Archetypal Psychology and Husserl’s Phenomenological Method
International Journal of Jungian Studies August 20, 2025 João Luis Corá Silva
This article examines the influence of Husserl's phenomenological method on James Hillman's archetypal psychology. It argues that Hillman's work, from his early thesis Emotion (1959) through his major work Re-visioning Psychology (1975), adopts a phenomenological attitude by bracketing theoretical assumptions to focus on the essence of phenomena. The method is illustrated in how archetypal psychology approaches dream images, attending only to the phenomenology of the image itself without interpretation, in order to grasp its archetypal background. The article contends that this phenomenological turn is central to Hillman's critique of modern psychology's replacement of metaphysical perspective with a phenomenological attitude.