Hillman: How Jewish Is Archetypal Psychology?

HOW JEWISH IS ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY?
(Just a Little Note)

JAMES HILLMAN

(In commemoration of the year 1492 and the Edict of Expulsion, March 31, of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella.)

Archetypal psychology has been placed in different mainstream religious traditions. David Miller has found it Protestant because of its radical attacks on comfortable idolatries and its deconstructive method of “seeing through.” He sees the red thread of Protest against established authority linking its words, and he hears in those words the echoes of Biblical prophets who, as Miller says, tell it forth, forthright, like it is.

That this psychology claims roots in Neoplatonism and relies on a Dominican Priest, Marsilio Ficino, for its fundamental notion of soul, places it also within the Roman Catholic camp. Catholic Schools—University of Dallas, Lone Mountain College, Salve Regina, Notre Dame—have hosted its conferences, indicating. perhaps, more than mere convenience and generosity. Because archetypal psychology continues those philosophical discussions that lie at the historical roots of Christian theology—the arguments about one God or many, the power of images, the distinction between Hebrewism and Hellenism, the mysticism of the heart, the interest in ritual, the differences between eros and agape, the significance of the underworld and afterlife, as well as references to Patristic writers, it shares a lot of ground with Roman Catholicism.

Yet in the hands of Charles Boer and Ginette Paris, and in view of my attention to such figures as Athene, Mars, Dionysus, Hades, Eros, Pan and to philosophers such as Heraclitus and Socrates, as well as to the ideas of Personifying and Dehumanizing, archetypal psychology is clearly a pre-Christian endeavor, too, its grace, its meditation and its metamorphoses neither Protestant nor Catholic. Hardly Christian at all, but Pagan.

There’s more to it than Catholic, Protestant and Pagan. The Jewish component has been forgotten—or repressed. Nothing surprising here, especially in view of the ugliness surrounding the Freud/Jung fights about “Jewish” psychology, and also how the “Jewish question” runs through all the development of and suppression of psychoanalysis. Suppression, oppression, repression—we’re talking Jewish daily bread and depth psychology’s too. Didn’t Freud regard his most important discovery and the first principle of psychoanalysis to be repression? Nothing surprising here either: Jewish Freud in Habsburg Vienna. So, by finding archetypal psychology Jewish, too, I’m opening the door wide to suppressed demons I can’t even imagine.

Demons can disguise themselves as stereotypes covering over the pointy meanness of their spirit. As Brutal Drunk, Fascist Colonel, Cheap Slut or Dirty Jew, that is, as stock characters, they seem universally archetypal, larger than life, and thus able to suck the blood from our reactions. We cave in to their magnified power, victims of their archetypal pretension. We forget that these figures from Central Casting are not mythical at all but only stereotypes of the lesser human regions. Their persistence is so undeniably strong only because of literalism: they strike (typos) us as solidly (stereo) fixed realities. It is this literalism, not an archetypal essence, that gives stereotypical accusations their vampiric force.

So, how deal with a vampire? Neither garlic, nor the Cross—just pull its teeth. Listen carefully to the accusations and hear through to their metaphorical value. This is how I try to practice what Jungians call “integrating the shadow,” and this is the method I’ll be pursuing in this little essay.

Not in theology or ritual, in textual reverence or law is archetypal psychology Jewish; rather it is Jewish in its current incursions into the collective culture of therapy, a culture which is horribile dictu and kholile, still devoutly unconsciously Christian. By unconsciously Christian I mean a culture unconscious of its Christianism. I mean that the most resistant unconscious is not so much primitive wildness or inert sloth as it is the Christian inheritance that informs every feeling, every thought that comes to mind. Christianism is endemic to the culture, inescapable. Contemporary therapy partakes of this unconsciousness in its worship of the inner child, its self-righteousness, and its sentimentalism about victimization and empowerment (see Nietzsche), What in Christian tradition is being washed in the blood of the innocent white lamb appears in the culture as salvation through denial—a denial that therapy is powerless to pierce since it worships at the same altar. Hence my “Running Engagement with Christianity” in both Inter Views and The Dream and the Underworld. I have been trying for years to distance an archetypal psychology from the Christianism of therapy.

