Archetypal Resemblance

Archetypal Resemblance names the structural kinship — formal, imaginal, or ontological — between a psychological phenomenon and its archetypal ground. The term occupies a contested site in depth-psychology, where its precise meaning differs sharply depending on whether one stands within the Jungian, post-Jungian, or archetypal-psychological traditions. For Jung, the resemblance between personal images and mythological patterns attests to a transpersonal inheritance: archetypes are formal predispositions, empty of content, whose empirical manifestations necessarily resemble one another across cultures because the underlying ‘axial system’ is shared. Hillman’s archetypal psychology inherits this logic but redirects it aesthetically and polytheistically, reading the resemblance of lived pathology to mythic figures as a mode of recognition rather than diagnosis. The critical pressure on this position is supplied most rigorously by Wolfgang Giegerich, who argues that when archetypal psychology speaks of ‘likeness’ between contemporary syndromes and Greek myths, it collapses into the very ‘simple act of matching’ it theoretically opposes — a matching that lacks the ontological continuity present in Neoplatonic analogia entis or even in Jung’s own archetype-in-itself. Tarnas extends the concept cosmologically, treating planetary alignments as bearers of archetypal resemblance across vast historical spans. The tension between resemblance as genuine ontological correspondence and resemblance as hermeneutic projection remains the central unresolved problematic of the concept across the library.

In the library 15 passages

by operating with the idea of a resemblance between our syndromes and certain Greek myths or Gods, HILLMAN structurally set up the psychological work as the very ‘simple act of matching’ that he expressly rejected.

Giegerich argues that Hillman’s deployment of resemblance between pathological syndromes and mythic figures reproduces the reductive ‘matching’ logic he claimed to transcend, and that it lacks the ontological continuity of its Neoplatonic or Jungian sources.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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that which would have to disclose, within itself, its archetypal image as its own internal mirror, by means of which the phenomenon could reflect and know itself.

Giegerich insists that authentic archetypal recognition requires the phenomenon to disclose its own internal archetypal image rather than being matched externally against borrowed mythological material.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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the notion of likeness, as it functions in archetypal psychology, is nothing else but the abbreviated formula for the methodological stance of matching.

Giegerich reduces the archetypal-psychological concept of likeness to a methodological shorthand for structural matching, thereby challenging its deeper theoretical warrant.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own.

Jung grounds archetypal resemblance in a formal, not content-determined, preforming structure — analogous to a crystal’s axial system — that produces similar representations across diverse individual and cultural instances.

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

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this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception… producing, in the fantasy-images of children’s dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels.

Jung explains cross-cultural and trans-individual archetypal resemblance as arising from inherited formal predispositions that generate parallel mythological imagery independently of cultural transmission.

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

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mythic, -al, 60; base for dreams, 2… mythic realities, 140; resemblance, see Resemblance

Hillman’s index entry cross-references ‘mythic resemblance’ as a distinct technical concept in his dream hermeneutics, signalling its structural importance to the work’s methodology.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting

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The more exact the available data and the more deeply familiar I was with the person or event, the more compelling were the correspondences… The coincidence between planetary positions and appropriate biographical and psychological phenomena was in general so precise and consistent.

Tarnas treats the precision of planetary-biographical correspondences as empirical evidence that archetypal resemblance between cosmological patterns and psychological life is not projective but structurally real.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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Often two individuals are born with two very different alignments involving the Sun… yet have another planetary combination in common and clearly share the corresponding archetypal themes in their lives.

Tarnas demonstrates archetypal resemblance operating synchronically across distinct biographies that share a planetary alignment, regardless of other biographical differences.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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through the resemblance of Hyakinthos to the boy Apollo, the invention of pederasty.

López-Pedraza invokes archetypal resemblance between a human figure and a divine prototype to explain the mythological genesis of a cultural institution.

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

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the swineherd and Princess A are nothing less than earthly simulacra of Prince and Princess B, who in their turn would be the descendants of divine prototypes.

Jung articulates a hierarchical ontology in which mundane figures bear archetypal resemblance to divine originals through a chain of descending simulacra.

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

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Portmann’s biology of living forms adds an animal dimension to the Neoplatonic idea of inherent intelligibility of all things, sometimes elaborated as the Doctrine of Signatures (visible markings indicate invisible potencies).

Hillman links archetypal resemblance to the Neoplatonic Doctrine of Signatures, in which visible formal resemblance discloses invisible archetypal potency — grounding the concept in perceptible self-display.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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Portmann’s biology of living forms adds an animal dimension to the Neoplatonic idea of inherent intelligibility of all things, sometimes elaborated as the Doctrine of Signatures (visible markings indicate invisible potencies).

This parallel passage reinforces Hillman’s grounding of archetypal resemblance in an aesthetically perceptible Neoplatonic intelligibility inherent in living forms.

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

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we are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconsciousness… one would be astonished to see how these symbols are governed by the same fundamental laws that can be observed in individual mandalas.

Jung reads the cross-cultural recurrence of mandala imagery as evidence of a transconsciousness that produces archetypal resemblance through identical formal laws operating independently in separate individuals.

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

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we can recognize here both the diachronic and synchronic patterning that I found so pervasive in studying planetary correlations with cultural and historical phenomena.

Tarnas notes that archetypal resemblance operates both diachronically across a single figure’s lifespan and synchronically within a historical moment, demonstrating its multi-temporal scope.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006aside

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we all have those archetypal principles and complexes living within us, in varying forms and combinations with other archetypal impulses… these archetypal impulses carry vast streams of historical experience.

Tarnas argues that archetypal resemblance across individuals and eras reflects the universal internalization of shared archetypal principles rather than mere coincidence.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006aside

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