Post-jungian schools

The post-Jungian field is not a unified tradition but a structured argument — three schools that share a common inheritance from Jung and disagree, sometimes sharply, about what in that inheritance matters most. The definitive taxonomy comes from Samuels (1985), who replaced three earlier and "mutually exclusive" classificatory schemes with a tripartite model grounded not in geography or generation but in how each school orders six theoretical and clinical priorities.

The six variables are: the definition of the archetypal, the concept of the self, the development of personality, the analysis of transference-countertransference, emphasis on symbolic experiences of the self, and examination of highly differentiated imagery. Each school weights these differently, and the weighting is the school.

The Classical School places the self first. Individuation — the integrating, centering movement of the psyche toward wholeness — is the governing telos. Archetypal imagery matters insofar as it serves that movement; early developmental experience receives comparatively less emphasis. Clinically, the symbolic experience of the self takes precedence. Samuels identifies this ordering as closest to Jung's own, hence "Classical." Adler's "orthodoxy" and Fordham's "Zürich School" are its predecessors. The school's self-description is captured in a letter Jung cited by Adler: "the main interest of my work is with the approach to the numinous… but the fact is that the numinous is the real therapy" (Samuels 1985, p. 13).

The Developmental School — Fordham's London School, Adler's "neo-Jungians" — weights development first, self second, archetype third. Its decisive clinical contribution is the elevation of transference-countertransference from adjunct to central instrument. Fordham's concept of the interactional dialectic defines the analyst's total experiential response to the patient, of which countertransference is one component. The school's cross-pollination with Kleinian object relations gave it a clinical precision the other schools have not matched; its language is largely psychoanalytic. Fordham's reformulation of the self as a primary psychosomatic integrate operative from birth — from which ego crystallizes through cycles of deintegration and reintegration — is its most original theoretical contribution.

The Archetypal School reverses the Classical ordering entirely: image first, self second, development a distant third. Clinically, highly differentiated imagery takes precedence over symbolic experiences of the self, and both take precedence over transference-countertransference. Hillman states the position with characteristic directness:

At the most basic level of psychic reality are fantasy images. These images are the primary activity of consciousness…. Images are the only reality we apprehend directly.

The school's founding figures — Hillman, Berry, López-Pedraza, Miller, Casey — constitute what Goldenberg called the "third generation": the first cohort without personal loyalty to Jung, free to inherit without discipleship. Goldenberg's point, which Samuels endorses, is that this freedom from personal responsibility to Jung is precisely what distinguishes the Archetypal School from its predecessors. The school has no formal training program; it is, as Sedgwick (2001) observes, "more an attitude" than a clinical institution — an attitude grounded in the poetic basis of mind and the primacy of soul over self.

The three schools fall into two camps when it comes to clinical method. The Developmental School stands alone in its interactional dialectic; the Classical and Archetypal schools share a focus on the healing power of the symbol, even as they disagree about whether that symbol serves integration (Classical) or imaginal deepening (Archetypal).

Samuels himself, formally classified within the Developmental School, builds sustained bridges to the Archetypal School — a reminder that the taxonomy describes tendencies, not enclosures. Giegerich goes further, arguing that archetypal psychology is not a school beside the others but a theoretical advance beyond them, the only post-Jungian project that "logically further developed what Jung had been most interested in" (Giegerich 2020, p. 104). Whether one accepts that claim or not, it marks the live fault-line: the question of whether the three schools are genuinely coordinate or whether one has superseded the others is itself part of the ongoing argument.

  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and the Archetypal School
  • Andrew Samuels — the principal cartographer of the post-Jungian field
  • Archetypal School — the school that places image before self and soul before individuation
  • Developmental School — Fordham's London School and its clinical method of interactional dialectic

Sources Cited

  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
  • Sedgwick, David, 2001, An Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy
  • Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life