MA in Myth, Cosmology and Sacred

Dissertations
Supervisor: Dr. Geoffrey Cornelius

Re-visioning the myths for soul-making

- In the context of James Hillman and

archetypal psychology

Sawako Gomi

24 September 2017
Contents

1. Introduction ...................................................................3
2. Methodology..................................................................5
3. Archetypal Psychology is logos of psyche ........................7
4. Jung and Hillman .......................................................... 10
5. Image and Romanticism ............................................... 13
6. Image and soul ............................................................. 17
7. Mundus Imaginalis ....................................................... 21
8. Differentiation between the soul and the human .......... 26
9. The Myth of Ego without myth ..................................... 29
10. Oedipus and Sigmund Freud ....................................... 32
11. Conclusions ................................................................ 36

References ....................................................................... 39

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Introduction

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all
intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a
butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably
myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a
butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. (Wu, 1990, p.
47)

This is a famous story from Chuang Tzu. He points out, before this part, that when we
are in a dream, we don’t realize that we are dreaming. He says only when we wake
from a dream, do we know that we are in a dream. Likewise, if we are in myth, is it
possible for us to realize that we are in myth? Do we know whose myth that we are
in? Do we live our lives, or do the Gods and Goddesses live through our lives? These
questions might sound strange, yet these are the kind of inquiries presented to us by
James Hillman and archetypal psychology. This reversion of perspective towards myth
is the radical challenge of archetypal psychology and is the central theme of this
dissertation: do we live myth or does it live through us?
As a counsellor, I have always been interested in myths and stories. It is safe to say
that clients bring their life stories to sessions. I feel their stories need a witness.
Their stories need to be heard. In a way, one could say that our job is to listen to
their stories, re-vision them, and recreate new stories by which they will be able to
live. Therefore, for counsellor or therapist, it may be natural to be attracted by myths.
It was Sigmund Freud who cast myths in a new light with a new psychological
understanding of human nature and neurotic disease with his concept of the Oedipal
complex, named after a Greek myth. Car l Gustav Jung followed him and deepened o ur
comprehension of myth. Hillman (1991, p. 91) writes, “ The first to recognize the
implications of Sigmund Freud’s recognition of the relation between myth and psyche,
between antiquity and modern psychology, was C.G. Jung.”
It seems as if myth is coming back into our society after a long exile. Currently,
myths tend to be treated as if they are maps or models of our psycho -spiritual
personal development, as is done in depth psychology. Many books tell you that you
are a Hero or the Goddess. For example, the subtitle of Awakening the Heroes Within,
the best selling book of Jungian analyst Carol Pearson (2016), is “ Twelve Archetypes
to help us find ourselves and transform our world.” At the end of this book, there is

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an appendix – The Heroic Myth Index – which is designed to help people to identify
various archetypal activities in their lives. Such books tell people which Hero or
Goddess you are, or what you should do next in order to solve the problems. It ’s all in
myths! The Jungian analyst and author Jean Bolen (2014, p. 2) explains, “Knowledge
of the “goddesses” provides women with a means of understanding themselves and
their relationships with men and women, with their parents, lovers, and children.” All
of them sound fascinating. I was excited when I read them, at first. Howev er, some
people may feel something is wrong with it. Hillman did. He is alarmed by that stream
of thinking:

… the chief danger lies in taking myths literally even as we aim at taking syndromes
mythically. For if we go about reversion as a simple act of ma tching, setting out
with the practical intellect of the therapist to equate my themes with syndromes,
we have reduced archetypes to allegories of disease; we have merely coined a new
sign language, a new nominalism. The Gods become merely a new (or old) gr id of
classificatory terms. (Hillman, 1997, p.p. 101-102)

It feels difficult and dangerous to step into an unknown world, so we try to explain
the unknown using known terms. Doing so, we end up in the same familiar world: we
cannot arrive in the new land. Hillman (2014, p. 221) describes the danger of
psychological practice, using alchemical language: “ If psychological practice neglects
its yellowing, it can never leave off psychologizing, never redden into the world out
there, never be alive to the cosmos - from which today come our actual psychological
disorders.”
So, let us stop here to listen to H illman’s warnings. How can we avoid the danger
of literalising myth or simply psychologizing it? Perhaps, it might demand that we
re-vision myth. But first, what is myth in archetypal psychology? Hillman (2013, p. 28)
says it is not the role of myth in archetypal psychology “to provide an exhaustive
catalogue of possible behaviors or to circumscribe the forms of transpersonal
energies,” but more truly “to open the questions of life to transpersonal and
culturally imaginative reflection.” Hillman (2013, p. 28) emphasizes the function of
myth that “allow events to b e recognized against their mythical background.”
However, for Hillman, the mythical life of the soul is the most important aspect of
studying mythology. He (Hillman, 2013, p. 28) writes, “More important, however, is
that the study of mythology enables one to perceive and experience the life of the

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soul mythically.”
The purpose of this dissertation is re -visioning myth for soul-making in
accordance with James Hillman and archetypal psychology. I also follow psychological
philosopher Robert Avens’ study, which clarifies the archetypal psychology’s
movement toward mythical thinking. He (Avens, 1980, p. 29) says, “ Thus the main
task of archetypal psychology which claims to reflect a refining and deepening of
Jung ’s later work, will be to “re-mythologize consciousness.” So what should I do first
in re-visioning myth? Hillman (1997, p. 158) says, that “Myths do not tell us how.
They simply give the invisible background which start s us imagining, questioning,
going deeper.” So, I would follow Hillman’s phenomenological methodology in
imagining, in questioning.

Methodology

When I was a child, I felt myth was so fascinating and confusing, yet I sensed that
there was a reality beyond my comprehension. Now, there is still excitement when I
read myths, but I feel differently from my childhood. The more ‘knowledge’ I got, the
less numinous feeling I could have. Why did I lose this? One of the founders of
modern studies in Greek mythology and Jung’s co-worker, Carl Kerenyi (1985),
maintains that we have to understand mythology from an immediate and direct
experience of it, yet we are far from genuine mythology. Kerenyi (1985, p. 1) says,
“We have lost our immediate feeling for the great realities of the spirit - and to this
world all true mythology belong s - lost it precisely because of our all-too-willing,
helpful, and efficient science.” Furthermore, he (Kerenyi, 1985, p. 1) argues that true
science would free us from this falsity, and what we require from science is a “feeling
of immediacy between ourselves and scientific subjects.” Kerenyi continues:

Science herself must throw open the road to mythology that she blocked first with
her interpretations and then with h er explanations - science always understood in
the broadest sense, in this case the historical and psychological as well as the
cultural and anthropological study of myths. (Kerenyi, 1985, p.p. 1-2)

So, neither interpretations and explanations, nor historical, psychological, cultural

and anthropological methods are suitable for understanding myths directly. Kerenyi

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(1985, p. 4) compares mythology and music, and says, “ every true mythologem has its
satisfying meaning ”, as music does. Therefore, he (Kerenyi, 1985, p. 4) claims that
“the right attitude towards it: to let mythologems spea k for themselves and simply to
listen.” He continues:

Any explanation has to be along the same lines as the explanation of a musical or
poetic work of art. That a special “ear” is needed for it, just as for music or poetry,
is obvious. Here as well “ear ” means resonance, a sympathetic pouring out of
oneself. (Kerenyi, 1985, p. 4)

This approach – of ‘listening’ to myth as it is rather than explain it or analyse it – may

be called phenomenological methodology. Hillman explains his phenomenological
attitude in his psychological work:

Phenomenology deals with things as they appear as such. It sets aside

speculations about origins, causes, explanations, theories. This is how I work in
psychology… I do not know the primary sources of any of the things I greet in
practice… Instead, I regard the phenomena. (Hillman, 1997, p. 6)

Thus, I have conducted this research in the phenomenological way. However, from the
point of view of both Hillman and archetypal psychology, we have to remember that
we are not only listening but also playing the mu sic. Hillman (2013, p. 27) points out
that the ” soul can be an object of study only when it is also recognized as the subject
studying itself by means of th e fictions and metaphors of objectivity.” We try to keep
our objectivities, especially in the academy – we believe that we can be objective.
However, Hillman thinks objectivity itself is fantasy. We are “never beyond the
subjectivism given with the soul’s native dominants of fantasy structures.” (Hillman,
2013, p. 32) That is to say, “we can never be purely phenomenal or truly objective.”
(Hillman, 2013, p. 32) Therefore, what I can do is to keep the idea in my mind that I
also think in fantasy, and that archetypes and mythical images might emerg e through
my own perspective, which leads me to remember the importance of seeing through
‘how’ I think and ‘what’ I think through writing this paper, as well.

