What is Archetypal Psychology?

Modern psychology in its various branches - biological psychology, cognitive psychology, and behaviorism - has often been rightly criticised for being too reductive, materialistic, and literal. More to the point, it completely ignores the psyche, or soul, of the human being. Psychologist James Hillman sought to redress this deficiency in the second half of the twentieth century by founding a school of thought and practice known as Archetypal psychology.

Hillman trained as the Jung Institute, and was influenced by the precepts of Carl Jung's Analytical psychology. He sought to expand upon Jung's work and encompass the full spectrum of mankind's fantasy life. Hillman believed that fantasies and myths shape the psychological lives of every man and woman. His conception of the "Archai" resembled the archetypes that mythologist Joseph Campbell distilled from out of stories the world over: the fundamental and universal fantasies that animate all of life.

In James Hillman's view of the human being, the ego is but one fantasy among the many that compose the psyche. Dreams and inner images were, to him, the language of the soul; and the outer world he termed anima mundi, which essentially meant the soul made manifest in physical terms.

In establishing such a clear link between the inner (dreams) and the outer (consensus reality) worlds, Archetypal psychology runs counter to all the scientific disciplines of the West (such as chemistry, biology, and physiology) that attempt to define reality in strictly physical and measurable terms - discarding, in the process, the fanciful, the poetic, the abstract, and the wisdom of the mystics and the insight of dreams.

James Hillman outlined the principles of Archetypal psychology in several books, the most influencial of which was The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. His work can be seen as an attempt to usher the much-maligned psyche (soul) back into the world, and to help patients not to adapt to society as it is (as behaviorists would have them do), but rather to find their own personal calling - the "seed of their own acorn", as he wrote.

To achieve this end, Archetypal psychology - not surprisingly - draws upon the inner wellspring of wisdom that is our dreams. Hillman did not believe that dreams were manifestations of the garbage of the mind, as many psychologists claimed; nor were they to be fitted into tight interpretations. A dream is a phenomenon that holds personal significance for the dreamer, and only by sticking with the dream and the person's associations to it can its true meaning be found. With dreamwork, Hillman carried many of Carl Jung's ideas to their logical conclusion while also liberating dreams from the constraints of formal categorizing and the search for universal symbols. Dreaming was to be a personal matter, and so Archetypal psychology has become a vehicle for each person to embark upon the journey to discover their own psyche/ soul.