Archetypal Imagery

imagery fell into patterns, that these patterns were reminiscent of myth, legend and fairytale, and that the imaginal material did not originate in perceptions, memory or conscious experience. The images seemed to Jung to reflect universal human modes of experience and behaviour.

Samuels reconstructs the historical origin of archetypal theory in Jung’s observation that spontaneous imagery recapitulates universal mythic patterns independent of personal experience.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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The issue of archetypal imagery in dreams, alluded to above as a Jungian mainstay, is a complex one. Orthodox Jungianism has a tendency to ‘privilege’ the more collective imagery… the archetypal may be more a matter of feeling than imagery as such.

Sedgwick challenges the classical conflation of archetypal dreams with specific symbol-types, arguing that the archetypal quality inheres in the felt numinosity of a dream rather than in its identifiable iconography.

Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001thesis

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The Archetypal School would consider archetypal imagery first, the self second, and development would receive less emphasis. Thus the ordering would be 1, 2, 3.

Samuels maps the three post-Jungian schools by their clinical priorities, identifying the Archetypal School’s distinctive insistence on giving primacy to archetypal imagery over both the self and developmental considerations.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Jung placed analysis within an archetypal frame, thereby freeing the archetypal from confinement to the analytical… Placing archetypal prior to analytical gives the psyche a further chance to move out of the consulting room.

Hillman argues that Jung’s 1912 move subordinated the analytic method to the archetypal, establishing a principle that archetypal imagery possesses autonomous authority beyond any therapeutic technique.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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She knew of the attribute ‘big’ from my stories of the dream life of African primitives I had visited. It has become a kind of ‘colloquial term’ for characterizing archetypal dreams, which as we know have a peculiar numinosity.

Jung exemplifies the category of ‘big’ dreams through clinical material, identifying numinosity as the phenomenological marker by which archetypal dream-imagery is recognized.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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When the dream presents an image that goes against the way things are naturally, let’s assume such images to be of high value because they are examples of the opus contra naturam. As I understand Jung’s idea of symbols, they change the course of nature and upgrade its energy to a higher value.

Berry proposes that unnatural or paradoxical dream images carry the highest symbolic charge, linking the recognition of archetypal imagery to its violation of natural order.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting

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the image is the teacher. We have to endure a laboriously slow method of dreamwork, frustrating our hermeneutic desire in order to hear the image.

Hillman insists on the epistemological primacy of the dream-image itself over any interpretive framework, placing the image’s autonomous instruction above the analyst’s hermeneutic agenda.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

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there are many archetypal ways of seeing one sexual image… we can appreciate that there are many archetypal ways of seeing one sexual image. He enables us to view polymorphism in sexuality, something that the monotheism of our lives has repressed throughout two millennia.

López-Pedraza draws on Homer’s polytheistic imagery to demonstrate that a single experiential content — sexuality — can be perceived through multiple, distinct archetypal lenses, resisting monotheistic reduction.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting

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one aspect of our account suggests that sub-cortical structures may encode ‘archetypes as such.’ While extant work suggests increase in bottom–up signaling

McGovern raises the neuropsychological hypothesis that archetypal imagery has a subcortical substrate, situating Jungian theory within contemporary neuroscience while acknowledging the speculative character of such claims.

McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting

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A dream image is or has a quality of emotion. Dream moments may be expansive, oppressive, empty, menacing, excited…. These emotional qualities are not necessarily portrayed verbally by the dreamer in his report… They adhere or inhere to the image.

Berry argues that the emotional valence of a dream-image is intrinsic to the image itself rather than added by the dreamer’s report, grounding the recognition of archetypal weight in direct imaginal experience.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting

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Picasso put his developing imago in terms of mythic images, which have the capacity to combine physical presence with a strong statement of archetypal transcendence.

Stein uses Picasso’s self-portraits to illustrate how mythic images serve as vehicles for archetypal expression, demonstrating the concept’s applicability beyond clinical dreams to creative and cultural production.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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Because of this individuality of the dream, conceptual generalities about dreams must fail… ‘The soul has its own logos, which grows according to its needs.’

Hillman invokes Heraclitus to argue that each dream-image possesses its own logos, warning against the reduction of archetypal imagery to fixed conceptual typologies.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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An approach often taken to images is to find a meaning outside the image itself. A cigar in a dream is considered a phallic symbol instead of a cigar. A woman is an anima figure instead of a particular woman.

Moore critiques the conventional practice of translating dream-images into archetypal categories, arguing that such translation forfeits the irreducible particularity of each image.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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action in a dream may seem to oppose the dream-ego while its true purpose is to enlarge or transform the ego in relation to the Self… relates to any particular dominant ego-image at any particular stage of life in the light of this underlying, ongoing process.

Hall connects the confrontational character of certain dream-images to the individuation process, situating archetypal imagery within the teleological framework of Self-realization.

Hall, James A., Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, 1983supporting

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archetypal theory and its language is well-suited both to cultural analysis and to be the clinical variant of structuralism… Archetype theory is useful because of the space and importance it accords the personal dimension.

Samuels defends the retention of archetypal vocabulary by arguing that it uniquely mediates between structural universals and personal particularity, functioning as a clinical structuralism.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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It is only by connecting to the imagery — Hermes cheating his brother, Apollo, and his father, Zeus — that we can gain any profitable idea about cheating.

López-Pedraza exemplifies the archetypal-psychological method of remaining close to mythic imagery rather than abstracting from it, treating the god’s actions as the irreducible source of psychological insight.

López-Pedraza, Rafael, Hermes and His Children, 1977supporting

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Purposefulness qualifies psychic events, but it is not to be literalized apart from the images in which it inheres. Thus archetypal psychology refrains from stating goals for therapy (individuation or wholeness) and for its phenomena such as symptoms and dreams.

Hillman argues that teleology is immanent to psychic images themselves and must not be abstracted into programmatic therapeutic goals, resisting literalized accounts of individuation.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside

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devotion to the figures of dream tempers the soul by providing imaginative references for our feelings, fantasies, and experiences… One of the results of giving some care to dreams is the appreciation of the importance of images in experience.

Moore, drawing on Ficino, frames attentiveness to dream-images as a soul-practice that gradually discloses the imaginal infrastructure underlying lived experience.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982aside

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by moving away from image and into implication we forego the depths of the image — its limitless ambiguities — which can only partly be grasped as implications. So to expand on the dream is also to narrow it.

Berry cautions that interpretive expansion away from the literal dream-image paradoxically impoverishes it, as the image’s depth exceeds any set of implications drawn from it.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982aside

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