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Archetypal Psychology is logos of psyche

To begin with, I would like to explore what archetypal psychology is for Hillman. In
the book Archetypal Psychology, which was originally written as an introduction of
archetypal psychology for inclusion in the Enciclopedia del Novecento, Hillman
defines it:

Archetypal psychology can be seen as a cultural movement, part of whose task is

the re-visioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of
the Western cultural imagination. (Hillman, 2014, p. 13)

As he (Hillman, 2014, p. 13) says, the term of “archetypal” not only reflected the
theory of Jung ’s later work, which was an attempt “to solve psychological problems
beyond scientific models”, but also Hillman’s aim to go back to its original meaning of
archetypes, that is the “primary forms that govern the psych e.” So, archetypal
psychology “is an attempt at a psychology of soul.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 2) So what does
‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ mean for Hillman and archetypal psychology? For him, soul is not
a metaphysical entity but a perspective. He explains:

By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint

toward things rather than a thing itself . This perspective is reflective; it mediates
events and makes differences between the doer and the deed, there is a
reflective moment-and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
(Hillman, 1997, p. xvi)

As Avens (1980, p. 31) points out, Hillman uses the term ‘psyche’ and ‘soul’
interchangeably, for the most part. It is important to emphasize his view that psyche
is a perspective, for it implies psyche is the subject of psychology as well as the
object at the same time. Yet, why does he have to re -vision psychology? Here, it is
helpful to go back to the origin of psychology first. According to the Concise Oxford
Dictionary of English Etymology (1993), it is said that the word ‘psychology’
originates from the modern Latin ‘ psȳchologia’, which started being used around
mid seventeenth century, meaning ‘ science of the human soul or mind’. Hillman
(2013, p.25) puts it, “ Psychology (logos of psyche) etymologically means: reason or
speech or intelligible account of soul.” As we see, for Hillman, ‘logos’ means “reason

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or speech or intelligible account.” Thus, primarily, “It is psychology’s job to find logos
for psyche, to provide soul with an adequate account of itself.” (Hillman, 2013, p.25)
Nonetheless, as Hillman (2013, p. 16) points out, “In the dualistic tradition, psyche
never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology.” Why so? In the dualistic
tradition, every thing is divided into two, so we have body (or thing) and spirit (or
mind), but there is no space for soul. There are two reasons that psyche is unable to
have its own logos in the dualistic tradition. The first is that, as Hillman (1997, p.
172) argues, the word ‘psȳchologia’ was used first in theology. He writes:

Textbooks always say it was introduced by Melanchthon, Luther’s close friend and
co-worker. It makes its appearance together with the new terms of the
Reformation: self-regard, self-love, self-conceit, self-destruction. The new word
selfness, and the self as a reflective intensive pronoun, expressed a new
reflective style, a new interiority and intensification of person. (Hillman, 1997, p.
172)

So, the logos of soul was not brought into this world in the way that archetypal
psychology attempts, it reflected a new inward tendency in the theological
circumstance of that time. Secondly, as Hillman (2013b, p. 67) claims, we lost the
realm of soul at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in the year 869 CE. He (Hillman,
2013b, p.67) writes, “Because at that Council in Constantinople the soul lost its
dominion.” At this Council, “our idea of human nature, devolved from a tripartite
cosmos of spirit, soul, and body (or matter)” moved “to a dualism of spirit (or mind)
and body (or matter).” (Hillman, 2013b, p.67) Moreover, according to Hillman (1997,
p. 68), soul had been confounded with spirit since St Paul. He writes:

Already in the early vocabulary used by Paul, pneuma or spirit had begun to
replaced psyché or soul. The New Testament scarcely mentions soul phenomena
such as dreams, but stresses spirit phenomena such as miracles, speaking in
tongues, prophecy, and visions. (Hillman, 1997, p. 68)

In this way, when soul came back to the world with a new name, ps ȳchologia, in the
context of religion in seventeenth century, it had already been mixed up with spirit.
In western culture, people don’t realize that they confuse soul with spirit, for soul
has been rejected intentionally and systematically for a long time. Hillman (2013b, p.

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68) claims that this “traditional denial of soul” remains in our unconscious attitudes,
whether we are Christian or not, since we are so deeply affected by our culture’s
tradition unconsciously.
As we have seen, religion, in western culture, came from spirit rather than soul,
and soul lost its own unique realm. As a result, western culture does not possess a
religion that is concerned with soul -making. Instead, it has a psychology which
reflects religion. “Since the religion in our culture has been monotheistic, our
psychologies are monotheistic.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 168) Yet, soul’s nature is not
monotheistic. As Hillman (1997, p. 167) says, the polycentricity is soul’s primal
nature. Therefore, Hillman had to re-vision monotheistic psychology in order to
transform psychology for soul -making. He writes:

By keeping our focus upon soul-making, we cannot help but recognize that the
Gods in the soul require religion in psychology. But the religion that psychology
requires must reflect the state of soul as it is, actual psychic reality. This means
polytheism. For the soul’s inherent multiplicity demands a theological fantasy of
equal differentiation. (Hillman, 1997, p. 167)

Thus, in order to move toward mythical thinking, polytheistic imagination is

indispensable, for “mythology is the mode of spe aking religion in polytheistic
consciousness.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 158) Hillman (1997, p. 158) says mythology
reminds polytheistic consciousness of “the ambiguity of meanings and the
multiplicity of persons in each event in each moment.” Therefore, to seek for
polytheistic consciousness and psychology, Hillman went back to Jung and Henri
Corbin, who were the fathers of archetypal psychology, which is rooted in the
Neoplatonic tradition. Hillman (2013a, p.p. 40-41) writes, “The tradition of thought
(Greek, Renaissance, Romantic) to which archetypal psychology claims it is an heir is
set in polytheistic attitudes.” So, what are the characteristics of this tradition?
Fundamentally, according to Hillman (2013a, p. 16), it is a tradition focusing on soul
as a primal basis, claiming this soul as a ‘ tertium quid’ (‘third thing)’ between body
and spirit. Hillman writes:

Soul as tertium, the perspect ive between others and from which others may be
viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez -Pedraza 1977), as
“esse in anima” (Jung, CW 6:66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by

9
 Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy.
(Hillman, 2013a, p. 16)

In other words, it is an image -oriented tradition. Hillman (1997, p. xvii) says, “I am

working toward a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image.” That is
to say, a psychology of soul is almost the same as a psychology of image, for the
image is psyche in archetypal psychology. This identification of image with psyche
originated with Jung as I will discuss in the next section.

Jung and Hillman

Now, I would like to go back to one of the fathers of archetypal psychology, C.G. Jung,
to explore how he understood mythology and how it influenced archetypal
psychology. According to Hillman (2013a, p. 17), archetypal psychology begins with
the image, which was identified with the soul by Jung, leading archetypal psychology
to the principle of soul: “soul is constituted of images, that the soul is primarily an
imagining activity most natively and paradigmatically presented by the dream.” He
writes:

So, Jung said, if you are in search of soul, go first to your fantasy images, for that
is how the psyche presents itself directly. All consciousness depends upon fan tasy
images. All we know about the world, about the mind, the body, about anything
whatsoever, including the spirit and the nature of the divine, comes through
images and is organized by fantasies into one pattern or another. (Hillman, 2013b,
p. 70)

Moreover, Hillman (2013b, p. 70) continues that these patterns of fantasy images are
archetypal, that is “we are always in one or another archetypal configuration, one or
another fantasy, including the fantasy of soul and the fantasy of spirit.” He (Hillman,
2013b, p. 71) emphasizes what Jung said; 'Every psychic process is an image and an
imagining', therefore the only knowledge we can have is knowledge “that is
immediate and direct is knowledge of these psychic images.”

