Active imagination in service of a new psychology

 Let’s recall Frye’s observation in The Education Imagination, that the language of the imagination, through the use of figurative devices like metaphor, simile, personification is a unifying of one thing with another, in a picture. And while the first ‘thing’ is not LITERALLY the thing to which it is being compared, the linkage deepens and clarifies, and enhances the “image” in both the imagination of the writer/poet/novelist/playwright and  the reader/audience. The double “linkage”, if entered fully by all participants, cannot be either denied or avoided.

Similarly, from the perspective of James Hillman, each moment, crisis, accident, illness, tragedy, if it is to be “mined” fully as if it were a poem, in an of itself, and then related imaginatively to a universal, timeless, voice of a god, goddess, myth or legend, keeping in mind that gods never act singularly, this way of seeing human psychology, provides a timeless, universal, cultural, psychological and often religious ‘linkage’ to persons and patterns, in and through those archetypes. And it is in the paradoxical relationship, based on the profound uniqueness of each individual, as discerned “backwards” (borrowing from Kierkegaarde) that surprisingly illustrates and embodies our shared human story.

Not only is Hillman pushing back against literality, nominalism, and all forms and faces of reductionism, opposing clinical diagnostics of psychiatry and psychology and the regard of the illness as the problem to be rectified through interventions of pharmaceutics, or shock therapy or ‘talk’ therapy, he is also acknowledging, without prejudice or contempt, the fact that the medical profession, by its own acknowledgement, has access to the evidence of the ‘presenting problem’ through the eyes and larynx and facial expressions of the patient. It is not surprising, then, that the whole biography lies at the core of the approach of archetypal psychology. And, as in the discernment, through the imagination of individual figurative devices in literature, there is no implicit morality in the image itself, so too, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, dwelling inside the ‘image’ of the moment, and remaining open to the evocation of the mythic/archetypal voices that “might” by inherent in and coming out of that image. Furthermore, since archetypal psychology posits a polytheism of voices, and challenges the cultural adherence to a monotheism (not merely from a Christian, Judaic or Muslim) but as a lens through which the culture tends to perceive.

Adopting or borrowing the word “soul” or “psyche” not as a thing, but as a way of seeing, (another of the linguistic challenges from Hillman), he has attempted to obstruct and then to deconstruct not only ‘what’ we ‘see’ and consider significant, but also ‘how’ we see ourselves, and our critical moments.

Hillman does, however, seek to differentiate the active imagination in his work, A Blue Fire, pps. 57-58)

v from the spiritual disciplines, because there are no prescribed or proscribed fantasies

v from artistic endeavour, and the creative production of paintings or poems,

v from silence and stillness but at story or theatre of conversation, emphasizing the importance of the word, as an instrument of feeling

v from mystical activity, for the sake of reaching select states of consciousness

v from a psychological activity in only the personal sense for the sake of curing symptoms, calming or abreacting terrors and greeds, bettering families, improving and developing personality…not as a problem solver.

v From a psychological activity in the transpersonal sense of ritual magic, the attempt to work with images by and for the human will.

…Hillman further articulates:

Therefore, active imagination, so close to art in procedure, is distinct from it in aim. This is not only because active imagination foregoes an end result, in A physical product, but more because its intention is Know Thyself, self-understanding, which is as well its limit—the paradoxical limit of endlessness that corresponds with the Heraclitean endlessness of psyche itself. Self-understanding is necessarily uroboric, an interminable turning in a gyre amid its scenes, its visions and voices. From the viewpoint of narrative, the visions and voices are an unfolding story without end. Active imagination is interminable because the story goes into death and death is endless-who knows where it has to stop? From the viewpoint of narrative, self-understanding is that healing fiction which individuates a life into death. From the imagistic viewpoint, however, self-understanding is interminable because it is not in time to begin with. Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act. We may fiction connections between the revelatory moments, but these connections are hidden like the spaces between the sparks or the dark sears around the luminous fishes’ eyes, images Jung employs to account for images. Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself. So, Know Thyself, terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it…..To see the archetypal in an image is thus not a hermeneutic (branch knowledge that deals with interpretation) move. It is an imagistic move. We amplify an image by means of myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity. Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image. Our move, which keeps archetypal significance limited within the actually presented image, also keeps meaning always precisely embodied. No longer would there be images without meaning and meaning without images. The neurotic condition that Jung so often referred to as ‘loss of meaning’ would now be understood as ‘loss of image,’ and the condition would be met therapeutically less by recourse to philosophy, religion, and wisdom, and more by turning directly to one’s actual images in which archetypal significance resides. (A Blue Fire, pps. 59-60)

For this scribe, there is a significant stretch, away from what has become conventional vernacular, borrowing and stealing from Jung, into a new phase of ‘seeing’ images of and for their own sake…without attempting to deploy the various conventional ‘deployments’ and uses and goals of contemporary culture and therapy, and religion and philosophy. Hillman is staking out territory exclusive to psychology, in a vigorous attempt to remove surgically, epistemologically, and iconoclastically, some of what he considers the barnacles of medicine, law, literalism, nominalism and agency between and among individuals, including between client and therapist/analyst.

