‘The aim of therapy is the development of a sense of soul; the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.’
– James Hillman, from UE1: Archetypal Psychology
Archetypal psychology radically revisions what psychology is. It sprouted about fifty years ago from ‘the soil’ of Jungian psychology, a reaction really, against the overly intellectual culture of ‘the Jungians’. It arose from a movement back to the original spirit and ideas of Carl Jung and endeavours to re-awaken that spirit in a way that does not get stuck in theories, ‘therapy’, ‘the consulting room’ or even in psychology itself.
Archetypal psychology is really a cultural movement, moving psychology out of the consulting rooms ‘into the streets’. By re-imagining how we perceive ‘life and everything’ and by letting the actual in-the-world details of our world be shaped accordingly, it involves all the details of our life. Not only ‘healing our illnesses’. It requires a radical departure from prevailing culture, aiming to serve ‘soul’ rather than our personal goals.
Rather than overcoming our so-called ‘illnesses’, Archetypal psychology re-imagines our afflictions, weaknesses and insecurities as ‘tools used by soul’ over the course of our life by which our characters are shaped. Similarly to how a sculptor chips away at stone with a hammer and chisel.
So, ‘we’ are not the artists, but the stone. And our role involves learning to move out of the way so that soul may shape us as she wills. Which is an art rather than a science. It is no surprise then that archetypal psychology is deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture and the history of ideas, rather than with medical and empirical psychologies.
