing Avens 1982).

The school’s circle, as documented by Andrew Samuels, comprised Hillman, Robert Avens, Patricia Berry, Wolfgang Giegerich, Rafael López-Pedraza, Murray Stein, and Robert Stein (Samuels 1985). The unifying move was not a new doctrine but a new posture: poesis over explanation, image over interpretation.

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