It was Jung who brought in the concept ‘collective unconscious’ which he (Jung,
1990, p. 3) regarded as “identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic
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substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present i n every one of us.” Jung (1990,
p. 5) argued that the contents of the collective unconscious are of a “primordial
type”, that is, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Jung
(1990, p. 78) argued that every psychic function must be preformed, for all psychic
content is preformed. As a shape of products of ima gination, those primordial images
can be seen in our sensible world. Jung named those primordial images, especially
universal primordial images, as archetypes, although, as he says (Jung, 1990, p. 4), it
was not his original idea. He brought the concept from the Hermetic and Platonic
traditions into the modern psychological perspective. He wrote:

“Archetype”, far from being a modern term, was already in use before the time of
St. Augustine, and was synonymous with “Idea” in the Platonic usage. When the
Corpus Hermeticum, which probably dates from the third century, describes God
as τό άρχέτυπον φώς, the‘ archetypal light’, it expresses the idea that he is the
prototype of all light; that is to say, pre -existent and supraordinate to the
phenomenon“ light.” (Jung, 1990, p. 75)

Jung (1990, p. 79) emphasized the importance of his discovery, esp ecially in his study
that illustrated that archetypes can regenerate spontaneously beyond time and place,
regardless of traditions and languages. Moreover, he (Jung, 1990, p. 79) implied the
autonomic nature of archetypes; “there are present in every psyche forms which are
unconscious but nonetheless active-living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense,
that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions.” That
is to say, Jung acknowledged the causal aspect of archetypes, which led him to
compare archetypes and t he gods. Jung wrote:

Today, we call the gods “factors” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers
stand behind the wings of the world -theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In
the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be th e “factors”
themselves… Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us
to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the
unconscious. (Jung, 1990, p. 23)

Thus, archetypal images were identified with the gods by Jung. Furthermore, he
related archetypes to myths. He (Jung, 1990, p. 5) wrote, “Another well-known

11
expression of the archetypes is myth and fairy -tale.” More importantly, Jung pointed
out the primal connection between myth and soul. He (Jung, 1990, p. 6) put it: “The
fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of
the soul is something they have absolutely refused to see until now.” Jung (1990, p.
22) explained that the nature of the collective unconscious (the nature of the soul in
archetypal psychology) is the reverse of the state of daily consciousness, that is, we
are the objects of every subject. He wrote:

No, the collective unconscious is anything but an incapsulated personal system; it

is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am
the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness,
where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the
world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. “Lost in
oneself” is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a
consciousness could see it.(Jung, 1990, p. 22)

He (Jung, 1990, p. 23) admitted that “we are the objects of unseen factors” outside
the realm of consciousness. Here, we can see signs of the reversion of perspective
towards myth in Jung. Avens (1980, p. 26) clarifies this reversion : “Our point,
however, will be that not only is there a substratum of mythical mentality in every
person, but that mythical or archetypal images constitute the very essence of psychic
life, that they are the psyche.” He also clarifies the reversion of subject and object
relationship of myth and human. He writes:

Arguing against the nineteenth -century evolutionistic fantasy, Barfield suggests

that the picture of the primitive man as “always projecting his insides onto
something or other,” i.e., as animating a dead world with arbitrarily concocted
shapes of monstrous or benevolent beings, must be reversed to say that “it was
not man who made the myths but myths or the archetypal substance they reveal,
which made man.” (Avens, 1980, p. 26)

However, as Jung (1990, p. 75) himself mentioned, Jung was a modern scholar, who
wanted to be a scientist rather than philosopher, something that might have made
him refrain from going further. He wrote:

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 Were I a philosopher, I should continue in this Platonic strain and say:
Somewhere, in “a place beyond the skies,” there is a prototype or primordial
image of the mother that is pre -existent and supraordinate to all phenomena in
which the “maternal,” in the broadest sense of the term, is manifest. But I am an
empiricist, not a philosopher; I cannot let myself presuppose that my peculiar
temperament, my own attitude to intellectual problem, is universally valid. (Jung,
1990, p. 75)

Moreover, as we can see what he says above, it seems that h is mind set is Kantian,
leading him to separate archetypal images and the archetypes themselves, as
Kantian-distinct phenomena and “things in themselves.” Avens (1980, p. 43) says,
“Admittedly Jung was philosophically so steeped in the Kantian world view that it was
difficult for him to regard it in the light of his own revolution.” Yet, Avens (1980, p.
43) claims that it did not mean Jung could not overcome his Kantian precondition.
Avens writes:

As a neo-Jungian writer puts it, he remained a Kantian while steadily undoing

Kant, by developing “an epistemological stance which renders the no umena
phenomena distinction wholly unnecessary… The Jungian world view dissolved…
its Kantian counterpart.” Archetypes for Jung are not ultimate psychic “things in
themselves” or metaphysically real; their ‘unknowability’ is only a portent of
their ambiguity and the wealth of reference. (Avens, 1980, p. 43)

Although Jung realized the limitations of subject -ism and noumenalism, and noticed
the significance of a reversion of subject and object relationship between our
consciousness and the images, he was still in the territory of Kantian dualism. For
Jung, archetypes “transcend the empirical world of time and place and, in fact, are in
themselves not phenomenal.” (Hillman, 2013a, p. 14) This is the crucial distinction
between Jung and Hillman. Therefore, in the next section, I would like to explore
Kantian dualism and how Hillman deals with it.

Image and Romanticism

As we saw above, suspending Jung’s Kantian dualism is Hillman’s challenge.

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Therefore, in this section, let us examine what Kantian dualism is – and Kant’s
discovery of the fundamental function of imagination – in aiming to clarify Hillman’s
challenge to move beyond this Kantian view. I will also explore how Romanticism,
which is one of the roots of archetypal psychology, tackled dualism in post -Kantian
circumstances and how it helped the resolution of this dualism.
The Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cass irer (2009, p.p. 50-51) mentions two
fundamental philosophical conflicts or different directions between Plato and
Aristotle, which were clarified by Goethe. He quotes from Goethe’s Materials on the
History of the Doctrine of Colors :

Goethe says: Plato relates himself to the world as a blessed spirit, whom it
pleases sometimes to stay for a while in the world; he is not so much concerned
to come to know the world, because he already presupposes it, as to
communicate to it in a friendly way what he brings along with him and what it
needs… He moves longingly to the heights in order to become again a par t of his
origin… Aristotle, on the contrary, stands to the world as a man, an architect. He
is only here once and must here make and create. He inquires about the earth,
but not farther than to find a ground… He draws a huge circumference for his
building, procures materials from all sides, arranges them, piles them up, and
climbs thus in regular form, pyramid fashion to the top; whereas Plato, like an
obelisk, indeed like a pointed flame, seeks heaven. (Cassirer, 2009, p.p. 50-51)

Cassirer (2009, p. 51) says after the appearance of these two men, the world was
forced to follow one or the other. Cassirer continues that it was Kant who brought a
concession to this opposition. He (Cassirer, 2009, p. 52) argues that Kant’s
interpreters do not understand Kant’s fundamental intention, which supposes a
certain relationship between experience and thoug ht. According to Cassirer (2009, p.
52), Kant did not “entrust human reason with the power, nor does h e grant it the
right to build up such a supersensible world on the strength of the pure concept.”
Conversely, Cassirer (2009, p. 52) continues, Kant thought “all power of the pure
concept” should “make experience itself understandable and transparent to us, its
logical structure and its logical laws, its general principles and conditions.” Moreover,
according to Avens (1980, p. 14), it was also Kant who could distinguish between two
different type of imagination: reproductive and transcendental. This distinction
enhanced the role of imagination as middleman. He (Avens, 1980, p. 14) explains that

14
transcendental or productive imagination is an autonomic process, and it has its own
internal agent without outside influence. It is prior to experience. He writes:

Kant holds that this imagination gives rise to the transcendental synthesis
combining purely sensory data with purely intellectual apprehension (categories
of reason). Imagination is the mediatory power, the synthetic medium which
orders the chaos of sensuous intuition according to certain unchanging general
forms or schemata. (Avens, 1980, p. 14)

Kant notices the primacy of imagination; however, he did not go to that direction.
Instead of exploring the realm of imagination, according to Cassirer (2009, p. 55),
Kant led us “back into the depths of our own reason.” Avens (1980, p. 15) explains it
using Martin Heidegger’s study of Kant, “Kant retreated from the primacy of
imagination because he saw that its foundational function points to a ground more
basic than sense and thought.” Avens (1980, p. 15) continues that it was obvious to
Kant that the basis of all our experiences is established by an unknowable union of
imaginative scope, yet Kant drew back from his realization, for “it led to an “abyss”.”
In the second edition of the Critique, Avens (1980, p. 15) writes, “Kant reaffirmed the
supremacy of reason thus reverting to the more traditional path of rationalism.”
Avens (1980, p. 15) concludes “he merely transposed the subjectivism of Western
metaphysics,… to the transcendental level of the “I think.”
Thus, Kant did not appreciate primacy of imagination, and the realm of
imagination remained abandoned. According to Avens (1980, p. 17), the task of the
English and German Romantics was to raise imagination’s position to “th e primary
creative agency of human mind or the Self” in the circumstances of post -Kantian
idealism. Avens (1980, p. 17) mentions, “Romanticism justifiably rebelled against the
Cartesian cogito ergo sum as well as against the ‘I’ principle of the Kantian ‘I think,’
converting it into a Self which was held to be primordial, active and unlimited by the
objective world. However, the attempt of the Romantics to elevate the imagi nation
deteriorated into an irrational and “sentimental enthusiasm.” (Avens, 1980, p. 17)
Avens (1980, p. 17) points out this was because Romanticism was still under the
influence of “the idealist and the subjectivist tradition of the West.” He (Avens, 1980,
p. 18) continues that ”the only major exceptions to subject -ism are Coleridge, Blake
and Goethe.” He writes:

15
 In Blake, imagination is an inclusive concept implying and containing within itself
all the powers of cognition. Somewhat like in eighteenth - and nineteenth-century
German Idealism (and in Coleridge), it is the central element not only in man but
also in cosmic creation itself: the subjective pole of being and the objective pole
of natural phenomena interpenetrate through imagination. (Avens, 2006, p.26)

This concept of interpenetration amongst everything in this world can be seen in

Goethe, too. According to Avens (1980, p. 19), Goethe thought that only particular
concrete things could hold “the perduring archet ypes (Urphänomen),” which can be
perceived in this living world through sensation. Therefore, as Avens (1980, p.p.
20-21) points out, “imagination is said to link har moniously (“psychosomatically” is
Barfield’s word) matter and spirit; it stands before the object and experientially, or
rather imaginatively, knows “I am that.” Avens (1980, p. 22) also mentions William
Blake’s “double vision”, which is the capacity to recognize at least two different
aspects at the same time. Avens (1980, p. 22) writes, “When Blake looked at the sun,
he saw not only “a round thing somewhat like a guinea” but also “an immeasurable
Company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
Blake could see beyond a thing through imagination, the refore the world itself is
filled with spirit for him. Hillman (1997, p. xv) explains that the term soul-making in
archetypal psychology is derived from the Blake’s Vala, yet the phrase was articulated
in a letter of John Keats to his brother: “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of
Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world… .” Thus, there was a sign of
awakening of soul or imagination as a tertium between the matter or body and the
spirit or mind in Romanticism, which is clarified in archetypal psychology.
As we saw, although it was Jung who brought imagination back in an attempt to
return to the soul, he maintained the existence of archetype as an a priori form in the
collective unconscious. However, Hillman (2013a, p. 14) points out that archetypes
“are in themselves not phenomenal.” He continues:

Archetypal psychology, in distinction to Jungian, considers the archetypal to be

always phenomenal (Avens 1980), thus avoiding the Kantian idealism implied in
Jung (de Voogd 1977). (Hillman, 2013a, p. 14)

According to Avens (2006, p.34), Hillman thinks “the phenomenal archetype ” reveal
itself in images, and he points out that “archetypal image precedes and determines

16
the metaphysical hypothesis of a noumenon.” Avens (1980, p. 43) says that Hillman
thinks the noumenalism of archetype is unnecessary and constraint. Then, “The
third-generation Jungian”, as Avens (1980, p. 43) describes, “profess to be more
interested in images, in the primacy of the imaginal life than in the “a priori
organizing potential” of the archetypes.” Avens describes:

Instead of asking how archetype and image are related (as two distinct events),
one begins with and concentrates on images in all their multiple implications. The
adjective “archetypal” stands, not for an unknowable and noumenal content in
the unconscious, but rather for the unfathomable and polymorphous nature of
the images themselves. (Avens, 2006, p.34)

Moreover, Avens (2006, p.34) points out that Hillman refuses the expression
“unconscious”, for it is not considered as the vessel of archetypes, which are
unknowable, in archetypal psychology any longer. It is an implement for intensifying
and internalizing the images. Avens (2006, p.36) argues Hillman’s phenomenology
can be understood “in terms of what he ca lls “archetypal episteme,” which is “a
psychological method to dismantles metaphysics by relativizing the pivotal points of
its traditional edifice: “pure reason” (Kant).” Hillman sticks with “things and events
themselves” (Avens, 2006, p. 37) and lets them speak, so that “the primary, and
irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns” becomes the “metaphorical
discourse of myths.” (Hillman, 2013a, p. 14) Therefore, Hillman’s method becomes
“archetypal reversion – a return to mythical patterns and persons of the psyche.”
(Avens, 2006, p. 37) I would explore this “reversion” more a bit later.
Thus, by dealing “with things as they appear as such” or confronting “the
phenomena right under your nose” (Hillman, 1997, p. 6), Hillman tries to move
beyond the Kantian dualism in Jung. Archetype is not hidden for Hillman, but rather
reveals itself in image and mythical perspective. Therefore, in order to appreciate
this notion, it is crucial to understand the danger of considerin g images or myth as
allegories.

Image and soul

We saw in the previous chapter that Hillman and archetypal psychology tries to move

17
beyond dualism by focusing on image and returning to myth, which is the
phenomenal archetype. However, it is diffic ult for the modern mind to take images or
myths as they are as such, for images or myths have started to be seen as allegories.
Therefore, in this section, I will discuss that how images and myths became just
symbols or allegories and lost their power. Fur thermore, I will examine how Hillman’s
distinction between the literal and imaginal, and his notion of soul -making, were
influenced by Henri Corbin.
To begin with, we have to go back to the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE, for
at this Council, as Hillman (2013b, p .67) points out, “images were deprived of their
inherent authenticity.” According to Hillman (2013b, p. 69), the fear and aversion to
images is very strong and has a long history; he regards it as another conflict of
“those long battles between spirit and soul, between abstractions and images,
between iconoclasts and idolaters.” So, what was done to images at N icaea? Hillman
(2013b, p .67) says that although hundreds of bishops continued to adhere to the
significance of images it was a triumph of the iconoclasts, since “a subtle and
devastating differentiation was made” (Hillman, 2013b, p.69) by them. It was a
separation between the image itself and what the image expresses. “Thus, image
became allegories.” (Hillman, 2013b, p.69) He describes:

The image itself has become subtly depotentiated… Yes, the image is allowed, but
only to be venerated for what it represents: the abstract ideas, configurations,
transcendencies behind the images… They become representations, no lon ger
presentations, no longer presences of divine power. (Hillman, 2013b, p.69)

Since then, images such as statues, ic ons and paintings became just matter or things.
This restriction stops us from exploring and experiencing our intuition and strong
emotions which arises when looking at astonishingly beautiful statues and images.
Furthermore, as Angela Voss (2006, p. 201) points out, we are unable to “trust in the
‘marvellous truth’ revealed to the ima gination through sense-perception of image”,
for our modern minds are so accustomed to “a Cartesian duality that distinguishes
between thought and action, conception and perception.” In our dualistic cosmology,
things or images are neither able to have the ir own feelings and personalities nor
souls. Therefore, it does not allow us to enter an intimate and ‘erotic’ relationship
outside the humanistic one. Voss continues:

Added to which, our Christian -Platonic legacy of the past two thousand years in
18
 the West has left us wary about the nature of sensuality and desire. In not
allowing Eros to reveal his divinity through the arousal of our senses, we have
separated soul from body, sacred love from profane passion, and ultimately
divinity from matter. (Voss, 2006, p. 206)

Thus, images became mere symbols or allegories. Perhaps, in our modern view, it
sounds natural that statues and icons are just stone or wooden things. People might
view them as man made or artificial things. We are thus trained to distinguish the
symbols and the essences that they are expressing, yet the second father of
archetypal psychology, Henri Corbin, would say the act of separation itself is what
makes them into an icy stone object. According to Cheetham (2015, p.p. 28-29),
Hillman’s essential insight, which is the distinction between the literal and imaginal,
comes from directly from Corbin. So, how does Corbin distinguish between the literal
and imaginal? Cheetham (2015, p. 28) says Corbin’s whole “psycho -cosmology” hangs
on “Corbin’s distinction between the idol and the icon.” For Corbin, according to
Cheetham (2015, p. 29), although the aim of our life in the world is to be “in
sympathy with being” or to live “in love”, this could be a trap in two ways. One is to
“love a being without perceiving its transcendence ,” in which case “it becomes an idol,
and you become an idolator, a fundamentalist.” (Cheetham, 2015, p. 29) The other
was is to love “transcendence itself” and disregard “the reality of being” under our
nose. (Cheetham, 2015, p. 29) Here, “the icon loses its grounding in the world.”
(Cheetham, 2015, p. 29) Therefore, the separation itself between the image and what
the image represents deprives the i mage of its power. You have to fall in love with
the icon without separating the icon itself and what the icon expresses.
I will explore a bit more of Corbin later, for now let us focus on myths. We also
tend to consider myth as an allegory, as we do fo r images. However, what might
happen once myth becomes just allegory? Hillman says:

First, allegory keeps the autonomy and reality of the Gods at bay. By being “used”
for moral examples or educational homilies, they are no longer powers but rather
technical tricks, categories, conceits. They become instruments of reason rather
than the very forms that organize reason. (Hillman, 1997, p. 7)

Thus we cannot understand the myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with a sculpture
19
that he had carved. Instead, it became an allegory of the phenomenon which shows
that higher expectation can increase performance. Hillma n (1997, p.1) argues that
the dualistic way of seeing the world imprisons autonomy and spontaneity within
humans. He describes:

This view confines the idea of subjectivity to human persons. Only they are
permitted to be subjects, to be agents and doers, to have consciousness and soul.
The Christian idea of person as the true focus of the divine and the only carrier of
the soul is basic to this world view. (Hillman, 1997, p.1)

Thus, we lost an ability to have a close and intimate relations hip with mythical figures,
and the relationship became I-It rather I-Thou. Then, we ask “Are things alive or
dead?” or “ Are Gods real or are they symbolic projections?” (Hillman, 1997, p. 16)
However, as Hillman says:

Mythic consciousness answers with Cassirer: “ There is nowhere an ‘it ’ as a dead

object, a mere thing.” Subject and object, man and Gods, I and Th ou, are not
apart and isolated each with a different sort of being, one living or real, the other
dead or imaginary. The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the
condition of our souls. (Hillman, 1997, p. 16)

Therefore, Hillman claims that “ To enter myth we must personify, to personify carries
us into myth.” What does ‘to personify’ mean for Hillman ? He explains:

All three terms-anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic

idea: there exists a “mode of thought ” which takes an inside event and puts it
outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine.
These three terms, by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls,
are actually describing a manner of soul -making. But by calling this activity a
“mode of thought ” it becomes an act we perform -conscious or unconscious
-rather than something we immediately experience. (Hillman, 1997, p. 13)

Hillman (1997, p. 13) describes that personifying “is a way of being in the world.” It is
a way of experiencing the world as a field of soul -making, where mythical figures are

20
given with events so that they attract and move us. Therefore, as Hillman (1997, p.
17) says, it is not us who actually pe rsonify. He writes:

Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it

imaginal persons. They are given with the imagination and are its data. Where
imagination reigns, personifying happens… Just as we do not create our dreams,
but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religions;
they, too, happen to us… To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination
are real. (Hillman, 1997, p. 17)

Hillman (2013a, p. 21) points out that hidden reality of the world can only be
revealed through those mythical figures. He writes:

Archetypal psychology axiomatically assumes imagistic universals, comparable to

the universali fantastic of Vico (Scienza Nuova, par. 381), that is, mythical figures
that provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as
well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural
phenomena. By means of the archetypal image, natural phenomena present faces
that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws and
probabilities and manifest their objectification. (Hillman, 2013a, p. 21)

However, in order to let those mythical figures or the Gods appear as they are, and to
let them speak to us, we need to be open to the realm f or them, the mundus
imaginalis. So, in the next section, I will discuss Corbin’s mundus imaginalis and
Neoplatonic cosmology, which is the basis of Hillman’s cosmology.

Mundus Imaginalis

In this chapter, I also want to mention the mythical figure or Angel in Corbin as well
as to explore mundus imaginalis and Neoplatonic cosmology, for it is crucial to
understanding Hillman’s ideas about myths. According to Hillman (2013a, p. 15), it
was Corbin who brought the idea that “the mundus archetypalis’ (‘alam al-mitbal’) is
also the mundus imaginalis”, meaning the realm of archetype is a specific fie ld of
“imaginal realities requiring methods and perceptual faculties different from the

21
spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naïve
formulation.” This notion takes two fundamental ideas in archetypal psychology from
Corbin: “(a) . . .the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination
first and presents itself first as image, so that (b) the entire procedure of archetypal
psychology as a method is imaginative.” (Hillman, 2013a, p. 15) Thus, the purpose of
therapy in archetypal psychology is aimed at the “development of a sense of soul, the
middle ground of psychic realities” (Hillman, 2013a, p. 15), that is, the mundus
imaginalis. Avens explains:

Corbin’s mundus imaginalis is the necessary mediatrix (theologically conceived as

Deus revelatus, revealed God) between the hidden Deity ( Deus absconditus) and
man’s world. It is the world of the soul or psyche which in the Platonic and
esoteric tradition is called Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. (Avens, 2006, p.3)

According to Voss (1986, p. 12), Corbin is the scholar who makes claims for the soul
of the world, and “stands in the line of Platonic interpreters from Plotinus,
Iamblichus and Ficino through to the archetypal and depth psychologists Carl Jung
and James Hillman.” Voss (1986, p. 12) describes that they all value “the imagination
as a faculty of perception which can penetrate far deeper into the mysterious nature
of being than any abstract or conceptual thought.” It seems fundamental to
understand what the Anima Mundi is and what kind of quality it has in the
Neoplatonic and esoteric sense, in order to comprehend Corbin’s mundus imaginalis
and soul in archetypal psychology, for they are rooted in the notion that we are in
the Anima Mundi or the soul of the world rather t han the soul being in us. Hillman
writes:

The primary metaphor of psychology must be soul… Psyche as the anima mundi,
the Neoplatonic soul of the world, is already there with the world itself, so that a
second task of psychology is to hear psyche speaking through all things of the
world, thereby recovering the world as place of soul (soul -making). (Hillman,
2013, p. 25)

Therefore, when Hillman says soul -making, it indicates the soul of the world, the
anima mundi. So, how can we understand the Anima Mundi? It was clarified by one of
the most influential Italian Renaissance scholars, Marsilio Ficino, in his books, Three

22
Books On Life. Geoffrey Cornelius (2005, p. 4) explains Ficino’s cosmology delineated
in those books. He writes:

Ficino observes that the whole cosmos is animate, which is demonstrated not
only by the arguments of the Platonists but also by the testimony of the Arabic
astrologers. The foundation of astrology resides in the working of the World Soul
(Anima Mundi), who contains in herself the ‘seminal reasons of things’. These
‘reasons’ reflect or correspond to the Ideas in the Divine Mind; but for the Ideas
to become materially manifested, they have to be brought to birth in the womb of
the World Soul. (Cornelius, 2005, p. 4)

In other words, all matter or things in this world are endowed with the celestial gift
of Ideas, with each genus agreeing to its own Ideas. Thus, the Anima Mundi links
matter and Ideas. Voss (1986, p. 4) describes Neoplatonic cosmology as being
composed of three strata of reality; “the divine intelligible realm, the material realm,
and linking them a mediating dimension which partakes of both: a spiritual body or
celestial earth.” This intermediate realm reveals itself to us through images, and
those images are caught through sense -perception. Voss writes:

It is the ‘intermediate place’ in the neoplatonic cosmos of emanation from spirit

to matter where the former is given a perceptible form through an image, and the
latter loses the density of embodiment and is ‘seen through’ to its immaterial
essence. (Voss, 2004, p. 1)

However, Hillman (1992, p. 67) claims that, “Let us imagine the anima mundi neither
above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of
powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material
world as its unifying panpsychic life principle.” Instead, he (Hillman, 1992, p. 67)
argues that we imagine the anima mundi “as that particular soul spark, that seminal
image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.” Therefore, Hillman
does not consider the anima mundi as metaphysical world, but, as we have seen, “the
phenomenal archetype” (Avens, 2006, p.34) revealing itself in images.
As Voss (2004, p. 5) says, to perceive those images from that intermediate plane, a
correspondence of soul is required. It expresses itself through agents such as gods ,
angels or daimons. That is, the special ‘ear’ and ‘eye’ are indispensible in order to
23
listen and see them through imagination. Voss writes:

These celestial souls are empowered by the desire to return to their particular
archangel, and at each level they form a couple. Each level of the material cosmos
too resonates with its soul and thereby with its angel, but the soul or angel of the
world is only perceptible through the cultivation of what Corbin terms the active
imagination. The imagination is the angelic mode of perception, for being
immaterial they do not possess the sense- perception of human beings. (Voss,
2004, p. 5)

Now, we can understand Hillman’s “archetypal reversion” which I mentioned before.

