Passio as Pathologizing

Hillman reads the crucifixion not as Edinger reads it — as the ego-Self coniunctio — but as the central image through which the West has contained its pathologizing, absorbing “the complexity of psychopathology with its rich variety of backgrounds” and endowing it with “one main meaning: suffering” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 71). The Latin passio — the word from which “suffering” first enters Western language as the translation of Jesus’ passion — names not a meaning to be redeemed but a mode of imagining the soul. The crucifixion presents pathologizing “first of all in the guise of emotional and physical torment,” and its iconography — Golgotha, place of skulls; betrayal for money, Barabbas the murderer, the thieves and gambling soldiers; the mock purple robes — is, for Hillman, the form in which Western soul becomes visible to itself as soul (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 71).

This is contrasted with — not opposed to — the Jungian-Edingerian reading. Where Edinger names the cross as the ego nailed to the mandala-Self in a redemptive coniunctio, Hillman names the cross as a deformed perspective through which soul exhibits its own afflictedness without resolution. “There is no cure of pathologizing; there is, instead, a re-evaluation” (Hillman 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account). The two readings are the two faces of ratio-crucis: the cross as the place where opposites are joined, and the cross as the place where suffering is shown.

Relationships

• pathologizing
• ratio-crucis
• crucifixion-as-coniunctio
• james-hillman

Primary sources

• hillman-revisioning-psychology (Hillman 1975)
• hillman-archetypal-psychology-brief (Hillman 1983)
• hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989, ed. Moore)