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Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Spring Publications, 1983) is Hillman’s formal statement of the school he founded: its lineage, its first principles, its method, its disputes. Where Re-Visioning Psychology (1975) performs the school’s moves, the Brief Account names and defends them.
The book identifies archetypal psychology by its sources — “The elaboration of this tradition by Hillman in Eranos lectures and in articles (1973a), by Miller in seminars at Syracuse University, by López-Pedraza at the University of Caracas, and by Moore’s (1982) and Boer’s (1980) work on Ficino gives a different cast to archetypal psychology when compared with Jung’s” (Hillman 1983). Against the Northern German-Protestant sources of Jung, archetypal psychology “situates itself more comfortably south of the Alps” in the Neoplatonic inheritance.
Its primary datum is the image. “The image was identified with the psyche by Jung (‘image is psyche,’ CW 13: 75), a maxim that archetypal psychology has elaborated to mean that the soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream” (Hillman 1983). Its anthropology is tripartite — body, soul, spirit — against the Western dualistic tradition whose history “goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople).”
Chapter 10, Polytheistic Psychology and Religion, is the book’s most argued position. It returns to Hillman’s 1971 paper Psychology: monotheistic or polytheistic? and extends it against Jung’s equation in Aion of the self with monotheism. The Brief Account is, among other things, the archive of that dispute and the founding document of the school that carries it forward.