Who is behind Archetypal Psychology? An Imaginal Inquiry

Excerpt - Noel Cobb - Archetypal Imagination

When you see a severed head rolling down the path toward our field, ask of it, ask of it—the secrets of the heart: for of it you will learn our hidden mystery. —JALAL 'UDDIN RUMI

With its metaphorical method of mythic reversion, archetypal psychology implicitly lays claim to being a psychology of psychologies, if not the psychology of psychologies. Is archetypal psychology, however, out of bounds for its own method? If as archetypal psychology asserts, fantasy is always going on, then what is the archetypal fantasy within archetypal psychology itself? Through epistrophé any phenomenon can be led back or “reverted” to its archetypal source.1 Suppose we try to lead archetypal psychology back to an archetypal source?

In thus asking who is behind archetypal psychology, we are not asking for the name of a literal person. If we were, we would begin with the obvious: James Hillman, who named archetypal psychology in 1970.2 We would also point to the two immediate fathers of archetypal psychology: Carl Gustav Jung and Henry Corbin.3 We might also list various contemporary authors, cited by Hillman as contributing to the broadly Neoplatonic tradition within which he situates his work: “Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato.”4

………