"In regard to art, a most important distinction is made between the bricoleur and the engineer. An old French term, the bricoleur is a kind of handyman who uses whatever means are available. His significance lies in the fact that his forms or materials have no preordained function; they find their place according to spur of the moment notions and activities. The scientist or engineer gives form to function or meaning, while the bricoleur gives meaning to form." (Jack Burnham, 1971, p. 10/Untitled Oil on canvas, 1948 by Clyfford Still; Private collection, in Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980 by Thomas Albright)
 
 
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 

With Hillman, the founder of the Archetypalist camp of Jungaian psychology, one finds many of the ingredients of a postmodern phenomenology. His pluralism multiplies difference by way of images independent of all reference--that is, not representational of reality but pure signs of themselves. In contrast to the developmental perspective, personal history outside the immediate image is avoided. Only the "word" retains historical qualities, and this is perused incessantly. Rejecting the Enlightenment heritage so endearing to the medical establishment that urges psychology in positivist directions, Hillman typically attributes relevance to the particular and the irrational. All that modernity has set aside, including emotions, feelings, intuition, reflection, speculation, personal experience, custom, violence, metaphysics, tradition, cosmology, magic, myth, religious sentiment, and mystical experience (Graff, 1979). Instead, Hillman questions the conscious, logical, coherent subject. He rejects conventional, and academic styles of discourse, preferring the audacious and provocative.

Hillman’s emphasis is preeminently phenomenological. "Archetypal psychology, in distinction to Jungian, considers the Archetypal to be always phenomenal," wrote Avens (1980). It avoids the Kantian idealism implied by Jung (de Voogd, 1977). It offers many of the same distinctions between the Kantian and Phenomenological (Husserlian) perspectives. Another phenomenological premise claimed by Archetypal psychology is that, "The datum with which Archetypal psychology begins is the image" (Hillman, 1983a, p. 6). The method of therapy then hinges upon the cultivation of imagination (Hillman, 1983a), and avoiding any reference to the classical conception of an after-image as the result of sensations and perceptions (Hillman, 1978). With Hillman, as with phenomenology, the image is the psyche itself in its imaginative from the psyche is considered to be fundamentally poetic (in the tradition of phenomenologist Gaston Bachlard). The golden rule of Archetypal psychology’s method is to "Stick to the image" (a classical Hussurlian approach).

In line with other postmodernists, Hillman moved toward "deconstructionism" with such works as Re-visioning Psychology (Hillman, 1975b). In general, postmodernism pursues three methodological approaches: introspective, anti-objectivist interpretation and deconstruction. The distinction between interpretation and deconstruction is not always clear. Some consider deconstruction "nothing other than interpretation." However, deconstruction does emphasize a certain negativity while interpretation expresses a more positive point of view (Sarup, 1989, p. 60). This postmodern methodology attempts to demystifying text. Instead of attempting to sort out the central arguments of the text, the object is to examine its margins (Hoy, 1985). Hillman attempts to reveal textual hierarchies and presuppositions, displacing these hierarchies as best he can (Culler, 1982).

One meets this process of hierarchy displacement repeatedly in postmodern attempts to expose the underlayers of meaning. Deconstructing the assumptions of "presence," for instance, attempts to see through the proposition of guaranteed certainty (Appignanesi, 1995). However, Hillman turned these deconstructionist maneuvers on Jung a bit too aggressively for my taste. And in this, he was sometimes successful and sometimes not. My bias is that he was less successful at deconstructing Jung himself than his followers. Even so, his Archetypalist approach proved somewhat clinically vacuous. In Hillman’s pluralist world, any conclusion seems inevitably inadequate. It struggles toward indeterminacy, diversity, difference, and complexity. But what do you do with this once you have it? My feeling is that it leads mostly to a world of simulacrum, of images-of-images in which the distinction between representation and what it refers to in the real world is inevitably lost.

Hillman might perhaps argue that the images are the real world, with statements like, "At the most basic level of psychic reality are fantasy images. These images are the primary activity of consciousness. Images are the only reality we apprehend directly (Hillman, 1975a), and this would be consistent with others postmodernist philosophies. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, described a philosophy in which images exist either as reflections of reality, perversions of reality, indications of the absence of reality, or as simulacrum in which they are their own reality (Baudrillard, 1994). This is contrasted to the pre-Renaissance conception of images considered to be reflections of reality. However, one of the dangers to treating images as if they are the real is that the "real" can become a redundant formulation of hyperreality in which images bread incestuously with each other. But while the kind of phenomenological purism this represents provides a grand scheme for bracketing presuppositions, it also screams for grounding to be much use clinically.

I would argue that Hillman does a poor job of preparing his readers for the shock phenomenology imposes upon those entrenched in the Cartesian/Kantian paradigm. This shock is buffered in Jung's work. Jung still had one foot in nineteenth-century empirical sciences (albeit, a singular source of confusion with his work today). Jung had an Enlightenment crust on his pie, more easily swallowed by Cartesian gullets. Hillman does.

Archetypal psychology and Phenomenology both ask that one suspend one’s natural way of looking at the world . . . .  that one see phenomena differently . . . .  (ala Husserl), that one ask questions differently. It’s hard, it’s odd, it’s peculiar furnishings in a Cartesian house. Rather than asking "How can I cure this person from his dysfunction?" Archetypal psychology might ask instead, "Why should this person be denied his God-given right to be dysfunctional?" (Thus validating rather than banishing the image of dysfunction). Rather than asking "How can I deal with this abnormal condition?" Archetypal psychology might consider instead that "abnormal" conditions are existentially human and hence fundamentally normal. They only become psychiatric conditions when looked at psychiatrically (recalling the postmodernist attitudes toward ‘Grand Narrative’ actively defining and creating history).

In this, modern psychology has emphasized the client’s story as historical representation rather than actual experience in the moment. And yet, the notion of truth is often conjoined with versions of reality (those of the analyst). "It must be clear," writes Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984, p. 81) "that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable . . . " While the modern psychologist might consider his role to be that of helping the client achieve a more adequate understanding of reality, the Archetypalist might argue in post-modern fashion that there is no true reality to discover. The postmodern therapist then acts principally to disrupt the frame of reference and manipulate meanings by referring to alternative interpretations (Hare-Mustin & Marecek 1988). As with Jung’s work, Archetypal psychology is an opus contra naturum -- a work that runs counter to one’s usual thinking.

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Michael Staples
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