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Re-Visioning Psychology as Revision of the Jungian Self

Re-Visioning Psychology as Revision of the Jungian Self

The book’s polemical center — easy to miss on a first reading because Hillman rarely names Jung as an opponent — is a revision of the Jungian Self. Where Jung’s mature work organized the psyche around the Self as its central and unifying archetype, Hillman argues that this centering reproduces the very monotheism that modern secular humanism inherited from Christianity. “The social, political, and psychiatric critique implied throughout archetypal psychology mainly concerns the monotheistic hero myth (now called ego-psychology) of secular humanism, i.e., the single-centered, self-identified notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre)” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology).

The replacement is not a new center but a pantheon: “Psychic complexity requires all the Gods; our totality can only be adequately contained by a Pantheon. There must be place for everything — else we begin again in the old fashion, needing bags called pathology” (Hillman 1975). The polytheistic move is structural. Where Jung offers one organizing archetype that integrates the others, Hillman offers many irreducible archetypal persons whose conflicts are not to be resolved but to be lived as “the themes of the human comedy and its tragedy” (ibid.).

This is the axis on which archetypal psychology separates from analytical psychology. It is also why Andrew Samuels’ Jung and the Post-Jungians treats the Archetypal School as a distinct branch of the post-Jungian tradition, not a sub-school within it (Samuels 1985).

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