The Seba library treats Anti Developmental Psychology in 8 passages, across 2 authors (including Hillman, James, Samuels, Andrew).
A developmental model will be plagued by its counter-movement, atavism, and reversion will be seen, not as a return through likeness to imaginal reality along Neoplatonic lines, but as a regression to a worse condition.
Hillman argues that the developmental model structurally produces regression as its shadow and thereby pathologises the soul’s legitimate need to return to origins, distorting imaginal reality into mere devolution.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
Giegerich, who used the term ‘genetic fantasy’, felt that any backward looking is un-Jungian because, for Jung, the ‘whence’ is less essential than the ‘whither’.
Samuels presents Giegerich’s charge that developmental psychology imposes ‘genetic fantasy’ on the psyche and enlists Hillman’s claim that the child serves as a screen for the theorist’s own projective fantasies.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
The first concerns whether an approach to analysis which utilises developmental theory is based on anything other than ‘genetic fantasy’ (Giegerich, 1975, p. 125).
Samuels frames the central epistemological objection to developmental approaches in Jungian analysis: that their empirical and systematic claims rest on nothing more than theorist-generated fantasy.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Hillman (1975a) follows further by attacking the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ which dominates most normative psychologies.
Hillman’s critique of the naturalistic fallacy extends the anti-developmental argument by challenging the assumption that natural or developmental norms should govern psychological valuation.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
Hillman (1975a) follows further by attacking the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ which dominates most normative psychologies.
This parallel passage in Hillman’s brief account reiterates the attack on normative developmental psychology as grounded in a philosophically illegitimate naturalistic fallacy.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
Mother and puer are ways of perceiving. More or less the same ‘facts’ can be found in puer and in the mother’s son, so the real difference between them lies in the way in which we perceive these facts.
Hillman displaces developmental fact-collection in favour of perspectival perception, implicitly rejecting the empirical-sequential logic on which developmental psychology depends.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
By conquering the parental complexes in the neurotic foreground, we smother the archetypal background. The puer suffers an enantiodromia into senex; he switches Janus faces.
Hillman shows that a developmental therapeutic strategy aimed at ‘overcoming’ complexes forecloses archetypal depth, producing the negative senex rather than genuine maturation.
, Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present, 1967aside
Break this vertical connection and it falls with broken wings. When it falls we lose the urgent burning purpose and instead commence the long processional march through the halls of power.
Hillman counterposes the puer’s vertical, imaginal connection to spirit against the horizontal, developmental ‘march’ of normative ego progression, privileging depth over chronological advance.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside