Archetypal Psychology and Husserl’s Phenomenological Method

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.