Hillman’s Departure from and Debt to Jung

The relation of Hillman to Jung is neither succession nor rupture. It is elaboration against a specific bias Hillman locates in Jung’s late work — the bias toward unity, integration, and the Self as the archetype “most important for modern man to understand” (Jung, CW 9ii, paras 422–70). Hillman takes this as the intrusion of a theological monism into a psychology whose other commitments — complexes, archetypes, multiplicity — were polycentric.

Samuels states the dispute cleanly: “Jung’s preference for the self, says Hillman, unduly narrows a psychology that in every other respect stresses the plurality and multiplicity of the psyche, the archetypes and complexes. Are we to assume that differentiated complexes are less important than the self? If so, then everything in therapeutic analysis except the self and its products is relegated to second place” (Samuels 1985). Hillman’s own formulation is sharper: when Jung leans on the completed mandala and integrated selfhood, it is a “fading Christianity coming back in the guise of a theology of the Self,” and “the imitatio Christi — no longer a religious dogma or practice — becomes a psychological dogma — now called ‘wholeness’” (Hillman, quoted in Miller 1974).

And yet: “Archetypal psychology begins with Jung’s notion of the complexes whose archetypal cores are the bases for all psychic life whatsoever” (Hillman 1983). The debt is load-bearing. Jung’s image is psyche (CW 13: 75) is archetypal psychology’s first principle. Jung’s polycentric model — the “multiplicity of partial consciousnesses like stars or divine sparks, ‘luminosities’” (CW 8, paras 388ff.) — is the ground Hillman claims for the school. Hillman does not leave Jung; he follows one strand of Jung against another.

The Russell biography catches the personal shape of the move: “My polytheism belongs to my character as a hill-man, a pagan,” Hillman said; his earliest excitement came from Plato and Plotinus, and the physical places of Greece and Sicily had “an overwhelming emotional impact … unlike any I have felt anywhere including the Himalayas or Jerusalem” (Russell 2023). The departure is geographic before it is doctrinal: from Jung’s Zürich to Hillman’s Mediterranean South.

Sources

• james-hillman: “Archetypal psychology begins with Jung’s notion of the complexes” (Archetypal Psychology 1983).
• andrew-samuels: the dispute about the self narrowing the psychology (Jung and the Post-Jungians 1985).
• david-l-miller: Hillman’s critique of wholeness as imitatio Christi (The New Polytheism 1974).
• carl-jung: CW 9ii on self/monotheism; CW 8 on luminosities — the two strands Hillman reads against each other.