Renaissance Neoplatonism and Archetypal Psychology
Excerpt-James Hillman-Re-Visioning Psychology
Often in the course of a therapeutic analysis a revolution in experience occurs. Soul is rediscovered, and with it comes a rediscovery of humankind, nature, and world. One begins to see all things psychologically, from the viewpoint of the soul, and the world seems to carry an inner light. The soul’s freedom to imagine takes on preeminence as all previous divisions of life and areas of thought lose their stark categorical structures. Politics, money, religion, personal tastes and relationships, are no longer divided from each other into compartments but have become areas of psychological reflection; psyche is everywhere.
This revolution in experience took place on a grand scale during the Renaissance, and was embodied in the philosophy of Neoplatonism;51 it was a “panpsychism,” psyche everywhere. There are striking likenesses between the main themes of Neoplatonism and archetypal psychology. Most important, the style of fantasying of the two is similar. In part this similarity is, of course, due to the fact that traditional Neoplatonism has influenced archetypal psychology, and in part because we interpret Neoplatonism in the light of our needs for a traditional background. But mainly the coincidences between Renaissance Neoplatonism and archetypal psychology rest upon a common starting point: soul. Neoplatonism treats “of the nature of man by means of the concept of Soul, conceived as something substantial. . . .”52
This body of thought gives full answer to the longing for “a soul of bulk and substance,” the opening cry of this chapter. It is subtle, complex, and ambiguous, a composite of thinking, erotic feeling, and imagination. It is more mythic and exhortative than expositional and discursive;33 it persuades through rhetoric rather than proving through logic, preferring to be evocative and visionary rather than explanatory.
Neoplatonism abhorred outwardness, the literalistic and naturalistic fallacies. It sought to see through literal meanings into occult ones, searching for depth in the lost, the hidden, and the buried (texts, words, leftovers from antiquity). It delighted in surprising juxtapositions and reversals of ideas, for it regarded the soul as ever in movement, without definite positions, a borderline concept between spirit and matter. All the while this philosophy remained close to alienation, sadness, and awareness of death, never denying depression or separating melancholy from love and love from intellection. It was often contemptuously negligent of contemporary science and theology,54 regarding both empirical evidence and scholastic syllogisms as only indirectly bearing on soul. Instead, it recognized the signal place of imagination in human consciousness,35 considering this to be the primary activity of the soul. Therefore any psychology that would have soul as its aim must speak imaginatively. It referred frequently to Greek and Roman mythical figures—not as allegories, but as modes of reflection.
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