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The Myth of Analysis
The Myth of Analysis — Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology
Hillman’s 1972 book, composed of three long essays (“On Psychological Creativity,” “On Psychological Femininity,” “On Psychological Language”), that inaugurates the archetypal-psychology critique of the Jungian clinical frame. The book’s move is to place analysis itself within a mythic field rather than to read myths as materials for analysis — a reversal that will organize Hillman’s subsequent career.
The load-bearing move of the book’s first essay is the elevation of the Eros-and-Psyche myth from Apuleius’s Golden Ass to the mythologem of analysis as such. Analysis is not a procedure that operates on the psyche; analysis is what happens when Eros and Psyche find each other, with Aphrodite as the obstructing third. Hillman’s reading differs from erich-neumann‘s canonical Jungian reading of the same myth — where Neumann reads it as the developmental arc of feminine individuation, Hillman reads it as the structure of any erotic-psychological relation whatsoever, de-historicized and de-personalized (see eros-psyche-tandem).
The book also introduces the differentiation of Eros into himeros, anteros, and pothos (see three-faces-of-eros) and retrieves Eros as psychopompos against the Freudian life/death split (see eros-psychopompos). It is the single most load-bearing Hillman text for the concept of eros in the archetypal lineage.
The book is the conceptual prelude to hillman-revisioning-psychology (1975). Where Re-Visioning will announce archetypal psychology programmatically, The Myth of Analysis demonstrates its method on the single question of love and soul.