Experiencing the Archetype (The psychologist perspective)

Selected thoughts on archetypal imagery from a psycology perspective, taken from the essay 'The Collective Unconcious' (Steve Beyer's blog).

  The Jungian perspective and psychologist James Hillman's views on archetypal imagery seem to confirm my view of the 'Tiatriste' portraits as archetypal images. Also see Tiatriste and Jungian Archetypes

 For Freud, there is no such thing as nonverbal thinking; the unconscious is accessed through words. For Jung, on the other hand, the unconscious is accessed through images. These images appear to us in dreams, fantasy, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. These images are how the unconscious communicates with us.

Again contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung maintained that, underneath this unconscious, there lay another unconscious, which he called first the phylogenetic and then the collective unconscious.

For Jung, this collective unconscious is not filled with images. It is filled with archetypes. Jung likened these archetypes to Kantian categories — that is, to a priori conditions for possible experiences. Jung proposed extending the Kantian idea of the logical categories of reason to the production of fantasy; the archetypes, Jung says, are “categories of the imagination.”

Archetypes thus are form without content; they are possibilities of images. Although they are themselves without content, they are often, on the basis of the images whose form they provide, named after mythological figures — the Hera archetype, for example, or the Wise Old Man archetype; or they may be named for some abstract theme, such as the archetype of engulfment or the archetype of rebirth.

We can distinguish archetypal images from ordinary images because archetypal images appear to us on a wave of emotion; they possess salience and depth; they are numinous and mysterious. It is these same archetypal images that appear as motifs in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, and art around the world, arising out of the same set of archetypes in the shared collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams.

There is thus a distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image, a distinction that Jungians — and even Jung himself — have often failed to maintain consistently. There is no access to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; they are transcendental and unrepresentable. All we have are archetypal images, which conform to the a priori conditions imposed by their archetypes. The collective unconscious is a negative borderline concept, just as unknowable as the Kantian thing in itself. We know of the archetypes only through a form of transcendental deduction from numinous images.

Moreover, there is clearly no one-to-one relationship between archetype and image. A single archetype can give rise to any number of archetypal images; and a single archetypal image may — or perhaps may not — be of two different archetypes at the same time. If the relationship between archetype and image is many-to-many, then the relationship between an image and any particular archetype becomes indeterminate.

Just how many archetypes are there? There appears to be no constraint on their number or nature. Steven Walker, a scholar of comparative literature sympathetic to Jung, says that “the list of archetypes is nearly endless.” There can be an archetype for just about any possible human situation, it seems; and conversely each archetype can produce an indefinite number of archetypal images. And apparently we can make up archetypes at will.

And if the person who has produced the numinous image gets to decide with which mythic motif or fairy tale situation it most clearly resonates, then it is not clear why we need to postulate transcendental archetypes of the collective unconscious at all.

Psychologist James Hillman faced this issue squarely, and he chose to eliminate the noun archetype altogether, while preserving the adjective archetypal. The problem, he says, is that Jung moved “from a valuation adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes… Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.”

But we do not need to take the idea of the archetypal in this reified sense. Any image can be archetypal, Hillman says; it need only be given value — archetypalized or capitalized — by the person experiencing it. “By attaching archetypal to an image,” he says, “we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.”

Still, if what we are looking for is the meaning of images — in dreams, visions, imagination, fantasy — then it is worthwhile, I think, to pursue that meaning wherever we can. We do not need to postulate a collective unconscious or the existence of archetypes to pursue that meaning across cultures and through history, or to place our own images in the vast context of human suffering and transformation. The purpose is to give our dreams and visions life-giving depth, overflowing with meaning and power — what Hillman calls “unfathomable analogical richness.” 

With regards to photography and the archetypal image..

Vince Aletti spoke on photography at the symposium on the current state of the field (of photography), held at SFMOMA in April 2010, was the first in a series of public programs on photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-

"If absolute truth were the only thing photography had to offer, it would have disappeared a century ago. Photography isn't merely a window on the world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares, obsessions, and the purest abstraction, as envisioned by Julia Margaret Cameron, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Simmons, and Adam Fuss."