Post-Jungian Reception of CW 9i

The three major post-Jungian elaborations of CW 9i — developmental, classical-structural, and archetypal — can each be located as a response to a specific passage in the volume. Together they define the coordinates of the post-jungian-vertex.

Neumann’s developmental extension. erich-neumann, in The Origins and History of Consciousness, reads Jung’s phenomenology of the mother-archetype onto a developmental arc, treating the hero-myth as “the folk history of consciousness” (cited in Samuels 1985). The move is an extension rather than a critique: Neumann preserves the archetype-as-such and adds a temporal dimension Jung had left implicit. The ego’s journey from uroboric containment to differentiated consciousness tracks the ego-self-axis as a developmental process.

Edinger’s structural elaboration. edward-edinger, in Ego and Archetype, grounds the Neumann development structurally:

The ego-Self affinity is illustrated mythologically by the Old Testament doctrine that man (ego) was created in God’s (the Self’s) image. … We therefore seem on firm ground when we postulate a basic connection between ego and Self that is of crucial importance for maintaining the function and integrity of the ego. (Edinger 1972, p. 38)

The ego-self-axis is named here not as a developmental stage but as a continuously operative structural affinity. CW 9i’s essays on the self and on mandala symbolism are the ground; Edinger supplies the axis-language.

Hillman’s supersession. james-hillman, in Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, refuses the archetype-as-such as a working psychological category. Only the archetypal-image is psychologically real: “An archetypal image is psychologically ‘universal,’ because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes” (Hillman 1983). The move is not a rejection of CW 9i but a supersession within it — Hillman takes the volume’s second concept (the image) and lets it do the work its first concept (the facultas praeformandi) used to do. The axis of disagreement is the reality-status of the form behind the image.

Samuels’s cartography. andrew-samuels, in Jung and the Post-Jungians, maps these three positions as the Developmental, Classical, and Archetypal schools — a division the CW 9i vocabulary makes possible and which the volume itself does not adjudicate (Samuels 1985). The volume is the common ground; the three schools are three trajectories through it.

Sources

• erich-neumann: mother-archetype as developmental carrier; hero-cycle as folk history of consciousness (The Origins and History of Consciousness).
• edward-edinger: ego-Self axis as structural affinity (Ego and Archetype, 1972, p. 38).
• james-hillman: archetypal image supersedes archetype-as-such (Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983).
• andrew-samuels: mapping of Developmental, Classical, and Archetypal schools (Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985).
• donald-kalsched: developmental transformation of the Self-image as ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny (The Inner World of Trauma, 1996).