Self-generative images - a premise of ‘Archetypal Psychology’

[Triton]

Self-generative images - a founding premise of ‘Archetypal Psychology’

"The source of images -dream images, fantasy images, poetic images- is
the self-generative activity of the psyche itself. In archetypal
psychology the word "image," therefore, does not refer to an after-
image, the result of sensations and perceptions; nor does "image" mean
a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and
feelings which it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond
itself, neither proprioceptive, external, nor semantic: "images don't
stand for anything" (Hillman 1978a). They are the psyche in its
imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible.
Visibility, however, need not mean that an image must be visually
seen. It does not have to have hallucinatory properties (which confuse
the act of perceiving images with imagining them). Nor do images have
to be heard as in a poetic passage. Such notions of “visibility” tend
to literalize images as distinct events presented to the senses. Hence
Edward Casey (1974), in his path-breaking essay on “Imagination,”
states that an image is not what one sees but the way in which one
sees. An image is given by the imagining perspective and can only be
perceived by an act of imagining.
Casey’s turning of the notion of image from something seen to a way
of seeing offers archetypal psychology’s solution to an old dilemma
between true (vera) imagination (Paracelcus) and false, or fancy
(Coleridge). For archetypal psychology, the distinction depends on the
way in which the image is responded to and worked. The criteria it
uses, therefore, refer to response: metaphorical and imaginative as
being a better response than fanciful or literal and this because,
where the former response is “fecund” (Langer), furthering the
deepening and elaboration of the image, the latter responses dissipate
or program the image into more naïve, shallow, or fixedly dogmatic
significance.
For Archetypal psychology, images are neither good nor bad, true
nor false, demonic nor angelic (Hillman 1977a), though an image always
implicates “a precisely qualified context, mood and scene” (as Hillman
[1977b] has on one occasion defined the image). Thus they do invite
judgment as a further precision of the image, judgment arising from
the image itself as an effect of the image’s own presentation of a
claim for response. To suspend judgment, therefore, is to fall into
the objectivist fantasy. Judgments are inherent to the image (as a
work of art brings with it the standards by which it can be measured
or a text brings with it the hermeneutics by which it can be
interpreted). Archetypal psychology examines the judgments about the
image imagistically, regarding them as its further specifications and
as psychological statements not to be taken literally from a purely
noetic, vantage point detatched from the image judged.
The emphasis upon response has led archetypal psychology to use the
analogy of a craftsman when discussing moral judgments. How well has
the image worked; does the image release and refine further imagining?
Does the response “stick to the image” (Lopez-Pedraza) as the task at
hand, rather than associate or amplify into non-imagistic symbolisms,
personal opinions, and interpretations? Such are the questions asked
by archetypal psychology.
“Stick to the image” (cf. Jung, CW, 320) has become a golden rule
of archetypal psychology’s method, and this because the image is the
primary psychological datum. Though the image always implies more than
it presents, “the depth of the image –its limitless ambiguities… can
only be partly grasped as implications. So to expand upon the dream
image is also to narrow it – a further reason we wish never to stray
too far from the source” (Berry 1974, p. 98).
It must be noted that the “source” is complex: archetypal
psychology is complex at the beginning, since the image is a self-
limiting multiple relationship of meanings, moods, historical events,
qualitative details, and expressive possibilities.

For archetypal psychology psychological practice is rooted in Jung’s
view of the psyche as inherently purposeful: all psychic events
whatsoever have a telos. Archetypal psychology, however, does not
enunciate this telos (in contrast to classical Jungian psychology.
Purposefulness qualifies psychic events, but it is not to be
literalized apart from the images in which it inheres. Thus archetypal
psychology refrains from stating goals for therapy (individuation or
wholeness) and for its phenomena such as symptoms and dreams. Purpose
remains a perspective toward events in Jung’s original description of
the prospective versus the reductive view. Positive formulations of
the telos of analysis lead only into teleology and dogmas of goals.
Archetypal psychology fosters a sense of purpose as therapeutic in
itself because it enhances the patient’s interest in psychic
phenomena, including the most objectionable symptoms, as intentional.
But the therapist does not literalize these intentions, and therefore
follows the Freudian mode of restraint and abstention. It moves along
a ‘via negativa’, attempting to deliteralize all formulations of
purpose so that the analysis is reduced to sticking with the actual
images.
[James Hillman - Archetypal Psychology: a brief account. p.6-8]

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For those who may confuse archetypal psychology (a movement that has
differentiated itself and branched from Jungian psychology) with the
Jungian philosophies regarding ‘archetypes’, the following by James
Hillman clarifies one of several ideological departures:

‘By "archetype" I can only refer to the phenomenal archetype, that
which manifests itself in images. The noumenal archetype per se cannot
by definition be presented so that nothing whatsoever can be posited
of it. In fact whatever one does say about the archetype per se is a
conjecture already governed by an archetypal image. This means that
the archetypal image precedes and determines the metaphysical
hypothesis of a noumenal archetype. So, let us apply Occam's razor to
Kant's noumenon. By stripping away this unnecessary theoretical
encumbrance to Jung's notion of archetype we restore full value to the
archetypal image.’ (Hillman 1971).