| rdfs:comment | - Archetypal psychology is a vein of inquiry into the psyche inaugurated in the early 1900s by Carl Gustav Jung. Jung and his followers, as well as Mircea Eliade, imagined the psychology of the archetypes from studying anthropology and archeology reports of their times and weaving it into their understandings of the psyche. They studied how the hierarchy of ancient gods, polytheistic religions, and archetypal ideas found in tales might influence modern life with regard to soul, psyche, dreams and the Self.
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| abstract | - Archetypal psychology is a vein of inquiry into the psyche inaugurated in the early 1900s by Carl Gustav Jung. Jung and his followers, as well as Mircea Eliade, imagined the psychology of the archetypes from studying anthropology and archeology reports of their times and weaving it into their understandings of the psyche. They studied how the hierarchy of ancient gods, polytheistic religions, and archetypal ideas found in tales might influence modern life with regard to soul, psyche, dreams and the Self. Aristotle described an archetype as an original from which derivatives or fragments can be taken. In Jung's psychology an archetype is an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious. Jung and his followers followed Sigmund Freud and others of Freud's generation, who also investigated, analyzed and put forth theories about how ancient myths, legends, sagas, and religions mimicked some of the broad impulses and drives in the psyche. There are many psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists who are sometimes called neo-Jungians and who take various approaches to archetypal psychology. These include Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman, with her inquires into the archetypes and dreams of the feminine and how these are affected by clashes and supports from masculine archetypes, therefore influencing soul and psyche in women's development. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian analyst psychiatrist, has also made a lifetime inquiry into the psychology of archetypes for men and for women, and their basis in conscious growth of the soul. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian psychoanalyst, holds that insights into soul and psyche, archetypes and dreams were preserved specifically and handed down by indigenous people worldwide, they being the original archetypal theorists. The inquiry into archetypal psychology has many different subsets, many different progenitors. Archetypal psychology as a basis for developing theory, and especially, down-to-earth applications, is ongoing and evolving constantly. In the mid-1970s, James Hillman, a psychologist who trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, also called his work Archetypal psychology. He reports his is in the Jungian tradition and most directly related to Analytical psychology, yet departs radically. His "archetypal psychology" relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Hillman's archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. To him, the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Hillman's archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post-Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels (see Samuels, 1995).
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