Hillman versus Jung on Imagination

The archetypal-Jungian divergence is sharpest at the point of imagination. For carl-jung, the image is the raw material from which the transcendent-function produces the uniting symbol; active-imagination is therefore teleological — the engagement with the image serves individuation’s goal of wholeness and the integration of the inferior-function (von Franz, Psychotherapy). For james-hillman, the image is the psyche. “Images don’t stand for anything” (Hillman 1978). To ask what an image means is already to have left the image behind.

Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account gives the position plainly: “The datum with which archetypal psychology begins is the image. … The soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream” (Hillman 1983). The image’s visibility is not sensory — Casey’s point, which Hillman endorses, is that “an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees.” To force an image into a concept is to “slaughter” it (Hillman, A Blue Fire). Archetypal psychology is therefore not a psychology of archetypes in the structural sense; it is a psychology of archai in the sense of the fundamental imaginal perspectives by which anything is seen at all.

The Dream and the Underworld (1979) carries the divergence to its clinical conclusion. The dream is not to be carried up into the day-world in the Jungian manner; the dreamer is to be taken down into the dream’s own underworld. “The essence of psyche is the principle of motion” (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld). Any image must be permitted its motion. This is why Hillman regards robert-a-johnson-style continuation of the dream as a subtle form of the “naturalistic fallacy” — expecting the dream to obey day-world laws of resolution.

The disagreement is not total. Hillman remains, as A Blue Fire notes, an officer of the Jungian system, director of the Zurich Jung Institute for ten years, and a reader who engages Jung “with precision and a comprehensive knowledge of Jung’s extensive and intricate writings.” What he rejects is the interpretive closure — the moment when the image is dissolved into the meaning the ego extracts from it. soul-making, not transcendent-function, is the telos. The Lineage records the disagreement without resolving it.

Sources

• carl-jung: active imagination as generator of the transcendent function; the uniting symbol as telos
• james-hillman: image as psyche; soul-making as telos; “images don’t stand for anything”
• marie-louise-von-franz: the four-phase Jungian practice — moral confrontation as the load-bearing final step
• robert-a-johnson: practitioner manual for dream-continuation active imagination — the register Hillman critiques