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Image as Psyche

Image as Psyche

“The datum with which archetypal psychology begins is the image” (Hillman 1983). Archetypal psychology takes Jung‘s maxim image is psyche (CW 13: 75) and elaborates it into a first principle: “the soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream” (Hillman 1983).

The image is neither an afterimage nor a symbolic representation. “‘Images don’t stand for anything’ (Hillman 1978). They are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible.” Edward Casey’s formulation, adopted by Hillman, is decisive: “an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees” (Casey 1974, in Hillman 1983). An image is given by the imagining perspective.

The radical claim follows: images are not subjective constructs. “Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics. In fact, images are the fundamentals that make the movements of psychodynamics possible. They claim reality, that is, authority, objectivity, and certitude. In this third recognition, the mind is in the imagination rather than the imagination in the mind” (Hillman 1983). The phrase Hillman adopts from Corbin — “it is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined” — carries the Neoplatonic and Islamicate inheritance of the mundus-imaginalis into post-Jungian psychology.

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