Archetypal psychology does just what anti-Semitic legends have said about the Jews for centuries. It curiously conforms with vicious stereotypes that pervade the collective culture. What could be worse than to be unconscious about itself, its own Jewishness! How better court disaster than by unwittingly fulfilling the facile stereotypes of anti-Semitism? For, yes archetypal psychology does disturb the mindless life, its long nose does sniff shadows in the nice day. And tho’ it appeals to the roots of Western traditions in Greece, the Renaissance and the Romantics, and revivifies these roots by revisioning them, nonetheless it takes down the high moralism, the other-worldliness, and the redemptive mission—the Christian ambition in that tradition, Archetypal psychology insidiously permeates Western faith in hope, salvation and the monotheism of love (love conquers all) which it psychologizes as styles of Christian denial.

Moreover, this “Jewish” psychology undermines the theologies on which it depends, biting the very hands that feed it: Plotinus’s One, Jung’s divine Self, Corbin’s transcendent mundus imaginalis. And it tries to employ the classic Jewish (cf. Heinrich Heine) rhetorics of attack: scholarly references to patriarchal authorities, clever bon mots, twisted midrashic interpretations and sardonic humor, to wit, Freud’s Own Cookbook.

Let me now review six legendary accusations against the Jews, just to show how archetypal psychology’s “Jewishness” places this psychology in tension with collective culture. Why else is it so marginalized? So assertively paranoid? And why else are we always trying to dive into the mainstream, making these desperate attempts to escape from the ghetto of introverted “self”-confinement? This Jewish sense of alienation may account also for recent moves toward assimilation (the city, multiculturalism, men’s movements), and an assimilation into a notion of soul, the anima mundi, more ancient in time, extensive in space and far more concretely communal than Christianism’s personal soul located inside the individual.

I. Christ-Killers

The most familiar label even if today no longer politically correct, applied to Jews has been that they are to blame for the death sentence upon Jesus Christ. Who did what—Roman soldiers, Pontius Pilate, the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees, Pharisees, Judas, God Himself in His infinite Wisdom—does not affect the underlying belief that the Jews were ultimately responsible for the shameful public execution of the only perfect man who ever lived, God’s own son.

The killing of the savior, redeemer, divine man goes on in archetypal psychology as the deconstruction of salvation, redemption and perfection, as well as the refusal to accept any futurism such as the current progressivism called “growth.” (Good Jews don’t grow. They study.) Archetypal psychology considers that ambitious idols like the imitatio Christi keep us ordinary citizens nailed to impossibilities and agonizingly in search of therapeutic reliefs. The sops offered by archetypal psychology seem vinegary so long as one has not descended from the high cross. For archetypal psychology, relief comes only upon taking down that Jungian construction supposedly embedded in the core of every human soul, the cross of opposites on which we have been hanged. Once suffering is imagined not as the original sinful condition but as the result of a sin-filled dogma from which the citizen needs saving, then the exemplar of this two-thousand year passio is no longer the model of psychic truth.

Archetypal psychology is particularly vulnerable to the accusation of Christ-killing because it has dethroned the Jungian identification of Self with Christ. In fact, it has presented a psychology without a theory of Self, hardly mentioning that word, except to criticize it as a senex term that maintains Jungian orthodoxy bound over to Christian theology.

A more recent move published in the Hillman/Ventura book does return to the idea of “self,” which it there defines as the “interiorization of community.” Again, this notion separates “self” from a personalized incarnation and affirms its identity with an old Jewish and early Christian idea that you are with the divine only as far as you are communal.

