The Giegerich–Hillman Quarrel

The dispute between Wolfgang Giegerich and James Hillman is one of the defining fissures of the late archetypal school. Both men begin from Jung and from the priority of soul; both take archetypal-psychology-charter‘s rescue of the soul-question from the clinical flattening of post-Jungian analysis as the necessary first move. They part on the question of whether the imaginal is the final horizon.

Giegerich’s charge is that archetypal psychology halts at the image, and that its gods have become, in consequence, “virtual-reality type gods” — “metaphors for modes of experience” (as Hillman himself writes in Re-Visioning Psychology, quoted at Giegerich 2020, p. 219). The soul’s logical life, Giegerich insists, requires going through the imaginal into the Notion — a movement he names, variously, “absolute-negative interiorization,” “fermenting corruption,” and “Dionysian dismemberment.”

The knife-point is the kill. In Giegerich’s essay “Killings” (Spring, 1993), the sacrificial act is read as the psychological origin of soul — the moment in which the subject commits itself beyond imaginal play. Hillman replied in “Once More into the Fray: A Response to Wolfgang Giegerich’s ‘Killings’” (Spring 56, 1994, pp. 1–18), rejecting on principle the idea of killing as a primary mode of soul-making. Giegerich returns the charge: “the ‘kill’ is missing from [archetypal psychology’s] theory and method, archetypal psychology does not really connect with reality. Its approach cocoons it into its own imaginings” (Giegerich 2020, p. 273).

Andrew Samuels registers the quarrel from the outside and earlier: Giegerich as the post-Jungian who named developmental analysis genetic fantasy, drawing on Hillman’s own argument that “the child functions as a screen on to which the developmental psychologist may freely propound [his] fantasies” (Samuels 1985, citing Giegerich 1975 and Hillman 1972). The alliance on developmental theory makes the later quarrel over the imaginal all the sharper.

Sources

• wolfgang-giegerich: the imaginal is halt; the kill and dismemberment are the soul’s logical life (Giegerich 2020, pp. 169–182, 255–273)
• james-hillman: archetypal psychology is the stick-to-the-image discipline; killing is not a primary mode of soul-making (“Once More into the Fray,” Spring 56, 1994)
• andrew-samuels: situates both within the post-Jungian field and records Giegerich’s “genetic fantasy” charge (Samuels 1985)