The Archetypal School stands as one of the three principal tributaries of post-Jungian analytical psychology — alongside the Classical and Developmental Schools — and its delineation as a distinct orientation is owed substantially to Andrew Samuels’s 1985 taxonomy, which remains the field’s most comprehensive cartography of these divergences. Where the Classical School centres its theoretical gravity on the self and its symbolic elaboration, and the Developmental School foregrounds transference-countertransference and early object relations, the Archetypal School displaces both in favour of image primacy and polytheistic phenomenology. James Hillman, who coined the term ‘archetypal psychology’ in 1970, furnishes the school’s animating proposition: that the archetype is the most ontologically fundamental of Jung’s concepts, and that renaming the enterprise ‘archetypal’ opens psychological inquiry far beyond the consulting room into culture, myth, and the Western imaginal tradition. Hillman’s movement away from developmental thinking, ego-reinforcement, and monotheistic unity brought fierce contestation from Classical and Developmental quarters alike, while winning allegiance from scholars — Berry, López-Pedraza, Giegerich, Miller — who sought a depth psychology adequate to aesthetic and mythic complexity. Giegerich, himself a disciple turned critic, subsequently subjected archetypal psychology’s imaginal method to rigorous logical scrutiny, arguing it had abandoned the very notion of soul it claimed to honour. The Archetypal School thus occupies a generative and persistently controversial position: perpetually insisting on radical revision while remaining indebted to the Jungian inheritance it nominally supersedes.