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Corbin at Eranos — the Sufi-Platonist Inheritance of Archetypal Psychology

Corbin at Eranos

Henry Corbin addressed the Eranos conferences for twenty-seven years (1949–1978). The relationship between his work and the archetypal psychology that james-hillman built there is direct, documented, and load-bearing. This thread records that transmission as the retrieval shows it.

Hillman named Corbin one of the “immediate fathers” of archetypal-psychology-charter alongside carl-jung and the Renaissance Platonist tradition (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology 1983, Uniform Edition I, p. 71). He called Corbin’s cosmology “a great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world,” and said Corbin’s Eranos lectures demonstrated “the theophanic power of bringing the divine face into visibility” (Russell 2023). Corbin returned the compliment: he named Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology “the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods” (Russell 2023). The exchange was not peripheral. It was the axis along which archetypal psychology crossed from Jungian analysis into a philosophical ontology of the image.

The divergence is as important as the inheritance. Corbin’s imaginal is theophanic, angelic, and oriented toward the luminous Man of Light. Hillman’s is polytheistic and pathologizing. Hillman himself noted the divergence in a footnote to his Eranos lecture “On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology”: “In stressing the pathologized aspect of the imaginal, I am aware of diverging here from the view of Henry Corbin” (Hillman, Facing the Gods 1980). Tom Cheetham captures the shared project that made the divergence possible: both figures were at work to “loosen the grip of dogmatic monotheism on Western consciousness by disclosing the polytheistic faces of Divinity” (cited in Russell 2023).

Sources

  • james-hillman: Corbin is the “third immediate father” of archetypal psychology alongside Jung and the Renaissance Platonists (Archetypal Psychology 1983).
  • henry-corbin: Re-Visioning Psychology is “the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods” (letter cited in Russell 2023).
  • Russell, Dick: biographical record of the Corbin–Hillman exchange at Eranos and in correspondence.