II. Until the Conversion of the Jews

For ages that phrase stood as meaning “impossible.” Jews would never commit to the Christian credo. The stubborn refusal to budge from apodictic assertions like stick to the image and all is fantasy shows a stiff-necked pride within archetypal psychology. It takes its own tenets as commandments given from the mountain. It will not convert its metaphorical vision to psychological literalisms about, for instance, the end goal of soul-making as wisdom, integration, and conjunction of opposites. All ends and goals are de-literalized as imaginations; heaven is not reached after life but intimated at home any Friday evening.

The refusal to convert goes yet deeper. The tenets to which archetypal psychology clings make it not only incapable of believing in the theories and findings of other psychologies; they also make belief itself impossible. To believe in a fantasy is delusion; to believe in an image, idolatry. So belief itself must go, not merely its contents.

It is in this sense that archetypal psychology is faithless, infidel, as Jews have often been called. They can never say: credo; it’s not merely that they won’t. Instead it’s their job, and the job of an archetypal psychology, to see through statements into their fantasies, beliefs into their images, and even these images may not become graven.

Curiously, this very faithlessness serves to confirm others in their belief systems. As a French writer said two hundred years ago: “The faith of the Christian requires the unbelief of the Jew.” This implies that the essence of the Christian faith is faith itself, i.e., a God who demands belief above all (probably because, unlike other religions, this God is invisible, intangible, and banished from apprehension by the senses except by miracles and epiphanies. Only belief can keep Him real.) They have to take belief utterly literally, especially the witness of emotional experience, much like the literalism surrounding personal feelings that has become the pre-fab cornerstone of every school of psychotherapy. Thus, archetypal psychology runs the danger among its brother and sister psychologies of hardening their stances while losing their myths as they become ever more convinced of the truth of their ways.

What follows is mission; the conversion of the heathen. More people in analysis, more trainees, and more analysis for those already converted. Mission is Christian; Christians should be out there converting; it’s a sign of the spirit according to Paul. Jews don’t; it’s enough to read the same old books, pray, complain, eat, make a buck, and argue with one another. Is that why archetypal psychology never could found an institute, develop a program, or figure out how to train, let alone define itself into a teaching text?

III. The Wandering Jew

This legend of a displaced wanderer and its tie with the Lost Tribes of Israel dispersed through the world comes back nowadays in aspersions that Jews don’t belong anywhere. They spread out everywhere. They live off of other organically rooted cultures, like parasites. Jews, according to the stereotype, are neither a homogeneous culture, nor a religion, a race, a nation

Well this fits archetypal psychology. It is a true child of the Diaspora, that is, a bastard phenomenon. It wanders all over the place. It has lived a while with Classics studies and Renaissance texts, but never fully settled down there. It argues religion with theologians and philosophy with philosophers, and it sets up shop among urban planners, poets, art critics, systems people, architects, ecologists—without paying the local dues. It pontificates on recovery without immersion in alcoholism, on cocaine without grounding in addictions. It does no clinical work with children and never studied anthropology, yet is full of theories about childhood and tribal life. And, when it retreats into modesty, claiming to be only a branch of the Jungian World Enterprise, it shows up at the Freud Museum to discuss Freud and at a national conference of Adlerians to praise Adler. Even its language is a kind of Yiddish, as if ordinary English was never native to it, so that its writings are packed with Latin, German, French and other fancy terms.

Worse: it doesn’t abide by the rules of the communities it invades, demanding special privilege. It isn’t really scholarly; it isn’t really psychiatric; it doesn’t really know about cities, or nature, or animal behavior, or art—or Greek and Latin, let alone Hebrew. It says: "I’m not an expert, only a commentator. A kibitzer really." Of course the disciplines into which it pushes, this troublemaker—and loud-mouthed at that—tend to tighten up. There goes the neighborhood, as soon as archetypal psychology moves in.

