Memoria

Memoria occupies a central and contested position in depth psychology, drawing together ancient faculty psychology, Neoplatonic metaphysics, Renaissance mnemotechnics, Augustinian theology, and post-Freudian imaginal theory into a single problematic. The most sustained treatment appears in Hillman’s The Myth of Analysis, where memoria is reclaimed from its modern reduction to clinical symptom and reinstated as a primary power of the soul — the palace of the imaginal, the homeland of archetypal fantasy, the very ground of psychic ontology. Hillman reads Freud’s ‘primary process’ as an impoverished rediscovery of this ancient faculty, one rendered pathological by the prejudices of secular psychology. Augustine provides the theological depth: his Confessions map memoria as the vast, stratified inner harbour in which images, passions, and even pre-sensory truths are stored, awaiting the soul’s active retrieval. For Aristotle, as reconstructed by Lorenz, memoria is more precisely physiological — involving retained sensory affections, dispositional structures, and the crucial phenomenological distinction between mere re-enactment (phantasia) and genuine remembering (anamnesis). Giegerich cautions that memoria as a discrete psychological faculty remains within a ‘fenced-in realm’ unless integrated into the ‘whole man.’ What unites these otherwise divergent positions is the insistence that memoria names something far more than storage: it is the soul’s constitutive relationship to its own depth.

In the library 16 passages

the unconscious was in fact a palace left from antiquity and the Renaissance, still inhabited by the surviving pagan Gods and once called the realm of memoria. Memoria has the reality of a fundamental power of the soul.

Hillman argues that the modern unconscious is a secularized heir of the ancient faculty of memoria, whose ontological reality requires no empirical proof and whose loss has been registered only through psychopathology.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jung clearly implies the Platonic view that in childhood the soul is immersed in memoria and that memoria is the home of our first personality, the mythic and childlike. Thus the fantasies of memoria — and all that resides there and can be expressed there — may be considered the first speech of the soul.

Drawing on Jung’s reading of Plato, Hillman establishes memoria as the original domicile of the mythic personality and the primary speech-ground of the soul, prior to and more fundamental than ego consciousness.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

memoria was considered by Cicero, among others, following Plato (Phaedo, Meno, Republic), to present evidence for the divine origin of the soul. Through the imagination man has access to the Gods: through the memoria the Gods enter our lives.

Hillman, via Cicero, positions memoria as theological evidence: it is the channel through which divine archetypes penetrate human life, making its secular suppression tantamount to the death of the soul.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming, and brought out at need; each entering in by his own gate, and there laid up.

Augustine presents memoria as an architecturally vast interior space whose structure governs the soul’s access to every mode of perceptual and intellectual experience.

Augustine, Confessions, 397thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

to learn these things whereof we imbibe not the images by our senses, but perceive within by themselves, without images, as they are, is nothing else, but by conception, to receive, and by marking to take heed that those things which the memory did before contain at random and unarranged, be laid up at hand.

Augustine argues that learning is fundamentally an act of recollection — the re-ordering of what memoria already contains, not the acquisition of genuinely new content from outside.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

we do injustice to the archetypes of memoria with a nineteenth-century concept. An ‘analytical’ psychology offers ‘analysis’ of memoria, but Jung said we must dream the myth along.

Hillman contends that analytical reduction is epistemically inadequate to memoria’s archetypal reality, which demands mythopoetic participation rather than clinical dissection.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Feeling, empathy, imagination, memoria, desire as such are not access roads to soul. As particular psychological faculties into the sum of which ‘the whole man’ has been cut apart, they stay in the fenced-in realm.

Giegerich challenges imaginal psychology’s privileging of memoria by arguing that as a discrete faculty it remains psychologically partial; only the integrated ‘whole man’ constitutes genuine access to soul.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

I name a bodily pain, yet it is not present with me, when nothing aches: yet unless its image were present to my memory, I should not know what to say thereof, nor in discoursing discern pain from pleasure.

Augustine demonstrates that memoria stores not merely perceptual images but affective and conceptual ones, making language itself dependent on memorial retention.

Augustine, Confessions, 397supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Aristotle distinguishes between such mere re-enactment and re-enactment accompanied by awareness of past interaction with the thing in question. He regards only the latter as amounting to an act of remembering. The former he treats as a case of phantasia.

Lorenz reconstructs Aristotle’s technical distinction between memory proper — which requires temporal self-awareness — and mere phantastic re-enactment, a distinction fundamental to any philosophically rigorous theory of memoria.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Aristotle takes dispositional memory not only to involve sensory affections that are retained or preserved in the organism. He also takes it to involve — in many cases and perhaps in general — the existence of dispositions that obtain among those sensory affections.

Lorenz shows that for Aristotle, memoria is a relational structure of dispositional affinities among retained sensory states, not a simple storage register.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The effort to recollect that is so exalted and praised in myth does not point to an awakening of interest in the past or an attempt to explore human time. Anamnesis is concerned wi[th escaping time].

Vernant situates Greek anamnesis within an eschatological rather than historical framework, reading memory exercises as techniques for escaping cyclical time rather than for recovering the personal past.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The three powers of my soul are my memory, my understanding, and my will. These three powers are ‘the likeness to the Blessed Trinity in my soul’ because ‘in my one soul are three powers.’

Hillman cites the Catholic catechism’s Augustinian tripartite soul — memoria, intelligentia, voluntas — to establish the theological pedigree within which depth psychology’s rediscovery of the imaginal must be understood.

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

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

tale riorganizzazione richiede innanzitutto un cambiamento della memoria stessa, sicché la domanda di ogni giorno non sarà: «Che cosa è avvenuto?», bensì: «Che cosa è avvenuto all’anima?»

Hillman argues (in Italian) that a transformation of memoria is prerequisite to psychological seeing, reorienting memory’s question from factual sequence to the soul’s experience of events.

Hillman, James, Puer Aeternus, 1967supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘Memory also of intelligibles does not occur without a phantasia. Hence it would seem to belong incidentally to that which is concerned with thought, but in itself to the primary part or aspect concerned with perceiving.’

Lorenz cites Aristotle’s De Memoria to establish that even intellectual memory requires phantasia, grounding memoria in the perceptual rather than the purely rational part of the soul.

Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

‘We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.’

Hillman uses Eliot’s Four Quartets to distinguish between short-term factual recall and the deeper, meaning-laden pattern-making that characterizes memoria as life-review in late character.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms