Archetypal Psychology and Husserl’s Phenomenological Method

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.

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Abstract

Archetypal psychology is a theoretical development of C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology and a critical theoretical approach to modern psychology as a whole. Among the criticisms made of psychology by its founder James Hillman, this article highlights the replacement of metaphysical perspective with a phenomenological attitude. Thus, the main objective of this article is to investigate the presence of Husserl’s phenomenological method in Hillman’s work, since the use of the phenomenological method in his first work, the thesis Emotion (1959), where he adheres to the phenomenological attitude of bracketing theories about emotions, until the publication of his opus magnum, Re-visioning Psychology (1975), in which the process of psychologizing, like Husserlian phenomenology, turns to the “essence” of phenomena. The phenomenological method will be clearly illustrated through the work with dream images, where Archetypal Psychology will focus only on the phenomenology of the image itself (without interpretations), aiming to grasp its archetypal background.