Hillman Against the Substantialist Reading

Hillman does not abandon the autonomy of the psyche — the 1985 Spring essay he co-authored with Paul Kugler is titled “The Autonomous Psyche” (cited in Hillman 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, bibliography). What he rejects is the temptation to read that autonomy as the property of a substance — a metaphysical entity called “the objective psyche” that exists behind or beneath the image. For archetypal psychology the psyche is image all the way down; “objective” names a phenomenological fact (the image’s givenness, its resistance to ego-manipulation) rather than a thing behind appearances.

This is a family quarrel within the Lineage, not a departure from it. Hillman keeps Jung’s essential claim — that the psyche is not a possession of the ego, that its material arrives with initiative of its own — and discards what he regards as the vestigial substantialism in Jung’s framing. Where Jung writes as though the objective psyche is an object of a higher order, Hillman reads the “objectivity” as the image’s own autonomy as image, without hypostasis.

The quarrel inherits into the Giegerich–Hillman debate and shapes the subsequent post-Jungian split between the classical and archetypal schools.

Sources

• james-hillman: “The Autonomous Psyche” (Kugler & Hillman 1985, Spring); Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983)
• carl-jung: the objective psyche as encountered reality (Letters I; CW 8)