Memoria occupies a peculiar and commanding position in the depth-psychology corpus: it is simultaneously a classical faculty of the soul, a pre-modern name for what modernity calls the unconscious, and a contested site where neuroscience, archetypal psychology, and Platonic philosophy converge without resolution. Hillman, the dominant voice in these passages, rehabilitates memoria not as mnemonic storage but as the imaginal ground of psychic life — the 'palace left from antiquity' once inhabited by the pagan Gods, rediscovered by Freud under the suspicious rubric of 'primary process' and by Jung as the substrate of archetypal fantasy. Hillman presses the Augustinian and Renaissance traditions — Cicero, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas — against the secular-analytical reduction of memoria to pathological symptom. Augustine himself contributes the phenomenological architecture: memoria as the 'great harbour' receiving images of all sensory experience, yet also containing knowledge never received through any bodily avenue. Aristotle, via Lorenz, sharpens the distinction between mere re-enactment of stored affections and genuine recollection accompanied by temporal awareness. Neuroscience (Kandel, LeDoux, Siegel) partitions the domain into explicit/implicit, episodic/semantic, short-term/long-term — taxonomies foreign to but not incompatible with the older ontological claims. The central tension is whether memoria names a faculty with metaphysical dignity, as Hillman insists, or a biological mechanism awaiting full mechanistic explication.
In the library
18 substantive 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 concept of the unconscious is a late, impoverished rediscovery of memoria, a classical faculty possessing genuine ontological standing rather than requiring empirical proof from psychopathology.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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 — may be considered the first speech of the soul.
Hillman, reading Jung through Plato, identifies memoria as the primordial ground of psychic existence, the archaic stratum that precedes ego differentiation and speaks in myth and fantasy.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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.
Drawing on Cicero and Plato, Hillman presents memoria as the metaphysical locus where divine reality intersects human life, grounding imagination in a theology of soul rather than in cognitive mechanism.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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 psychology's ego-centred method is structurally inadequate to the imaginal reality of memoria, which demands participation rather than dissection.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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 furnishes the foundational phenomenological account of memoria as a vast interior repository of images, in which retained sensory impressions remain available to thought without the original sensory objects being present.
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 extends memoria beyond sensory images to encompass knowledge already latent within the soul, anticipating later depth-psychological claims about a pre-personal imaginal stratum accessible through reflection.
the soul is where 'the whole man' has come to the fore ... 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 critically qualifies the Augustinian triad by insisting that memoria as an isolated faculty — however dignified — cannot of itself constitute soulful access; only the undivided subject crosses into genuine psychological territory.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
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 situates memoria within the classical tripartite soul (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas) derived from Augustine and codified in Catholic catechesis, establishing the theological context against which depth psychology operates.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
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.
Lorenz clarifies Aristotle's distinction between phantasia (mere passive re-enactment of retained affections) and genuine memoria (re-enactment plus temporal self-awareness), a discrimination with direct bearing on depth-psychological accounts of unconscious replay.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.
Hillman invokes Eliot to argue that memory in later life operates hermeneutically — recovering not factual sequence but archetypal pattern and significance, aligning with his broader account of memoria as meaning-generating faculty.
Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
'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.'
Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, as glossed by Lorenz, anchors memory in the perceptual rather than rational soul, with phantasia as its necessary vehicle — a position that anticipates depth psychology's insistence on the image as the primary datum of psychic life.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
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]
Vernant situates Greek anamnesis not as historical recollection but as cosmological reorientation, linking memoria's deepest register to escape from temporal cyclicity — a context essential for understanding Hillman's Platonic reading.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
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 (in Italian) argues that psychological liberation requires a transformation of memoria itself — a reorientation from factual chronicle to soul-centred recollection grounded in archetypal metaphor.
The index entry for memoria in The Myth of Analysis maps its extensive textual presence and identifies the compound term Memoria Dei, indicating the theological dimension Hillman assigns to this faculty.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside
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 preserves not only perceptual images but also affective and evaluative representations, enabling language and discrimination even in the absence of the original experience.
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 elaborates Aristotle's concept of dispositional memory as a structured network of retained affections with associative dispositions, providing the ancient philosophical background for later dynamic-psychological models of unconscious associative organisation.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
The more complex memory that had inspired me initially — the explicit memory for people, objects, and places — is consciously recalled and can typically be expressed in images or words.
Kandel's neuroscientific taxonomy of implicit and explicit memory provides a contemporary scientific counterpoint to the depth-psychological and philosophical accounts of memoria, marking the discipline's distance from the classical framework.
Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006aside
recollection, as Aristotle thinks of it, is a rather special way in which representations retained in an organism may become active, and one that, moreover, he takes to be unavailable to the brute animals.
Lorenz notes Aristotle's restriction of true recollection to rational beings, distinguishing it from mere associative activation — a boundary that later depth psychology deliberately unsettles by attributing archaic memoria to pre-rational strata of the psyche.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside