[Mark Allinson]

Hi, AE, great to see you in this discussion.

Let me start with your last point:

Mind you, all this is poetry-fodder....

Absolutely! And that is certainly consistent with one of Hillman's central expressions - that Archetypal Psychology assumes "a poetic basis of mind":

“Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the process of imagination”. Re-Visioning Psychology, p xvii.

The strangeness and complexity of Hillman's psychology is not easily conveyed in short quotes on threads, and really deserves a great deal of thought and study - and a new way of seeing our experience. I am aware that every point I make creates new problems for explanation. I taught a course at Monash University in Melbourne in the late eighties which included among its texts Re-Visioning Psychology. But even that course was far too short to do the material justice.

Mark, since you cite Schuon somewhere, I seem to remember Schuon making a sharp distinction between true spirituality & what he called "psychologism."

I am so glad you raised this point, AE. Hillman is constantly warning of the danger of "psychologism". Psychologism attempts to interpret events or ideas in subjective terms, explaining things by way of a reduction to psychological factors.

Hillman differentiates his process of "psychologizing" (or "seeing through") from the illegitimate process of "psychologism".

"Psychologism means only psychologizing, converting all things into psychology. Psychology then becomes the new queen and - by taking itself and its premises literally - becomes a new metaphysics. When the insights of psychologizing harden into systematic arguments, becoming solid and opaque and monocentric, we have the metaphysical position of psychologism: there is only one fundamental discipline and ultimate viewpoint, psychology ... Philosophical and scientific assertions are, of course, not only psychological statements. To reduce such assertions wholly to psychology commits the psychologistic fallacy, or 'psychologism. This point is important." Re-Visioning Psychology, p 133.

The key difference between Hillman's "psychologizing" and the fallacy of "psychologism" is that for him the psyche of individuals does not involve the "container fantasy" - the "skin-encapsulated ego" - the mind as a purely subjective entity, possessed by a human person "within" the head.

"Archetypal psychologizing ... avoids the psychologistic fallacy because ... the archetypes remain the perspectives of mythical persons who cannot be reduced to human beings or placed inside their personal lives, their skins, or their souls ... We keep from psychologism by remembering that not only is the psyche in us as a set of dynamisms, but we are in the psyche." p 134.

Archetypal psychology, Hillman stresses, "is NOT a humanism."

So Hillman's psychology is not reductionistic in the way of other psychologies: "psychologizing does not mean making psychology of events, but of making psyche of events - soul making. So psychologizing methods may be applied to psychology itself." p 134. The process of "seeing through" literalisms is never ending - where it does come to an end and a conclusion, Hillman sees paranoia. We do not so much have a psyche within us, but, as Jung says, Esse in anima - we have our being in the midst of soul or psyche, which is everywhere. As much "out there" in the world of things as "in here".

In any mystical tradition the "unmanifested" (e.g. Eckhardt's "Godhead") is at a higher ontological level than the "manifested" or phenomenal, & the goal of mystical practice is to realize that higher level, which is nothing if not unimaginable, surely. To say that "the unimaginable" is itself an image is to play with words while disastrously missing the point (i.e., the difference in levels of being).

Did I say "the unimaginable" is an image? - I think I might have said that "nothingness" or "the void" is an image, because it may be experienced. It might not be describable but unless it can be experienced, where is it?

When Hillman sees such expressions as "different levels of being" he looks for the archetype behind the statement - in this case, the archetype of Hercules, the fantasy of heroic conquest of "higher and ever higher" levels of being and mystical attainment. Hillman would call this a type of literalism - the heroic ego battling ever upward in a quest for ultimate enlightenment. Hillman sees all metaphysical statements as literalisms of images.

Jung's assertion, that the psyche "will never get beyond itself," has problems. Insofar as it means simply that the experiencer can never experience anything it is not equipped to experience, it is a meaningless tautology.

I don't think it is meaningless. The idea of a transcendent really - entirely apart and distinct from all psychic elements - is itself a psychic idea or image. The image of a transcendent reality always remains an immanent image.

Insofar as it means that the contents of the psyche's experience derive exclusively from the psyche itself, it is a nightmarish solipsism. It's like saying a finger, touching a rock, never gets beyond the finger. Is not the act of touching a way of seeing what's outside?

If the psyche is conceived in humanistic terms, which it invariably is today, as a thing entirely contained with the head of a human person, this would indeed imply a solipsistic nightmare. But again, we live in the sea of psyche, esse in anima, which is not simply "in here."

"Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image." Here again the gratuitous extra step: not "the void" but "experience of the void." The void itself has, by definition, no images. To say that experience of the void is an image is.... a curious proposition, when you think about it. How does one imagine the experience of nothing?

AE, you might have missed my earlier point that for Hillman, "image" is not simply an object to psyche, but "the way of seeing" of that particular psyche, resulting from trans-individual archetypes. The archetypal orientation of a psyche is as much an "image" as its objects. As Meister Eckhart says:

"The great wastes to be found in this divine ground, have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself ..."

This mystical way of seeing is itself the "image" here. Where is this "void" unless an experienced image - and we should note this is not Eckhart's consciousness of the void, but God's consciousness, which he participates in.

"A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground."

As I said, Hillman dispenses with the Kantean noumenon - the thing in itself. Anything we might say about such a transcendent object is ALWAYS an immanent image.

Psychologism really is bad business, Mark, largely because it's so good up to a point. It works out well until it doesn't. And then ...

Well at least we can agree on this point, AE, and I am as much against it as Hillman, and yourself.

As I say, I am aware that posts such as this will probably generate a degree of protest, horror and confusion - if not outright rejection.

All I can really suggest is to read Hillman - start with Re-Visioning Psychology where most of the principles of AP may be found. But have a google at the many other books and essays Hillman has written.