Working with Images: The Theoretical Base of Archetypal Psychology

by Benjamin Sells

What began as a postscript to the 1970 issue of Spring Journal has, in the past twenty-five years, come to offer the most broad-ranging, radical, and serious alternative to modern ego-based psychology. Known as archetypal psychology, this form of analysis challenges orthodox psychological thinking by replacing its humanistic and scientistic assumptions with a psychology founded in soul. Of the hundreds of psychological theories, only archetypal psychology has, from the beginning, insisted on a constant re-visioning of psychology's own ideas. Others argue ideology -- archetypal psychology insists on a psychology guided by aesthetic concerns and polytheistic imaging.

Working with Images focuses on the theory and practice of archetypal psychology as set forth by some of its pioneers. Included are James Hillman's classic essays, "Archetypal Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic", "Peaks and Vales", and "Image-Sense", as well as selections from Henry Corbin, Thomas Moore, Charles Boer, Mary Watkins, and others.

Working with Images is an indispensable volume for all those who are drawn to the mystery of soul and imagination. For the student of psychology, these essays sketch many of the formative ideas behind one of the most exciting and challenging psychological movements of our day. This volume is the first in a projected three-volume anthology of early essays in archetypal psychology, each edited and introduced by Benjamin Sells.

Genres: Psychology

207 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This annotated collection of essays is an attractive introduction to the core ideas of post-Jungian (or 'archetypal') psychology. In his introduction, Ben Sells makes clear what the ambition of this approach is: "to make psychology more psychological", i.e. to release "psyche from the twin cuffs of laboratory and high church to once again breathe freely in the many things of the world." Archetypal psychology seeks to transcend the dualism of matter and spirit by introducing 'soul' as the enabling, generative factor that animates the world. The world is neither dead matter nor a manifestation of pure transcendence. It has soul. Human beings have soul; everything has soul, manifested in visible, expressive form. This requires a capacity for sensing and imaging, and an aesthetic response to the world (from the Greek aesthesis, which roughly means 'sense experience'). Imagination is the human faculty that activates and guides this modus vivendi.

Elsewhere James Hillman has written: "The cognitive task will shift from the understanding of meaning to the sensitisation of particulars, the appreciation of the intelligibility inherent in the qualitative pattern of events". Hence the challenge to develop "a new nose", more akin to an animal sense. A different pattern of behaviour emerges: rather than intervening, we learn to make the right moves, to craft well. This pattern could be called 'poiesis'". This, in a nutshell, is the Hillmanian vision behind archetypal psychology.

The present volume contains ten essays, four of which are by Hillman. They deal with more fundamental ideas such as the polytheistic nature of the soul, the connection between concrete sensation, psychic image and spiritual meaning in 'psychological life', and the universal and transhistorical character of images and myths.

Four further essays are written by therapists working in the archetypal mould and address issues of practice. A big bonus is a long piece by Gilbert Durand, who is not really a Jungian, but rather a Bachelarian. He sought to rehabilitate the imaginal as a necessary anti-historical counterweight to the image-hostile march of progress in Western civilisation. And, like Bachelard, he did so by approaching the imagination and its products as a scientist, pointing to structures and dynamic patterns common to all humanity.

Finally, there is a piece by the distinguished Islamicist Henry Corbin, for whom the 'mundus imaginalis' was a metaphysical datum, an in-between world that, in true hermetic fashion, secured the link between the human and the divine. All in all, a very rich and valuable collection for readers interested in post-Jungian psychology and/or the philosophy of the imagination.