Post modern analytical psychology

The question names a genuine fault-line in the post-Jungian field — not a single school but a pressure that runs through all three of Samuels's schools, dissolving certain inherited certainties while leaving others intact. To understand what "postmodern" means here, it helps to begin with what it is pushing against.

Jung's late work — Aion, the alchemical writings, the essays on synchronicity — converged on a particular image of the psyche: multiple in its contents, yes, but ultimately ordered by a superordinate center, the Self, which Jung correlated explicitly with monotheism. In Aion he wrote that "the anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism," and declared the Self "the archetype which it is most important for modern man to understand" (CW 9ii). The individuation process, on this reading, is a movement from multiplicity toward integration, from the many toward the one. Mandalas, quaternities, the conjunctio — all point in the same direction.

The postmodern pressure in analytical psychology is, at its core, a refusal of that directionality. It does not deny the empirical phenomena Jung identified; it denies that images of unity rank above images of plurality in developmental or ontological importance. Hillman names the stakes with characteristic precision:

The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology which stresses the plurality of the archetypes. A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon and represented, at its best, in the psyche of Greek antiquity and of the Renaissance, is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism.

This is not merely a theoretical preference. Hillman's argument is that the elevation of the Self to hierarchical primacy smuggles a theological preference — specifically a senex, monotheistic temperament — into what presents itself as neutral psychological description. The result is a psychology that systematically devalues the autonomous complexes, the differentiated imagery of the gods, the dissolution process, and any experience that does not resolve toward unity. Postmodern analytical psychology names this devaluation and refuses it.

The refusal takes different forms across the schools Samuels maps. Hillman's archetypal psychology replaces the Self with anima — soul, the deepening of imaginal experience — and proposes that "the purpose of analysis is not individuation but animation" (Adams, cited in Papadopoulos 2006). Fordham, from within the developmental school, arrives at a structurally similar position by a different route: his concept of the primary self, unfolding through deintegration and reintegration, produces a model in which part-selves are not less important than the whole self, which "remains an unrepresentable abstraction" (Samuels 1985). Samuels himself, from his pluralist position, proposes an ad hoc hierarchy in which the preeminence of the Self is "only one version among many possible versions" — a situationist, relativized self in which clusters of experience carry the feeling of "being myself" rather than of being whole.

What unites these otherwise divergent moves is a shared suspicion of what Hillman calls "the fantasy of individuation which characterises it mainly as movement towards unity, expressed in wholeness, centering, or in figures like the Old Wise Man or Woman" (Samuels 1985). Postmodern analytical psychology does not abandon individuation; it pluralizes it. As Hillman puts it, we should speak of "a multiplicity of individuations deriving from our internal multiple persons. Therefore an individual cannot provide a norm even for himself" (Samuels 1985). Each of us has many gods to obey.

Bosnak, working in the embodied imagination tradition, makes the epistemological stakes explicit. He parts company with Jung precisely at the Self, which he reads as an "overvaluation of a singular patterning force" — the psychological face of monotheism. Against it he draws on complexity theory's principle of emergent self-organization: the most creative processes unfold on the border between order and chaos, without a steering hand from outside. The result is "a more versatile sense of self; all in lower case without an overarching Capital" (Bosnak 2007). This is postmodern analytical psychology in its most programmatic form: not the abolition of order, but the refusal to locate order in a single superordinate principle.

The constructivist wing — Young-Eisendrath, Zinkin — approaches the same territory from a different angle, arguing that the self is not a given but something acquired within culture, language, and relational context. The self is made, not discovered; or rather, the distinction between making and discovering cannot be cleanly drawn. This challenges both Neumann's primordial mother-infant unity and Fordham's primary integrate, while remaining within the Jungian orbit.

What postmodern analytical psychology does not do — and this is the fault-line Samuels insists on — is collapse into relativism. Hillman is explicit: polytheism means "many," not "any." It is not that anything goes, but that the soul has many sources of meaning, direction, and value. The tension among the gods is itself a form of order — not the order of the mandala, but the order of a rich counterpoint, a communion of persons each with specific needs, fears, and languages. The postmodern move is not the dissolution of structure but the refusal of hierarchy.

  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and the polytheistic critique
  • Andrew Samuels — the principal cartographer of the post-Jungian field and its three schools
  • The Self — Jung's concept of the superordinate center, and the debates it generated
  • Individuation — the process of psychic development, and its postmodern revisions

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1974, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (appendix)
  • Hillman, James, 1972, The Myth of Analysis
  • Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman
  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
  • Bosnak, Robert, 2007, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology