Term Paper on "Archetypal Psychology"

Term Paper 6 pages (2040 words) Sources: 6

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Archetypal Psychology

A myth is a sort of preferred lie (Sipiora 2008). It is something that we can create for ourselves, casting it with the players we want and imbuing it with emotion where there was none. A fact is a fact -- no way around it. If a person becomes ill and subsequently loses the ability to see, for example, there is not way around the fact that they are now blind. There is no changing that fact. However, when a person tells the story of how they became very ill and what is what like to lose their eyesight, the story becomes different with each telling as there are strong feelings that go along with it.

Hillman argued that who we are as people, our psychic identity, comes from our own fictionalization of facts that complicate the events into a story, creating a narrative that inexorably takes on some of the qualities of a myth. Myths are important for identity as their very nature has a timeless element. There are many different archetypes that come out of myths. If we are to look at the archetype of the mother, for example, we know (through our own interpretations) that the mother will take care of us. She will tend to all of our needs. She will feed us when we are hungry and protect us from danger. However, there are a number of different ways to feed and protect that are both concrete and symbolic.

Ricoeur argued that everyone has a vague sense of who they want to be, anticipating his or her own identity. The person then plays the role of the person who they have created. Each time an individual explains who they are, a new interpretation of those same elements is created.

The facts about each of us get hold of new meaning when they are made an essential part of a narrative. Our narrative will keep evolving throughout our entire lifetimes until we die.

Hillman (1977) discusses Jung's archetypal persons ("the little people") in Re-visioning psychology, stating that Jung used the words "shadow," "self" and "anima" or "animus" to refer to the structural components of the personality. Hillman suggested that we think of them as partial personalities and the way they relate is almost like characters in a story. The person can think of him or herself as being made up of personal relationships going on inside us -- or, as Hillman called it "an inner commune."

The shadow is one of the most common archetypes that reflects the more profound parts of our psyche. These are elements of us that are darker, unknown, and shadowy -- and they can be potentially harmful. The self, for Jung, is not just a person, but the self is also God. It is our spirit that connects us to others and the rest of the universe. The anima (male) or animus (female) -- or rather, the soul. It is the way we can get to communicate with the collective unconscious. The anima or animus represents the true self, according to Jung.

Hillman (1977) notes that we speak familiarly of these archetypes as the components of personality play "through their archetypal scenes, which we call our life problems" and they even get their own personal pronouns. For example: "She (the mother complex) paralyzes me." Or "He (the father complex) never stops driving me; he wants me perfect" (1977). We recognize Jung's archetypes in image as well as emption. They have a very significant impact on us, which Jung believed was because they have very profound and primitive origins. It is these archetypes that Jung believed were ultimately responsible for our personalities. Hillman notes that Jung said, "It is not we who must personify them; they have a personal nature from the beginning" (1977).

"Sticking to the image" is Hillman's (Moore, 1990) motto when it comes to how important it is to preserving the image. This means that images should not be translated into meanings "as though images were allegories or symbols" (Hillman; Moore, 1990). He believes that if there is some kind of latent dimension to an image, "it is its inexhaustibility, its bottomlessness" (1990).

Hillman (Moore, 1990) states that "the soul reveals itself in its ideas, which are not 'just ideas' or 'just up in the head,' and may not be 'pooh-poohed' away, since they are the very modes through which we are envisioning and enacting our lives." This means that we are always having ideas. There are a part of us as we go about our daily rituals, without even really being aware that they are there. These are imaginal images and Hillman (1990) posits that they are as important as a person's dreams and desires. "Our images are our keepers, as we are theirs" (1990).

The active imagination is a way for people to truly know themselves. Hillman (Moore, 1990) says that the active imagination is similar to art in procedure but is very distinct from art's goal. Active imagination "foregoes an end result in physical product, but more because its intention is Know Thyself" (1990). This active imagination is with us throughout our lifetimes. When we think of knowing ourselves, really understanding who we are, …from the imaginistic viewpoint, self-understanding is interminable because it is not in time to begin with. Know Thyself is revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous; it like a painting, a lyric poem; biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act… Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself (Hillman; Moore, 1990).

In "The thought of the heart," Hillman (Moore, 1990) discusses the importance of beauty as it is a way through which "the gods touch our senses, reach the heart and attract us to life." Aesthetics bring everything around us to life and if there were no beauty or some way of perceiving beauty (sense perception) then the world would not be alive. Hillman (1990) suggests that it is the thought of the heart that then perceives the and animates the images. This suggests that there is a soulful quality in all the things in our environment whether they are natural or not.

What this comes down to is an appreciation of aesthetics, and through the appreciation or "thought of the heart" we are able to bring soul to everything in the world. The world becomes animated, given worth and significance through art and the aesthetic response to what is offered to the soul.

Hillman (Moore, 1990) uses a phrase from the Koran to help us understand how images are the only things that remain after something has perished: "Everything shall perish except His face." This phrase leads us to understand that every thing but His face will be gone. Everything can be destroyed, everything can go away, and all that ends up is the "face of things as they are" (1990).

Hillman (Moore, 1990) is suggesting that we must rely on the "heart of the Lion," which is the heart's emotion that is made up of each of our animal natures. In order to understand ourselves, we must find a way of imagining our own hearts and we must understand the importance of aesthetics when it comes to understanding the world around us. While aesthetics may seem like a strange paradigm to consider in psychology, it is one that Hillman claims will help us understand not only ourselves -- but the world around us as well.

In "Anima mundi: The return of the soul to the world," Hillman is referring to the return of psychological subjectivity to the world of nature. By returning the soul to the world we are essentially giving ourselves back to nature after having been subject to the desires of the self (which is probably referring to Western psychology). There used to be a relationship that existed between people and the outer or non-human world, and Hillman believes that this relationship has been lost.

There is soul in everything around us as was discussed in Hillman's article "The thought of the heart." We give soul to the world around us, yet if we are not connected to our heart, how are we to give life to the world around us? We can think about this another way too: if we have a kinship with nature around us, it will help us to be better able to understand our own true selves.

Hillman's returning of the soul to the world feels a lot like some kind of green or eco psychology. The anima mundi is what gives us a signal in our hearts to do something. Our focus today on material things had probably also led us to tear away from the natural world. We think more about things we can buy to fill some sort of desire or need inside of us. He says that "the more we confine interiority to within the individual, the more we lose the sense of soul as a psychic reality…within all things" (Hillman). Here we see that… READ MORE

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