Future of jungian psychology

The question carries a particular irony: a psychology built on the premise that the psyche is not linear, not progressive, not aimed at a destination — and yet we ask where it is going. The honest answer is that the future of Jungian psychology is already visible in the tensions that currently animate it, and those tensions are more generative than any consensus would be.

Samuels mapped the terrain in 1985 with characteristic precision, identifying three informal schools — classical, developmental, and archetypal — each answering a different problem in Jung's corpus. The classical school holds that Jung's work is essentially complete and requires amplification rather than revision; the developmental school, following Fordham, integrates object relations and attachment theory, treating early life as the missing clinical ground; the archetypal school, following Hillman, refuses the integrative project altogether and insists on soul's irreducible plurality. Samuels himself noted that these are less schools than languages, and that a well-rounded analyst will be conversant in all of them while perhaps specializing in one (Samuels, 1985). The productive disagreement among them is not a problem to be solved but the field's actual life.

What has changed since Samuels wrote is the pressure from two directions that neither he nor Jung fully anticipated: neuroscience and the collapse of institutional religion.

On the neuroscientific front, recent work has attempted to give archetypes construct validity within predictive processing frameworks. McGovern et al. (2025) propose that archetypes can be understood as "shared minima" — stable spatiotemporal patterns in hierarchically organized neural architecture, with the affective core rooted in subcortical systems and archetypal stories encoded in higher cortical areas. The proposal is careful to avoid the mereological fallacy: archetypes are not brain regions, but the brain's architecture may constitute a neurophenomenological scaffold for archetypal experience. This is a genuinely new development, and it matters — not because it validates Jung in any simple sense, but because it opens a dialogue between depth psychology and cognitive neuroscience that psychoanalysis has largely failed to establish.

We propose that archetypes can be understood as shared minima, evinced by regular or stable spatiotemporal patterns that encode sufficiently stable patterns or themes across conspecifics.

Whether this dialogue enriches depth psychology or gradually dissolves it into cognitive science is the open question. Giegerich has argued, with some ferocity, that the eclectic impulse — supplementing Jung with Winnicott, Kohut, Klein — reflects a failure to understand Jung's work as an organic whole generated by its own inner logic. For Giegerich, the future lies not in accumulation but in a return to the "primal stuff" that forced Jung's psychology into being (Giegerich, 2020). This is the opposite of the developmental school's trajectory, and the disagreement is not merely methodological — it is a disagreement about what kind of thing Jungian psychology is.

On the religious front, Edinger's diagnosis from 1972 has only sharpened: the collapse of Christianity as a living symbol system leaves modern individuals without a collective container for the encounter with the archetypal psyche, obliging each person to undertake what was once a communal process alone (Edinger, 1972). Hillman's response was to refuse the compensatory move — to insist that the goal is not a new religion of psychology but a thoroughgoing reimagination of what psychology itself is for. As he put it, the goal is "the psychological cure of 'me'" — which means going beyond the desire for improvement, beyond heroic notions of attainment, beyond the spiritualization of the process (Papadopoulos, 2006). This is where Hillman and the classical school part company most sharply: the classical analysts, epitomized by Edinger, read individuation as a redemptive process; Hillman refuses the redemption arc entirely.

Psychology as religion implies imagining all psychological events as effects of Gods in the soul, and all activities to do with soul, such as therapy, to be operations of ritual in relation to these Gods.

The pneumatic temptation — the pull toward transcendence, higher selves, spiritual attainment — runs through the tradition's future as it has run through its past. Jung himself was not immune to it; his Self-with-capital-S risks precisely the metaphysical reification that Hillman refused. The most honest futures for Jungian psychology are those that hold this tension without resolving it: that take seriously both the reality of the archetypal psyche and the soul's tendency to use that reality as an escape from its own suffering.

What seems most alive in the field right now is the intersection of depth psychology with somatic and trauma work, with psychedelic research, and with the renewed philosophical interest in consciousness that McGilchrist's hemispheric model has catalyzed (McGilchrist, 2021). None of these are Jungian in any orthodox sense, but all of them are asking questions that Jung's framework is unusually well-equipped to address — questions about the relationship between image and affect, between the personal and the transpersonal, between the body's knowledge and the mind's constructions. The future of Jungian psychology may be less a school than a sensibility: a way of hearing the psyche's speech that remains useful precisely because it refuses to be fully systematized.

James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and the tradition's most rigorous critic of spiritual bypass
individuation — Jung's term for the lifelong process of becoming a singular, whole self
Andrew Samuels — the principal cartographer of the post-Jungian field and its three schools
Murray Stein — contemporary systematizer of Jung's opus and theorist of transformation

Sources Cited

Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians
McGovern, Hugh et al., 2025, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious
Giegerich, Wolfgang, 2020, The Soul's Logical Life
Edinger, Edward F., 1972, Ego and Archetype
Papadopoulos, Renos K. (ed.), 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology
McGilchrist, Iain, 2021, The Matter with Things