Hillman’s “reversion” is based on Plotinus’s method, “reversion” ( epistrophe) - the
idea that all things desire to return to the archetypal originals of which they are
copies and from which they proceed .”(Hillman, 1997, p. 99) Hillman (1997, p. 99)
claims, “Pathologizing, too, would be examined in terms of likeness and imagined.”
Moreover, he (Hillman, 1997, p. 99) says, “These archetypal resemblances are best
presented in myths in which the archetypal persons I am like and the patterns I am
enacting have their authentic home ground.” Thus, for Hillman, as Avens (2006, p. 37)
says, “archetypal reversion” is “a return to mythical patterns and persons of the
psyche.”
As we saw above, the mundus imaginalis is “a realm of angelic being or archetypal
images that provides cosmological grounding for physical reality.” (Avens, 2006, p.1)
According to Cheetham (2015, p. 22), Corbin accuses Aristotle of interpreting “the
Platonic forms not as personified principles, as he should have done, but rather as
abstract intellectual categories.” (Cheetham , 2015, p. 22) Corbin thinks we cannot
meet angelic beings alive in a rational Aristotelian cosmos. Cheetham (2015, p. 20)
says if we cannot look at them and have intimate personal relationship with them,
they cannot be more than abstract things. He writes:

The angelic function of beings is their capacity to serve as subjects, as icons,

gateways into the divine. In this sen se every being has an Angel. The Angel is the
immediate source of the personal face of every beings. For anything whatever to
be present, it has to be present to someone and it has to be regarded, looked at,
in a mutual, personal relation. Otherwise, at th e outer limit of Creation, there
24
 can only be abstract objects which are not looked at by anyone. And they
disappear. Presence and personhood are complementary terms. You can’t have
one without the other. (Cheetham, 2015, p. 20)

Thus, “the person is the first and final fact. Everything is personified, everything is
personal.” (Cheetham, 2015, p. 20) However, we have to avoid the trap of literalism.
The reality of the existence of angels does not mean beautiful divine creatures with
wings existing out there, for, as Voss (1986, p. 5) says, in “this dynamic cosmos, the
angelic hierarchies are not things, but events.” Voss writes:

Angel, soul and world are not separate entities ‘out there’, but modes of
perception: the world is perceived through sense, soul through imagination and
angel through intellect (which is intellect in the Platonic sense of the
pre-conceptual knowing described earlier by Iamblichus). (Voss, 1986, p. 5)

Now, we can identify those modes of perception with the mythical perspective.
Hillman describes:

Myths talk to psyche in its own la nguage; they speak emotionally, dramatically,
sensuously, fantastically. Through the mythical perspective we perceive
significances and persons, not objects and things: “Primacy of
expression-perception over thing-perception is what characterizes the mythi cal
world-view.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 154)

Hillman (1997, p. 154) also concludes that “myth is metapsychology and

metapsychology”, for myth is the act of seeing. Hillman writes, “Myth, says Hermann
Broch, is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is
capable. Archetype of all human cognition, archetype of science, archetype of art -
myth is consequently the archetype of philosophy too.” If our perception is the
perception of the anima mundi too at the deepest level, we see through “eye of the
soul”(Avens, 2006, p. 20).
In short, in archetypal psychology, our soul is identified with the anima mundi or
world soul, which is filled with angelic beings having their faces and talking to us
through imagination. Thus, “Earthly phenomena are elevated (or “reduced”) to the

25
level of soul, not soul to the level of earthly phenomena.” (Avens, 2006, p. p. 20-21)
Therefore, our next chapter Is about distinction between the human and the soul, for
“soul is not confined by man, and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the
nature of man.” (Avens, 2006, p. 23) The distinction between the soul and the human
seems significant to Hillman’s understanding of myth.

Differentiation between the soul and the human

In modern academy, it is natural to categorize psychology as a human science, which

sits between science and the humanities. However, Hillman (1997, p. 172) says
“archetypal psychology is not a science or a religion, so too it is not a humanism.”
This division is crucial for archetypal psychology, for archetypal psychology is not of
the human, but of the soul. However, as Hillman (1997, p. 173) says, the distinction
between the soul and the human does not mean “a division between the hum an and
psyche.” It “merely repeats the honored religious idea that a man may lose his life
and not his soul, or lose his soul and keep his life.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 173) As we saw
earlier, in archetypal psychology, our soul is in the world soul. Hillman says:

Philosophy, from Plato and his Neoplatonic followers (especially Plotinus) and
from Hegel and his neo-Hegelians, also supports this idea. Its tradition is that
even if psyche refers to an individual soul here and now lived by a human being, it
always refers equally to a universal principle, a world soul or objective psyche
distinct from its individuality in humans. (Hillman, 1997, p. 173)

And the world soul has “inhuman reaches”, for it extends into every event a nd matter.
Hillman explains that the our experience of soul as our “own” and “within” expresses
“the privacy and interiority of psychic life” (Hillman, 1997, p. 173) Again, we have to
be careful not to be trapped by literalism. “ The sense of “in -ness” refers neither to
location nor to physical containment.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 173) If we can admit this
distinction between human and soul, then it leads us to significant consequences.
Hillman writes:

If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the

soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our
26
 essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the
gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. (Hillman, 1997, p. 175)

Thus, we have to devote our individuation to the daimons or the Gods, for it is “not
my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to
my stewardship during my life.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 175) Furthermore, Hillman (1997, p.
175) says if our soul is not ours but belongs to daimons’ or the Gods’, then our
emotions must belong to them too. In scientific psychology, as Hi llman (1997, p. 176)
points out, they were referred to as “instinct ”, which implies indirectly an inhuman
background of human affections by illustrating its “phylogenetic sources.” Hillman
(1997, p. 177) also distinguishes emotions and the human, yet he claims that
emotions, too, belong to soul of the world, the anima mundi. He writes:

Whereas our distinction between human and emotion treats it as a “divine

influx,”… Emotion is a gift that comes by surprise, a mythic statement rather th an
a human property. It announces a movement in soul, a statement of the process
going on in a myth which we may perceive in the fantasy images that emotion
accompanies. (Hillman, 1997, p. 177)

If emotion is “a gift that comes by surprise” or “a mythic statement,” the client’s

story needs to “return to mythical patterns and persons of the psyche,” that is to say,
an “archetypal reversion” as we saw earlier. However, this reversion may be
unacceptable, especially for psychological practit ioners, for they consider emotions
and afflictions to be human traits. In addition, “therapy makes its patients
individually responsible and personally guilty for universal archetypes.” (Hillman,
1997, p. 177) On the other hand, Hillman (1997, p. 177) says that archetypal
psychology aims to conjecture emotions less as products of human potencies, for
“when freed from human centricity, reverted to fantasies, and then to mythic
patterns, emotions have a different quality of experience.” Hillman (1997, p. 177)
asks: is the subject of the experience human or “a psychic faculty who is “as if ”
human” - an internal person who has autonomous psychological functions such as
intention, selection and organization of experiences? Hillman (1997, p. 177) raises
the question that the subjectivity we call “I” or “my” may well be a mythical fantasy.
Hillman (1997, p. 177) points out that scholastic psychology always linked the interior
integrating sense with imagination. He answers the question:

27
 Imagination is the organizer. If so, then our experiences are organized by mythical
images, for it is by means of the imagination that the imaginal realm of
archetypes plays through the psyche. (Hillman, 1997, p. 177)

Furthermore, Hillman (1997, p. 177) claims it is the archetypal fantasy of self -hood
that we have a stable core at the middle of us. He says if humans are a compound of
various inner persons who cast back to mythical figures of myths , then the subject is
also in myths. Yet, in humanism’s psychology, they do the opposite – they reduce
significant divine events to personal psychodynamics. Hillman thinks this is the
serious problem of inadequacy in the humanistic approach. “Myth become
man-made.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 190) He writes:

So much is the depotentiation of myth the continuing concern of humanism that

this becomes its definition: humanism’s psychology is the myth of man without
myths. (Hillman, 1997, p. 190)

Therefore, in humanism’s psychology, we cannot have myths. The myths are reduc ed
to implements for human benefit, to allegorical stories, and to fictions. Hillman
writes:

Myths that shape human lives become in humanism instruments which the mind
invents to explain itself to itself. The inherent otherness of myth in an imaginal
other realm, the creative spontaneity of these stories and the fact that they are
tales of Gods and their doings with humans - all become something a man makes
up. (Hillman, 1997, p. 190)

Thus, we have lost the direct and immediate experience of myths, as I wrote earlier.
We cannot taste or listen to myths. Moreover, we have lost the experience of
“ourselves as passing through them, of being lived by them, and the sense that
“myths communicate with each other through men without their being aware of this
fact.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 190) Therefore, we need a reversion, as Cassirer did first and
then Hillman clarified it. Avens writes:

In conclusion, Cassirer is convinced that the usual anthropomorphic nature of the

28
 mythical process must be reversed : the primitive, instead of transferring his own
finished personality to the god, first discovers himself as active spiritual principle
through the figures of his gods : the human ‘I’ finds himself only through a detour
of the divine ‘I.’

However, although we have lost the direct experience of myths, the Gods did not
disappear, for they “are part of our life today just as they were in the past and will be
in the foreseeable future.” (Avens, 1980, p. 61) So, where are they now? I have to
start being reflective in order to see where are they in our society currently. In the
next section, for this purpose, I would like to examine the gre at success of the film
Star Wars and how it expresses heroic myth in our society.

