The Plotinus–Corbin–Hillman Line

A specific Neoplatonic-imaginal trajectory runs through the Lineage from plotinus through henry-corbin to james-hillman, and constitutes the spine of archetypal psychology’s metaphysical commitments. james-hillman‘s own Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983) names the line explicitly: archetypal psychology has had to “go back to their predecessors, particularly the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium, Timaeus), and most anciently to Heraclitus” (Hillman 1983, this recon’s chunks).

The mediating figure is henry-corbin. Hillman names him “the second immediate father of archetypal psychology” alongside Jung, and credits him with the doctrine that “the mundus archetypalis (‘alam al-mithal) is also the mundus imaginalis” — the mundus-imaginalis as a third ontological region between sense and intellect. Corbin’s title Alone with the Alone is the direct translation of Plotinus’s closing phrase of the Enneads, phyge monou pros monon — the flight of the alone to the Alone (cf. henosis). Corbin extends the Plotinian doctrine through the Islamic-Sufi tradition (Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Mulla Sadra), where it is preserved more vigorously than in the Latin-Christian West.

What Hillman takes from this line is twofold. First, the ontological commitment that imagination is not a faculty for processing sense data but the medium in which archetypal realities present themselves — “the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative” (Hillman 1983). Second, the methodological commitment that exposition “must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, and its therapeutic aim neither social adaptation nor personalistic individualizing, but rather a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities” (Hillman 1983). Both commitments are direct inheritances of the Plotinian interior-turn — the doctrine that the soul’s depth is a contemplative reality irreducible to sense or to discursive reason.

The thread is protected because it locates a specific lineage — Plotinus → Ficino → Vico → Corbin → Hillman — that supplements the Jung-centered reading of depth psychology and provides the metaphysical anchorage for the imaginal turn.

Sources

• plotinus: The Enneads — closing phrase monou pros monon
• henry-corbin: Alone with the Alone (1969) — title from Plotinus, content from Ibn ‘Arabi
• james-hillman: Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (1983) — Hillman’s own naming of the line