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Polytheistic Psychology

Polytheistic Psychology

The psychological position, developed by james-hillman and david-l-miller on the philological foundation laid by walter-otto and karl-kerenyi, that the soul is accurately imagined as plural rather than as single-centered. The gods are the plurality’s structures. Monotheistic psychology — including what Hillman calls “the monotheistic hero myth (now called ego-psychology) of secular humanism” — represses the soul’s native multiplicity and then meets its return as pathology (Hillman 1983).

The inheritance from Otto is direct: if gods are forms of being, the psyche that contains them — or is contained by them — is itself irreducibly multiple. Hillman distinguishes the position from “undifferentiated pantheism, holy vitalism, and naturalistic animism.” Gods in archetypal psychology “are not some primal energy suffused through the universe nor are they imagined to be independent magical powers working on us through things. Gods are imagined as the formal intelligibility of the phenomenal world, allowing each thing to be discerned for its inherent intelligibility and for its specific place of belonging to this or that kosmos” (Hillman 1983). The sentence is Otto’s thesis rendered as psychology.

Miller frames the implication sharply: “If there is only one model for individuation, can there be individuality?” (Miller 1974, citing Hillman). A polytheistic view of the self “reflects more accurately the illusions and entanglements of the soul,” and “without a consciously polytheistic psychology we are more susceptible to an unconscious fragmentation called schizophrenia.” Fragmentation is not the failure of integration; it is the unattended plurality of the gods.

The position sits in productive tension with carl-jung‘s late preference, in Aion, for the Self as conjunction — “the anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism” (Jung 1951). Hillman’s archetypal psychology declines the hierarchy.

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