Two Birds in a Tree: Glossary: Archetypal Psychology

Picasso said, "I don't develop; I am." And the puzzle in therapy is not how did I get this way, but what does my angel want with me?

- James Hillman

One of the three schools of Post-Jungian psychology (along with Classical and Developmental Psychology), by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in Jungian psychology and was the first Director of the Jung institute in Zurich.

In Archetypal Psychology the most important thing is the soul; the purpose of therapy is neither to "fix" a person, as if they were a broken car; nor is it to understand a problem, but rather to deepen one's experience of life through one's struggles and difficulties. Hillman called the world a "vale of soul-making" and felt that neuroses and psychopathologies were healing angels in disguise; their purpose - indeed, the purpose of one's entire life - was to help us grow into our destiny. He promoted the idea that we are born with an image of what we are meant to be, the way an acorn is born with the image of a giant oak in it's tiny seed.

Hillman was a vigorous critic of modern psychology, and modern society in general. He felt that psychology placed far too much emphasis on the mental hygienic aspect of therapy; by only focusing on trying to fix a problem, we fail to see what the illness has to teach us. He was also highly critical of the tendency in psychology to reject anything that wasn't sufficiently "scientific" which he called "scientism." This can be defined as the tendency to reduce everything to rational, causal factors, like poor upbringing, or chemical imbalances. In fact, he felt that society itself was sick - it had gone too far to the Apollonian, rational side, with it's soul-killing focus on efficiency - and that it would, in fact, be more accurate to say that the sickness in people today was from the society, not the other way around. What is needed, according to Hillman, is to reject all of that and give attention to all the things that caused us hardship and difficulty; according to him the soul shows us love by creating the very circumstances that lead to healing.

Archetypal psychology differs from classical Jungian psychology in that it rejects all attempts to interpret or understand neuroses, or other expression of the unconscious, like dreams. The image should be confronted and experienced simply as it was; any attempt to do otherwise would kill it. A part of this was his passionate advocacy of the importance of art for it's own sake. This is another area where he felt he diverged from Jung; Jung consistently rejected calls from friends and followers to exhibit artwork from The Red Book, insisting that it's importance was not in it's artistic value but as products of active imagination. Hillman by contrast felt that the importance of art was in it's value as art; as something which moved the soul.

The ultimate goal of psychology, however, is not to find answers and solutions to problems, but, rather, to deepen our experience of the problems themselves… The psyche is much broader than any of the perspectives it can take upon itself and is at bottom far more interested in the play of its own ideas than in the solution to psychological problems. The same can be said about the particular problems of each human individual, how to love, why to live, what to do with respect to money, family, sexuality, religion, etc. None are soluble, but rather the very fact that we ask them prompts us to go deeper into the caring of our soul. “The purpose of these eternal psychological problems” is, as we have seen, “to provide the base of soul-making.” Psychological ideas, for Hillman, are in essence, food for the soul.

- Sanford Drob, "The Depth of the Soul: James Hillman’s Vision of Psychology"

I think the first step is the realization that each of us has [a calling]. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn't necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It's more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

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I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures… You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I'm trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

- Scott London, "On Soul, Character and Calling: A Conversation with James Hillman"

Anyone who justifies decisions by referring to the bottom line has something to learn from Treblinka.

For a candidate for political office to campaign on a platform of efficiency in government suggests the infiltration of fascistic ideas. Mussolini made the trains run on time – but at what cost.

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There is a secret love hiding in each problem.

Hard to believe, but the hypochondrias are taking care of us, the depressions are slowing us down, obsessions are ways of polishing the image, paranoid suspicions are ways of trying to see through – all these moves of the pathological are ways we are being loved in the peculiar way the psyche works.

The psyche is highly flammable material. So we are always wrapping things in asbestos, keeping our images and fantasies at arm's length because they are so full of love.

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If our civilization suffers from hybris, from ego inflation and superbia, psychology has done its part. It has been looking at soul in the ego's mirror, never seeing psyche, always seeing man. And this man has been monotheistic Reformational man, enemy of images.

Cure the symptom and lose the God. Had Jacob not grappled with the Daemon he would indeed have not been hurt, and he would not have been Jacob either.

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The lead horse does not run because it is whipped.