The Myth of Ego without myth

As we saw above, we have lost myths that we can share in modern society. Myth has
been driven away not only from the academy but also from society. It became a
synonym of foolish fiction or irrational and meaningless primitive stories. However, is
it possible for society to exist without myth? According to Joseph Campbell (1993, p.
3), myth appears whenever and wherever humans live. He writes :

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the
myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of
whatever else may have appeared out of the activi ties of the human body and
mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through
which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural
manifestation. (Campbell, 1993, p. 3)

Carl Kerenyi (1985, p. 4) also says “Mythology, like the severed head of Orpheus,
goes on singing even in death and from afar.” If this is true, even though we believe
that we have pushed myth away from our societies and our lives, yet, we might still
live myths without noticing it. As Kerenyi (1985, p. 4) says, myth was “not only sung
like a kind of music” but “it was lived”. He (Kerenyi, 1985, p. 4) writes, “Material
though it was, for those peoples, its carrier, it was a form of expression, thought, and
life.” If so, what kind of myth are we living in?

29
 “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” It is the phrase of the opening
sequence from the film Star Wars. Many myths and folktales begin with this kind of
phrase, which enables you to enter another world or reality. Star Wars is the heroic
story of an orphan boy who sets ou t on an adventure to rescue a captured princess
and save a world. It is filled with mythical themes such as getting a special weapon,
meeting a master who disguises himself as a bizarre outsider, and awakening to his
own destiny and gift. It started with a single film in 1977, yet two other sequels and a
prequel trilogy followed by 2005. The new sequel was just released in 2015.
Furthermore, many spin-off films have been created. So, it has not yet been
completed. It seems to be welling up from somewhere, a s groundwater comes from
the ground. People may call this a pop culture phenomenon, yet what can we make of
all this?
Jung (1972, p. 79) argued that man identifies with the hero through “ The
narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such
a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, [which] grip the audience
with numinous emotions…”(Jung 1972), all of which can be seen in films. Jung says :

If we try to see such a situation with the eyes of the believer, w e can perhaps
understand how the ordinary man can be liberated from his personal impotence
and misery and endowed (at least temporarily) with an almost superhuman
quality. Often enough such a conviction will sustain him for a long time and give a
certain style to his life. It may even set the tone of a whole society. (Jung, 1972, p.
79)

If it is true, our whole society might be in the heroic tone. Furthermore, Hillman
claims:

But the Gods come back willy-nilly under the cover of hero ic man-centeredness,
infiltrating the structure of humanistic consciousness itself, its ideals, and its
formulations about man’s world -shouldering responsibility and his ego choices
that create existence. (Hillman, 1997, p. 191)

In this quote, Hillman (2006, p. 338) implies that hero myths might come back as a
phenomenon of the heroic man-centered perspective. He (Hillman, 2006, p. 338)
claims “Civilization requires a hero myth.”, and when “the gods have fled or were

30
declared dead, the hero serves only the secular ego.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of
Psychology, ‘ego” is defined:

1. The conscious sense of personal identity for many theorists, including

Jung and Murray. . . . 2. In psychoanalysis, the executive function of the
personality, which includes the self and makes decisions about actual
behavior and mediates the desires of the id, the moral restraints of the
superego, and the constraints and opportunities of reality using rational
thought to make plans and carry them out. . . . (Matsumoto, 2009, p. 179)

Therefore, the ego is considered to be the center of the person, and reflects how to
live or how to survive in the world. Hillman (1997, p. 102) claims that our ego could
be reverted to hero myths. He writes:

. . . it is also possible to insight the ego, and ego psychology, by reverting it to the
heroic myths of Hercules, with whose strength and mission we have become so
caught that the patterns of Hercules - clubbing animals, refusing the feminine,
fighting old age and death, being plagued by Mom but marrying her younger
edition - are only now beginning to be recognized as pathology. (Hillman, 1997, p.
102)

If we really open our eyes, we can find heroic man -centered perspectives all over the
world. He writes:

The force that prompts action, kills dragons, and leads progress becomes the
Western “strong ego”- capitalist entrepreneur, colonial ruler, property developer,
a tough guy with heroic ambitions on the road to success. (Hillman, 2006, p. 338)

In psychology, as Hillman (1991, p. 143) warns, we think under the influence of a

heroic perspective, thus we “ turn to a Goddess not for her sake, her therapeia, but
for our self-realization.” Despite his warning, heroic or egoistic languages such as
‘self-development,’ ‘growing up’ and ‘evolution’ continue to be used. Hero myths are
used as a guideline of “self -development ”, as we can see in Henderson’s work. He
writes:

These godlike figures are in fact symbolic representatives of the whole psyche,
31
 the larger and more comprehensive identity that supplies the strength that the
personal ego lacks. Their special role suggests that the e ssential function of the
heroic myth is the development of the individual’s ego -consciousness - his
awareness of his own strengths and weakness - in a manner that will equip him
for the arduous tasks with which life confronts him… The hero’s symbolic death
becomes, as it were, the achievement of that maturity…. This is to say, the image
of the hero evolves in a manner that reflects each stage of the evolution of the
human personality. (Henderson, 1972, p. 112)

Hillman (1997, p. 158) repeats, “Remember, the mythic is a perspective and not a
program; to try to use a myth practically keeps us still in the pattern of the heroic ego,
learning how to do his deeds correctly.” Although the job of the hero, according to
Hillman (2006, p. 338), is to slay “the Father/Dragon/Ogre/King,” and a “civilization
requires the Ogre be slain” who “tempts the young and devours them to increase his
own importance”, yet, to slays the Ogre is “Not the myth of the hero, but the myth as
the hero.” He (Hillman, 2006, p. 338) notes that Campbell endowed our civilization
with the “heroic function of myth”, that is “myth as the hero.” Hillman continues:

By recovering the myth of the hero and restoring myth itself to primary place in
cultural importance, Campbell has protected the city from the nihilism of
materialist science, from Christian otherworldly redemption, and from the
tyranny of capitalist commodification of all values. (Hillman, 2006, p. 338)

However, we are still in heroic territory, and we cannot ‘see’ how we s ee. Until we are
able to see through to another vision, we are trapped in a myth rather living a
mythical life for soul-making. Therefore, seeing through myths is crucial for
archetypal psychology. Yet, is there a time to which we can return that will help us
see through the myth we are living now? Perhaps, the time when myths started
coming back into our society might be useful to examine, and that is the time of
Freud. Therefore we need to revisit Oedipus.

Oedipus and Sigmund Freud

As I mentioned at the beginning, “archetypes and mythical images might emerge

32
through my own perspective,” and ‘what’ I’ve been thinking and ‘how’ I’ve been
thinking could be reverted to myths. So, I would like to begin this section by
reflecting on them. I am aware that ‘the puzzle was cast on me’, so I have been
seeking ‘the father ’ or ‘the truth’ and tried to ‘solve the puzzles’ in order to ‘save’
myths. I ‘traced back to the origins’ of archetypal psychology. Moreover, I ‘had to kill
the fathers’ to get a new perspecti ve. I had to kill the reductionism of Jung ’s Kantian
dualism and Corbin’s flight to the heights. All such language might imply that I am
thinking within the perspective of Oedipus. By seeking the truth, I lost myth. I ‘killed’
myth. I am ‘guilty.’ It was ‘inescapable.’ Thus, I became ‘guilty’ and ‘blind’ like
Oedipus. Hillman says:

We are so fascinated by what we see, we do not see our seeing : the object
content of the insight stands forth and we lose the subjective factor that makes
this content visible in the first place. This is the Oedipal moment in the analytical
method-when surety seizes, epiphanic, following upon a long coil of unraveling
and piecing together. (Hillman, 1991, p. 135)

As we have seen, myth is not an old story. Mythical figures are still alive in the
mundus imaginalis. It was Freud who noticed the fact that they live in us. Freud
thought Oedipus’s voice and his fate are still in us. He wrote:

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary
Greeks, the only possible explanation is that… there must be a voice within us
which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fa te in the Oedipus…
His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle
laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. (Hillman,
1991, p.93)

Freud admitted that Oedipus story “forces us to become aware of our own inner
selves” (Hillman, 1991, p. 93) However, unfortunately, the Oedipus myth became the
case history of a neurotic patient. Joseph Campbell writes :

… [the] Oedipus complex, which Sigmund Freud pointed out some fifty years ago
as the great cause of our adult failure to behave like rational being. As Dr. Freud
has stated it: “King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married his mother

33
 Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, more
fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not
become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and
in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.” (Campbell, 1993, p.p. 6-7)

