Archetypal Process

The archetypal forces no longer play themselves out offstage, out of sight in the collective unconscious, but come up to the conscious level through imagination. We, in our ego forms, actually enter into the play of the archetypes and actually influence the outcome of the drama.

Johnson argues that Active Imagination is the primary method by which the archetypal process is made conscious, transforming unconscious compulsion into participatory drama in which the ego becomes a genuine agent.

Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986thesis

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Jung placed analysis within an archetypal frame, thereby freeing the archetypal from confinement to the analytical. Analysis may be an instrument for realizing the archetypes, but it cannot embrace them.

Hillman establishes that the archetypal process exceeds and precedes any clinical procedure, so that analysis itself must be understood as one enactment of a larger, autonomous archetypal movement.

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

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When ‘image’ is thus transposed from a human representation of its conditions to a sui generis activity of soul in independent presentation of its bare nature… Empirical approaches of analyzing and guiding images strive to gain control over them. Archetypal psychology distinguishes itself radically from these methods of image control.

Hillman defines archetypal process as the soul’s autonomous image-production, categorically distinct from empirical or ego-directed imagination, and insists that response — not control — is the appropriate mode of engagement.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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When ‘image’ is thus transposed from a human representation of its conditions to a sui generis activity of soul in independent presentation of its bare nature… Empirical approaches of analyzing and guiding images strive to gain control over them. Archetypal psychology distinguishes itself radically from these methods of image control.

This passage, a near-duplicate of the companion volume, confirms Hillman’s foundational position that archetypal imagination operates as a self-presenting activity of soul irreducible to any empirical or guided-imagery methodology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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An archetypal image is psychologically ‘universal,’ because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes… the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance.

Hillman reframes the philosophical universals problem as a psychological one: the archetypal process transforms private experience into collectively significant event through the depersonalizing, amplifying force of the image.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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An archetypal image is psychologically ‘universal,’ because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes… the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance.

Identical in argument to the companion passage, this confirms that for Hillman the operative question of archetypal process is phenomenological recognition of collective importance within individual experience.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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Although an archetypal image presents itself as impacted with meaning, this is not given simply as revelation. It must be made through ‘image work’ and ‘dream work’… this work is done by ‘sticking to the image’ as a psychological penetration of what is actually presented.

Hillman specifies that archetypal process requires active hermeneutic labor — image work — rather than passive reception, situating the process in a disciplined practice of imaginal attention.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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the debate is not only about the existence or nonexistence of certain archetypes, but about the validity of Jung’s ideas forming a coherent explanatory system linking all the aspects in the unifying theory… In the face of the evidence speaking clearly against a universal distribution of these ideas and images… the architecture of the whole of Jung’s archetype theory has practically collapsed.

Roesler delivers a sustained critical assessment, arguing that the empirical and cross-cultural evidence has undermined the nomothetic claims on which Jung’s model of a universal archetypal process rests.

Roesler, Christian, The Process of Transformation — The Core of Analytical Psychology and How it Can Be Investigated, 2025thesis

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the idea of this process contains a model of a sequence of stages which are clearly defined (the shadow, anima and animus, the wise old man/the great mother, etc.)… The latter is a theory of a much higher complexity, and makes far-reaching claims in the sense of nomothetic statements.

Roesler distinguishes between a minimal self-organizing conception of psychic process and Jung’s more ambitious stage-sequence model of archetypal development, subjecting the latter to critical scrutiny.

Roesler, Christian, The Process of Transformation — The Core of Analytical Psychology and How it Can Be Investigated, 2025supporting

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The archetype underpins psychic life, is both precise and indefinable, and is central to Jung’s conception of therapy. Hillman went on to point out that the archetypes owe nothing to analytical endeavour… the substitution of the more fundamental for the more limited term opens up the area of psychological examination to what lies beyond the consulting room.

Samuels reconstructs Hillman’s rationale for naming the field ‘archetypal’ rather than ‘analytical’: the archetypal process is logically and ontologically prior to any clinical method.

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

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Archetypal psychology can be seen as a cultural movement, part of whose task is the re-visioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of the Western cultural imagination.

Hillman situates archetypal process within a broad cultural and imaginative project, framing the movement as a re-visioning of psychology in terms of the Western cultural imagination rather than a narrowly clinical enterprise.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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Archetypal psychology can be seen as a cultural movement, part of whose task is the re-visioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of the Western cultural imagination.

The companion passage reiterates that archetypal process, as Hillman conceives it, is inseparable from the Western cultural imagination and its mythological, Neoplatonic, and Renaissance inheritance.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness… as ‘esse in anima’ (Jung, CW 6: 66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin.

Hillman grounds archetypal process in the Neoplatonic and Corbinian concept of the mundus imaginalis — a middle realm of soul that mediates between matter and spirit — establishing the ontological locus in which the process operates.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness… as ‘esse in anima’ (Jung, CW 6: 66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin.

Identical in argument to the companion passage, this locates the field of archetypal process within the imaginal middle realm — a philosophically grounded intermediary space between body and spirit.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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behind the parental imagos there now loom the primary archetypes, and the figures encountered become more various, more complex, more enigmatic and equivocal as the journey progresses.

Neumann maps the archetypal process as a deepening encounter with increasingly primordial figures — the heroic journey through individuation dissolves personal imagos to reveal transpersonal archetypal forces.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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each complex in the personal sphere (conscious or unconscious) is formed upon an archetypal matrix in the objective psyche. At the core of every complex is an archetype.

Hall articulates the structural dimension of archetypal process: every complex and personal psychological formation rests upon an archetypal substrate, making archetypal activation the hidden engine of psychopathology and growth alike.

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

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Similar to the morphogenetic constants inherent in the human body, each new expression of the archetype maintains a fidelity to its original form.

Conforti draws a parallel between biological morphogenetic constants and archetypal patterning, arguing that the archetypal process exhibits a conserving fidelity to form across all individual instantiations.

Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting

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Jungian psychotherapy does well enough by simply recognizing that the process of therapy is probably archetypal in a general sense. Discussion of which archetypes are involved is not particularly fruitful for the patient.

Sedgwick offers a pragmatic corrective to over-schematized archetypal interpretation, arguing that acknowledging the generally archetypal character of the therapeutic process is more clinically productive than taxonomic identification of specific archetypes.

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

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she was able to experience the impersonal archetypal psyche. These are classic features of what he would call the process of individuation in the second half of life.

Stein illustrates Jung’s clinical understanding of archetypal process as the encounter with the impersonal archetypal psyche during individuation, presented here through a case example from Jung’s practice.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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the beginnings of every deep human question formulated into an academic, scholarly discipline lie in the mundus imaginalis. This provides the archetypal background or causa formalis of the matter under investigation.

Hillman extends the reach of archetypal process beyond psychology proper into scholarly inquiry itself, identifying the mundus imaginalis as the causa formalis that drives the compulsion toward origins at the heart of any deep investigation.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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The imagery that takes shape in such a set-up tends toward, and is subtly encouraged toward, the archetypal. In terms of dreams, however, the archetypal may be more a matter of feeling than imagery as such.

Sedgwick notes that the archetypal process in dream life may manifest as an affective quality — a sense of depth or magnitude — rather than exclusively through canonical symbolic imagery.

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

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By discarding psychodynamics as necessary for a description of the psyche, archetypal psychology shares a viewpoint with existential psychology. But there are major differences between existential and Jungian therapies. First, the substructures in existential therapy… are concepts, not images and persons.

Hillman draws a boundary between archetypal process — grounded in images and mythic persons — and existential psychology’s conceptual categories, insisting that the imaginal concreteness of archetypes is not reducible to existential abstractions.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside

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