Mythic Figures

Name: Mythic Figures
Author: James Hillman

Mythic Figures is a work by James Hillman (2007).

Core claims

Hillman’s Mythic Figures demonstrates that mythology is not a symbolic supplement to psychology but its operational substrate — the gods do not illustrate complexes, they are the structural grammar through which psychic life becomes intelligible at all.
The book’s most radical move is its insistence that Freud’s “errors” about Oedipus were not failures of scholarship but acts of homeopathic psychologizing — madness in the method reaching toward the madness in the case — thereby reclaiming psychoanalysis as a myth-preserving cult rather than a science.
By reading Zeus not as sovereign authority but as the ordering power of differentiated imagination — polytheism as antidote to titanic enormity — Hillman provides a political theology of the psyche that directly challenges both Jungian introverted retreat and monotheistic ego psychology.

How does Hillman’s reading of Freud’s Oedipus as epistrophé in Mythic Figures challenge Edinger’s developmental model of ego-Self separation and return in Ego and Archetype?
In what ways does Hillman’s claim that “the gods have become diseases” in Mythic Figures extend or contradict Jung’s own formulation in the Collected Works, particularly the alchemical writings that Hillman identifies as most resonant with archetypal psychology?
How does Hillman’s critique of Campbell’s hero myth in the final essay of Mythic Figures — “not myth of the hero, but myth as the hero” — reframe the relationship between López-Pedraza’s clinical mythology in Hermes and His Children and Campbell’s comparative method in The Hero with a Thousand Faces?