Hillman (1997, p. 100) wants to criticize Freud’s reduction, saying “Freud’s method of
reversion took a positivistic course.” He (Hillman, 1997, p. 100) argues Freud located
myths on the real response of actual families instead of going b ack to myth as the
background of the events, that seeing through the pathologizing was “the soul’s
return to myth.” According to Avens (1980, p. 12), what Freudian psychoanalysis
neglected to notice was the fact that Freud “ told us less which myth was psyche’s
essence than that the essence of the psyche is myth, that psychology is ultimately
mythology, the study of the stories of the soul.” Avens writes :

Following the associationist attempt to explain the genesis of imagination

reductively, Freudianism lumps together imagining, fantasying and hallucinating.
All of these acts are regarded as varying ways of surrogate satisfaction of basic
wishes stemming from the unco nscious. (Avens, 1980, p. 12)

Therefore, Hillman has to “revisit” Oedipus. He (Hillman, 1991, p.93) claims, “if we
would be faithful to the project of an archetypal re -visioning of depth psychology ”
Oedipus needs to be revisited, for the Oedipus myth unites psychoanalysis. Hillman
(1991, p. 94) says “depth psychology is obliged to notice its fantasies in reading its
theories”, for, as Jung said, “psyche creates reality ever y day,” and fantasy seems to
be the most articulate stat ement for it. He points out:

The critics also say, because of Freud, every family reduces to the single same
account, a monomyth, and myth itself reduces to compulsions and repressions
derived from family. (Hillman, 1991, p. 97)

However, Hillman (1991, p. 98) argues that Freud’s mistake was and is inescapable
and indispensable. He (Hillman, 1991, p. 98) writes, “Freud ‘got it wrong,’ because it
is the genius of psychology to get it wrong, to disturb, pervert, dislocate, misread, so
as to lift the repression of the usual sense.” Hillman (1991, p. 98) claims
psychoanalysis “goes wrong in order to keep close to the wrongness in the case.” The

34
insanity is required in the practice to access the insaneness of the case, f or
“Pathologizing is homeopathic: like cures like.” (Hillman, 1991, p. 98) Since, as
Hillman (1991, p. 137) says, blindness triggers off self -inquiry, it is vital for the
Oedipal method. Therefore, we have to start in the dark without knowing what to do
or where to go. Hillman (1991, p. 137) mentions two different ways of being blind:
one is “as Oedipus whose eyes are open and cannot see,” and the other is “as Tiresias
whose eyes are closed and is a seer.” He (Hillman, 1991, p. 137) argues that although
it is commonly said that Oedipus’s self -blinding at the ending is the disclosure of his
genuine character, it is the sequel of Oedipal metho d of taking actions “-pursuit,
questioning, getting to the truth of himself, self -discovery.” Thus, blinding and
blindness is inevitable as an outcome of following the Oedipal method, for “Content
results from method.” (Hillman, 1991, p. 138) He (Hillman, 1991, p. 138) emphasizes,
“The what that is discovered is utterly tied to the way it is discovered.” Perhaps, we
can add to it that what we discover is the sequence of how we see, who sees it, or
which Gods or Goddesses see it. Hillman (1991, p. 138) says analysts need “Teiresian
eyes” to help clients to find who they are, that is to return the soul. He writes :

Analysis aims to open those of the patient by p lacing concrete life in the vessel
(temenos, process, transference, etc. ), putting out the eyes of the physical view
so as to see life more clearly as a field of ignorant projections, as shadows on the
wall of the cave. (Hillman, 1991, p. 138)

However, it is neither easy nor comfortable. Actually, sometimes the result is

“tragedy”, for “the ‘I’’s heroic effort to see is the symptom itself trying to see, and a
symptom cannot see itself.” (Hillman, 1991, p. 139) He points out:

Whatever myths may operate in the psyche, whatever contents we might disclose,
as long as our method remains search for self, these other tales w ill yield only
Oedipal results because we turn to them with the same old intention. We are still
seeking a subjective identity by understanding ourselves, locating this
understanding and this identity in a narrative of personal development. We can’t
get out of this play, this tragedy. (Hillman, 1991, p. 142)

We are stuck in the old land. Heroes cannot arrive the new land. We bel ieve, in
therapy, in the myth of family – we are so convinced that our problems are caused by

35
family issues. We are so accustomed to examine our family history for self -discovery.
Yet, as Hillman (1991, p.p. 149-150) points out, “the psychological blinding of
obsession with family” is required to descend into “the underside of his God
blood-crime, and catharsis” as Oedipus did. Hill man (1991, p. 150) claims that a hero
needs to move into a “foreign land” or “anima country” He writes:

The move from Thebes to Colonus moves the mind from seeing to hearing, moves
questioning from what happened to where are we now, moves family from
parents to children and moves children (tekna as he called the Thebans and now
calls his daughters) from duty to love, moves the revel ation for ends, moves
saving the city by action to blessing the city by death, and moves piety from
oracles to libations. These moves have brought Oedipus into anima country;
Colonus is described as argeta: silvery, radiant, white (670). This is the new la nd,
a foreign land for a hero. (Hillman, 1991, p. 150)

Hillman (1997, p. 89) says, “For our concern is with the symptom, that thing so
foreign to the ego, that thing which ends the rule of the hero -who, as Emerson said,
is the who is immovably centered.” He (Hillman, 1997, p. 89) emphasizes,
“Pathologizing moves the myth of the individual onward by moving him first of all out
of the heroic ego.” Hillman (1997, p. 192) also says, the term ‘therapeutes’ initially
meant “one who serves the Gods,” therefore the “therapist is the one who pays
attention to and cares for “the God in the disease.” That is, we need to move from
the literal world to the imaginal land, the anima mundi, through letting the mythical
figures speak and listening to them in our symptoms. Then, the individuation in
therapy becomes “the individuation of the angel” (Hillman, 1991, p. 156) Thus
therapists become ‘therapeutes.’ Finally, the world becomes ‘the vale of Soul-making.’
At the end, a hero fades in the soul as “ Oedipus vanishes and the daughters remain
visible.” (Hillman, 1991, p. 156) Only this reversion can help a hero or help our
society.

Conclusion

Through this dissertation, I have re -visioned the myths for soul-making in Hillman and
archetypal psychology in order to solve the puzzles that are thrown at us; do we live
36
our lives or does life live through us? I also wanted to discuss the problems of the
current practice of using myths for self -development. For this purpose, I discussed
why Hillman needed to re-vision psychology, how we never had a true psychology, the
logos of psyche, and the significance of having the logos for psyche for soul -making.
Then, I went back to one of the fathers of archetypal psychology, C.G Jung, who
identified the images with the soul and clarified the fundamental function of myths
revealing the nature of soul. I also mentioned Jung ’s constraint within the Kantian
view, and I explored Hillman’s challenge to move b eyond Kantian dualism by focusing
on image and returning to myth, through examining Kant ’s discovery and recoil from
the primacy of imagination and the attempt of Romanticism to tackle Kantian dualism.
Then, I argued that our difficulty in taking images and myths as they are by discussing
our accustomed attitude toward i mages, how we view images as just symbols or
allegories. I proposed that it is crucial to personify and have intimate relationship
with images so we can enter myths to listen and meet mythical figures or angelic
beings for soul-making. I also looked into N eoplatonic cosmology in order to
understand Hillman’s “archetypal reversion,” which is about returning “to mythical
patterns and persons of the psyche.” Then, I discussed myths as metapsychology,
which is the act of seeing. From this perspective, I tried t o see through what is
happening in our society by the Heroes myths that have returned to our culture in
various ways, include Joseph Campbell’s work and films. Finally, I revisited Oedipus in
order to find a way to step away from the Hero myths into a myth ical life.
I clarified that the mythical perspective and images are the foundation of our
psychic function, on which we rely to think, feel, and understand the world. That is,
myths are our existential ground. This fact led to another fundamental realization
that we are in the world soul, which speaks to us through imagination and mythical
language. Thus, myths “are no longer stories in an illustrated book. We are those
stories, and we illustrate them with our lives.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 102) Thus,
individuation is not for us, but for the world soul.
As Hillman (1997, p. 163) says, “Psychologizing arrives at no conclusion, for to
make a point is to come to a stop.” As I wrote this dissertation, I felt I was walking
around the puzzle, rather walking directly toward the conclusion. Hillman (1997, p.
163) puts it very well, “Psychological reasoning tends to be circular, thriving on the
repetition compulsion and cycles of return to the same insoluble themes.” However,

37
this “errant way leads to the less known for sure, to less knowledge as established, as
accumulated into security.” (Hillman, 1997, p. 163) If arriving into a new land is the
way to step out of the Hero’s territory to the anima mundi, we need to take this
errant way. Now, I am imagining who is actually writing this dissertation? Is it me who
is writing and imagining or is it imagining through my imagination? By imagining so, I
am fading into the soul.

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