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Archetypal Psychology
Also known as: imaginal psychology, Hillmanian psychology
Archetypal psychology is a post-Jungian tradition founded by James Hillman that shifts psychology's center of gravity from ego, development, and diagnosis to image, myth, and soul. Drawing on Neoplatonic philosophy, Renaissance thought, and Jung's later alchemical writings, it treats the psyche as fundamentally imagistic — constituted by archetypal images that are not symbols to be decoded but presences that make experience possible.
What Distinguishes Archetypal Psychology from Classical Jungian Thought?
Classical Jungian psychology distinguishes sharply between the noumenal archetype-per-se and its phenomenal expression in images. Hillman refuses this distinction. As he articulates in Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, the tradition “rigorously refuses even to speculate about a nonpresented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image” (Hillman, 1983). The move is deliberate: by collapsing the gap between hidden structure and visible image, Hillman eliminates the metaphysical scaffolding that allows psychology to treat images as mere derivatives of deeper, truer realities.
Hillman follows Jung’s insight that archetypal forms shape thoughts, attitudes, and ideas as modes of apprehension (Hillman, 2015). But where Jung retained a structural model of the collective unconscious as a psychic layer, Hillman treats archetypal determinants as ways of seeing rather than things seen:
“Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary.” — James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983)
This means archetypal psychology is less a theory of psychic structures than a practice of perception. It asks not what an image represents but what it demands.
What Is the Primary Critique of Archetypal Psychology?
Wolfgang Giegerich mounts the most sustained internal critique. In The Soul’s Logical Life, Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology remains structurally blind to the logical status of images — it “sees only the fish, but not the water; the birds, but not the air” (Giegerich, 2020). The imagination, in Giegerich’s account, cannot comprehend the historical and logical element in which images have their place. Only thought, what Giegerich calls “sublated imagination”, can grasp the soul as logical life rather than imaginal display. A psychology that stops at the image risks aestheticizing suffering rather than metabolizing it.
How Does Archetypal Psychology Define Soul?
Soul arises, in Hillman’s formulation, wherever the mythic imagination meets the sufferings and longings of everyday life (Hillman, 2015). It is present when depth is sounded, when the universal touches the unique. The goal of psychotherapy under this framework is not cure but the invocation of soul-making — the deepening of events into experiences through reflective, imaginal engagement.
Sources Cited
- Giegerich, Wolfgang (2020). The Soul’s Logical Life. Peter Lang.
- Hillman, James (1983). Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Spring Publications.
- Hillman, James (2015). Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Vol. 1. Spring Publications.