Archetypal Process names the dynamic, temporal dimension of archetypal life — the way universal psychic patterns unfold, transform, and make themselves known across individual experience, cultural history, and therapeutic encounter. The corpus reveals three principal registers in which the term operates. First, within classical Jungian thought, archetypal process designates the sequenced movement of the psyche toward individuation: the emergence of Self-images, the confrontation with shadow, anima/animus, and Great Mother figures, each stage governed by the archetype responsible for that transition (Roesler, Jung, Neumann). Second, Hillman's archetypal psychology radically revises this processual understanding by insisting that the image — not the developmental sequence — is primary. For Hillman, archetypal process is less a teleological unfolding than an ongoing imaginal activity; the psyche perpetually enacts its archetypal nature through myth-inflected perception, pathology, and poetic response. This shifts emphasis from transformation as progress to what Hillman calls 'soul-making.' Third, the corpus registers a productive tension: Roesler and Giegerich press the question of whether nomothetic claims about universal archetypal sequences can survive empirical and logical scrutiny, placing classical process models under significant pressure. Johnson represents a more participatory, experiential strand, arguing that ego consciousness actively enters and influences the archetypal drama through active imagination. Across all positions, the term marks the site where structure becomes event.
In the library
22 substantive passages
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 transforms archetypal process from an impersonal background event into a conscious drama in which the ego becomes a genuine participant capable of influencing fate.
Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986thesis
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… Archetypal psychology distinguishes itself radically from these methods of image control.
Hillman redefines archetypal process as the image's own autonomous self-presentation, rejecting empirical and guided approaches that subordinate the image to external control.
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… Archetypal psychology distinguishes itself radically from these methods of image control.
The parallel text confirms Hillman's foundational position that archetypal process is irreducible to imagining as a psychological act — it is the image's own uncontrollable activity.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
An archetypal image is psychologically 'universal,' because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes… whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance.
Hillman locates the universality of archetypal process not in metaphysical ontology but in the psychological effect of depersonalization and amplification that the image exerts on lived experience.
Psychologically, the universals problem is presented by the soul itself whose perspective is harmoniously both the narrow particularity of felt experience and the universality of archetypally human experience.
Archetypal process is constituted by the soul's simultaneous inhabiting of the singular and the universal — a paradox that resists resolution into either pure subjectivity or abstract structure.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
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.)… a theory of a much higher complexity, and makes far-reaching claims in the sense of nomothetic statements.
Roesler critically maps Jung's archetypal process as a staged developmental model with nomothetic ambitions, exposing the theoretical complexity and empirical vulnerability of such claims.
Roesler, Christian, The Process of Transformation — The Core of Analytical Psychology and How it Can Be Investigated, 2025thesis
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.
Roesler argues that challenges to universalist claims about archetypal process threaten not isolated concepts but the entire explanatory architecture of Jungian theory.
Roesler, Christian, The Process of Transformation — The Core of Analytical Psychology and How it Can Be Investigated, 2025thesis
Jung placed analysis within an archetypal frame, thereby freeing the archetypal from confinement to the analytical… After all, analysis too is an enactment of an archetypal fantasy.
Hillman argues that Jung's decisive move was to subordinate analytic process to archetypal process, recognizing the consulting room itself as a site of mythic enactment rather than clinical procedure.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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 as culturally generative, extending its scope beyond individual therapy into a revisioning of Western civilization's imaginative foundations.
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 repeated framing of archetypal psychology as cultural re-visioning confirms that archetypal process extends its reach into collective and civilizational domains beyond the clinical.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
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.'
Hillman insists that archetypal process requires active human engagement — image work and dream work — rather than passive reception, establishing a collaborative hermeneutic between ego and archetype.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
This Neoplatonic tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea).
Hillman grounds archetypal process in the Neoplatonic tradition of soul as mediating tertium, positioning imaginal activity between materiality and pure spirit as its philosophical home.
Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness… as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin.
The concept of soul as tertium, aligned with Corbin's mundus imaginalis, provides the ontological space within which archetypal process unfolds as neither purely material nor purely spiritual.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
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 describes the late stages of individuation as an intensification of archetypal process, in which the ego voluntarily relinquishes defensive certainty and encounters progressively more multivalent archetypal presences.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
The archetype underpins psychic life, is both precise and indefinable, and is central to Jung's conception of therapy… 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 documents Hillman's strategic renaming of analytical psychology as archetypal psychology, arguing that this shift re-centers process on the archetype and expands its field to all of psychic and cultural life.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
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 basis of archetypal process by showing that every complex — and thus every psychic dynamic — is rooted in an archetypal matrix that governs its patterned expression.
Hall, James A., Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, 1983supporting
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 qualification: acknowledging that therapeutic process is archetypally structured matters more than taxonomic identification of specific archetypes at play.
Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001supporting
Similar to the morphogenetic constants inherent in the human body, each new expression of the archetype maintains a fidelity to its original form.
Conforti frames archetypal process through the lens of morphogenetic field theory, arguing that archetypes constrain expression the way biological constants constrain organic form.
Conforti, Michael, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche, 1999supporting
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 archetypal process into the epistemology of scholarship itself, arguing that intellectual inquiry is driven by imaginal origins that function as formal causes.
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 complicates the identification of archetypal process with symbolic imagery, suggesting it may manifest more fundamentally as an affective quality of 'bigness' in dream experience.
Sedgwick, David, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, 2001aside
Analysis has been gorgeously extravagant in the mythical thematics or 'mythemes' of its work, more like the grandiose tasks of Hercules or Theseus than the needlework and basketwork and alchemical slow stewing that goes on in actual soul-making.
Hillman cautions against inflating archetypal process into heroic grandiosity, arguing that soul-making proceeds through modest, artisanal labor rather than epic mythic drama.
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 how archetypal process manifests clinically as the ego's encounter with the impersonal archetypal psyche during individuation, particularly in the second half of life.
Stein, Murray, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998aside