Andrew samuels post jungians

Andrew Samuels is the principal cartographer of the post-Jungian field. His 1985 Jung and the Post-Jungians did not merely describe a landscape that already existed — it constituted one, replacing three earlier classificatory schemes (Fordham's geographical, Adler's ideological, Goldenberg's generational) with a single framework rigorous enough to hold the field's productive disagreements without collapsing them into false unity.

The architecture of that framework rests on six variables — three theoretical, three clinical — that every analytical psychologist, whatever their allegiance, necessarily engages. The theoretical variables are the definition of the archetypal, the concept of self, and the development of personality. The clinical variables are the analysis of transference-countertransference, emphasis upon symbolic experiences of the self, and examination of highly differentiated imagery. What distinguishes the schools from one another is not which variables they acknowledge but how they weight and order them.

My hypothesis is that there are indeed three main schools. We can call these the Classical School, the Developmental School and the Archetypal School. My method is to select three aspects of theoretical discussion and three of clinical practice to which all analytical psychologists relate. I hope to demonstrate that it is the ordering and weighting of these that underpin the evolution of the schools.

The Classical School — Adler, Neumann, Hannah, von Franz, Edinger — weights its theoretical priorities in the sequence self, archetype, development, preserving what Samuels calls "Jung's own ordering of priorities." Clinically, it foregrounds the symbolic experience of the self, with transference-countertransference as a secondary rather than primary instrument. The Developmental School — centered on Fordham and the London group — inverts this, placing personality development first and making the analysis of transference-countertransference the primary clinical instrument. Its method Samuels names the interactional dialectic: the analyst's total experiential response to the patient, including countertransference, is the medium through which analytic work proceeds. The Archetypal School — Hillman, Berry, López-Pedraza, Miller, Casey — places differentiated imagery first, the self second, and development a distant third. Clinically, it privileges the particularity of the image over both self-symbolism and relational process. Hillman's own formulation is unambiguous: "At the most basic level of psychic reality are fantasy images. These images are the primary activity of consciousness" (cited in Samuels 1985).

The taxonomy is not merely descriptive. Samuels is aware that it enacts a thesis: the post-Jungian field, like the psyche itself, is structurally multiple rather than unified. He draws on Heraclitus — polemos, strife as generative principle — to argue that the disagreements among the schools are not a problem to be resolved but the condition of the field's vitality. Students who wept at the diversity, as Samuels recounts, were experiencing the anxiety that multiplicity always provokes; the positive reading is that comparative work becomes possible precisely because the schools are genuinely distinct.

Samuels is formally positioned within the developmental school, yet his theoretical work refuses the closure his own taxonomy might invite. His later writing on the "plural psyche" and on political dimensions of depth psychology extends the anti-hierarchical impulse: the self, he argues, should not occupy a permanently privileged position in Jungian parlance but should be understood as "only one version among many possible versions" (cited in Papadopoulos 2006). This is a move that brings him into partial alignment with Hillman's polytheistic critique of Jungian monotheism, even as his clinical commitments remain developmental.

Sedgwick, writing from a clinician's vantage, captures the practical upshot well: rather than speaking of schools, it may be more useful to speak of "various Jungian languages," with the developmental language being psychoanalytic, the classical language symbolic-synthetic, and the archetypal language imaginal (Sedgwick 2001). A well-rounded Jungian practitioner, on this view, is conversant in all three without being imprisoned by any one.

Andrew Samuels — portrait of the principal cartographer of the post-Jungian field
James Hillman — founder of archetypal psychology and the school that places the image first
Archetypal School — the third post-Jungian school, defined by the primacy of differentiated imagery
Post-Jungian Vertex — Samuels's six-variable framework for mapping the field

Sources Cited

Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
Sedgwick, David, 2001, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy
Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology