Polytheistic critique of the Self

Hillman’s departure from Jung turns on a single sentence in the conclusion of Aion: “The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism.” Hillman records the force of the provocation: “The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology that stresses the plurality of the archetypes” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983).

The critique is not a denial of the Self as a phenomenon. Hillman accepts that Jung has empirically identified the images of quaternity, conjunctio, mandala, and synchronicity. What he refuses is the hierarchical claim that these images of unity are more advanced, more mature, more important than the images of plurality. To grant primacy to the Self is, for Hillman, to enact in psychology the cultural move Western monotheism has already made in religion — subordinating the gods to a single God — and thereby to “cure the symptom and lose the god.” The polytheistic-psychology of archetypal psychology insists that “the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon… represented, at its best, in the psyche of Greek antiquity and of the Renaissance” remains equally significant for modern consciousness (Hillman 1983).

This is one of the Lineage’s genuine disagreements. The graph records the contradiction without resolution: the Jungian core holds the Self as telos; the archetypal school holds the gods as arche and refuses a totalizing center. Both are in the tradition. Both belong.

Sources

• carl-jung: the Self is the archetype “most important for modern man to understand” (Aion 1951)
• james-hillman: primacy of the Self is the monotheistic tyranny archetypal psychology rejects (Archetypal Psychology 1983)
• edward-edinger: extends Jung’s Self as individuation’s telos (Ego and Archetype 1972)
• erich-neumann: centroversion toward the Self as developmental culmination (Origins 1954)