Charting a new voyage for psychology, through the maze that has been overgrown by both academic and professional institutions and regimes, and opening possibilities of new “births’ in how we might begin to “see” ourselves and each other. We need no longer start from a cultural perspective that holds ‘differencce and deviance and abnormality’ as primarily and unequivocally either good or bad. There is a chaotic aspect to what Hillman proposes, that opens, without closing, the process of Know Thyself….and that not merely defers from quick and glib ‘nomenclature’ but rather remains in and open to the myths/voices/legends that lie at the heart of each image.

He posits the dream, as an example of images that continually appear, without the will of the dreamer, as his best ‘process analogy’ for the enterprise. Figures in our dreams, considered as they are, without instantly comparing them to the ‘vernacular’ or the cultural notion of their meaning and identity. And as this process of Know Thyself is begun and continued, we have to face another ‘Hillman’ image, that of the uroborus snake, with its head in its tail. A professor of mine, now deceased, introduced me to the word, in the context of a person/organization/culture that merely repeats itself, grinding a trench of tradition, comfort, expectation and dependability and reliability.
(the old adage of some teachers having ten years of experience, while others have 1 year of experience ten times comes to mind) Hillman uses the word uroboric, as a descriptive, without prejudice, without moralizing, without termination, by linking all moments to our death….when who knows?

The steepness of the cognitive, epistemological, psychological, anthropomorphic  and cultural mountain Hillman is asking his readers to climb, while considerable, will differ for each, depending in part on the degree to which each shares Hillman’s own rebelliousness, his iconoclasm, his depth and range both of scholarship and of psychic experience. Some of us have resisted the kind of nomenclature of the DSM’s for decades, for a variety of reasons. For example, the definition of depression is derived from the patient interviews with primarily female patients. And moving away from the conceptual framework of a diagnosis, to the fullness of the image of the moment, irrespective of the gender, age, ethnicity, culture and language of the client, seems to this scribe as both refreshing and revivifying.

There is a profound difference between an intellectual concept, and our vernacular abounds with words that pose them as “realities” as if our sociology is our personal reality. Similarly, conceptual words have found a welcome home in the field of psychiatry and psychology, and have flooded into the practice of ministry. I have actually encountered a clergy who designed and who wrote her homilies directed to the demographic depiction of her congregation, based on their results on the Myers-Briggs typography, rationalized as an attempt to “reach” as many people as possible.

There is a ‘herd’ aspect to the linguistic, ‘intellectual’ and sociological lens that comes with each pair of prescription eye glasses (metaphorically). We have ‘bought in’ to the mass perceptions that unless we are ‘self-improving’ we are devolving downward. The self-help and the pharmaceutical/pharmacological empires, along with the insurance and the ‘war machine’ so dominate at least American culture, and to a slightly lesser extent Canadian culture, that we have lost the potential first to step away from that psychic edifice, which Hillman seems to suggest is encapsulated in the reign of Molloch (the god of Money), while this scribe might challenge that perhaps Ares, the God of War, might merit a place in the pantheon of contemporary American culture.

From godsandgoddesses.net, we read:  
(Ares) in literature he represents the violent and physical untamed aspect of war, which is in contrast to Athena who represents military strategy and generalship as the goddess of intelligence. Although Ares embodies the physical aggression necessary for success in war, the Greeks were ambivalent toward him because he was a dangerous, overwhelming force that was insatiable in war. He is well known as the love of Aphrodite, ….and though Area plays a limited role in literature, when he does appear in myths it is typically facing humiliation….He was most often characterized as a coward in spite  of his connection to war; he responded even the slightest injury with outrage…Ares was never very popular-either with men or the other immortals, As a result, his worship in Greece was not substantial or widespread….His bird was vulture.

Hillman’s overt linking of the anima mundi (world soul) with the psyche/soul of each person, and this perspective is also a direct challenge to the psychological establishment which in North America, has turned a blind eye, a deaf ear and a resistant intellect to his work, at their own, and our own peril, it says here.

Imagine, for a moment, a school in which the study of ageing, in a medical faculty under the rubric of gerontology, having both the vision and the courage to contemplate first reading, and the formally discussing and then implementing, even as an experimental project, the study by graduate students of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology through such works as Revisioning Psychology, A Blue Fire, Suicide and the Soul, Mythic Figures, and most importantly, The Force of Character, dedicated to those of us with grey beards and/or no hair!....what a fantasy!