Customer Reviews

Archetypal Psychology

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Having read a variety of Hillman's books and articles and also some by Thomas Moore and David Miller, this book is a good summation of Archetypal Psychology's major thrusts. Any longer would perhaps be too technical. A large reference list of articles and books is particularly helpful. It is less theoretically oriented and more practically oriented than Jungian psychology, and, from Hillmans lucid writing, easier to understand.

"As Freud's paradigm of psychopathology was hysteria (and paranoia) and Jung's was schizophrenia, archetypal psychology has so far spoken mainly about depression" p 41. Anyone who has experienced their own underworld will relate to archetypal psychology. It validates and gives voice to those personal and cultural experiences of descent that are marginalised and suppressed in a western culture that priveleges optimism, objective science, consumerism and protestantism.

This is a very, very basic introduction to the kind of psychology associated with James Hillman. The information is presented in short chapters (usually around 3-5 pages) and reads like a long Encylopedia entry (which is the form in which it was originally published). If you're a scholar looking for easily quotable summaries or a bibliography (more than half this book is bibliographic information), this volume would be useful. If you're looking to learn something or are after the pleasure Hillman's lyrical prose usually offers, you'll likely be disappointed here.

I'm not sure archetypal psychology can be summed up in a book like this, nor do I agree with Hillman's reduction of archetype to "image" even granting that by "image" he means something far broader than a mental picture. If you're taking a psych class and need some good test answers, this may be a book to buy. His other books are better.

"Superficial Psychology" would be a suitable term denoting Hillman's theory. The American psychologist James Hillman has in his writings removed the Jungian concept of the archetype as objective inherited pattern and replaced this with the archetypal image as existent within the natural world. Allegedly, what decides whether an image is archetypal or not is the subjects level of appreciation of the image. So if the subject "capitalizes" the image, i.e., decides that he appreciates the image, then it should be regarded archetypal. Hillman's theory belongs to the bizarre category of phenomenological Neoplatonism which means that only what we see should be regarded real, i.e., only what is apparent to consciousness is existent. Hillman says:"the soul is constituted of images, [and] that the soul is primarily an imagining activity...." (Hillman. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 6). These notions are extremely reductive and occasions a primitive psychology and moral. Don't buy it. Buy books by Franz, Neumann or Jung instead.