IV. The Poisoning of the Wells

A major folk legend in Eastern Europe, a legend that fed the fires of persecution for centuries, claimed that Jews poisoned the wells of Christian communities. People feared drinking their own waters which, owing to the Jews, had become suspect. Archetypal psychology continues to “poison the well: by infiltrating drops of doubt into collective comfort. Communally shared habits of mind that seem simple, limpid and deep can no longer be taken for granted. The hermeneutic of suspicion that underlies the entire therapeutic endeavor now even permeates therapy. The chicken has come home to roost—and it’s a sick chicken. By insisting that therapy is narcissistic and neglects the world, archetypal psychology has poisoned the well of therapy itself. And, this at a time when the fons et origo, the literal sources of Christianism in ancient Palestine, are being redefined by scrolls dug out of desert caves. If these texts, offensive to Christianism’s literalisms, can be repressed by educated academics—and that’s what is going on—then it’s little wonder that archetypal psychology worries it too could be repressed for its offensive interpretations. When a depth psychology starts worrying about being offensive and fantasizes about being repressed, doesn’t that fit with collective notions of a Jewish psychology?

V. The Ritual Murder of Children

Some readers may not know that as late as 1882 (the Tisza-Eszlar trial) Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. A major component of anti-Semitic emotion for centuries derives from the fantasy of protecting Christian children from being killed by Jews. (Photographs of the all-too-literal corpses of Jewish children at concentration camps in Christian Germany provides a demonic and concrete reversal of the ancient fantasy.) In 1892, the Osservatore Cattolica of Milan claimed to “possess considerable material for proving the existence of Jewish ritual murder—in cases which can be attested to by witnesses who are still living.”

This charge against Jews has its parallels in charges brought by the ancient world against early Christians who were themselves accused of the blood sacrifice of children. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Origen are among those eminences who defended that faith against these devastating accusations.

So Pagans killed Christians and Christians, Jews. But the cause of all the killing is literalism regarding the child that we see today raging around abortion clinics. Frightening. Archetypal psychology better move cautiously since it, too, “kills the child”—metaphorically. Its sustained attack on the cult of the inner child (Bradshaw), on the goodness and creativity of innocence (Alice Miller), on the “empirically” based theories of the infantile psyche (Melanie Klein, Fordham), on the birth experience (Grof), on the dogma that regression to childhood is necessary for therapeutic progress is an attack on literalism. I mean taking the child and childhood so literally. Their own literalism makes the members of the cult of childhood feel they are undergoing a real killing.

Archetypal psychology’s emphasis instead on such adult complexities as citizenship, language, beauty, sexual imagination, friendship, humor, philosophical reflection, conflict and war, claims these polytheistic ambiguities constitute the essence of a human life and thus of therapy. This emphasis kills the child by ignoring it, by abandoning it on the rocky hillsides of an adult life. This adult life begins at thirteen (Bar and Bas Mitzvah). There cannot be “adult children” in a Jewish psychology any more than in a psychology of archetypes. Where are the mythical figures that give background to therapy’s monstrum, the “adult child?”

VI. Worldliness

Who has not been told that Jews are low, dirty, materialistic, worldly? Archetypal psychology lives out this charge by soiling all idealisms with pathologizing, grounding its notions of soul-making in the pathologized psyche. Even the Gods are pathologized, any and every one of them able to afflict and destroy. The “infirmitas of the archetype"” soils the divine with worldliness, lowering the omniscient horizons of the godly realm to the inescapable demands of ananke, necessity, felt as limitations brought upon each soul by conditions of the world’s soul. So, neither greening, recovery, nor rebirth forms part of its vision; instead the necessity of pathologizing. That the very Gods are pathologized, each bringing a particular style of destruction, conforms to both a Greek feeling and to the Hebrews’ experience of Jahweh’s arbitrary destructive wrath.

Yet for all this darkness in the divine, archetypal psychology holds, against Christianism, that there is no principle of evil, and that the idea of evil is a fantasy necessary to Christianism’s notion of redemptive recovery. Souls have got to be saved (not made), says Christianism.

But if there is no evil per se, then what’s there to be saved from, to recover from? The world? In Jewish eyes, the world and the flesh are not devilish. In fact worldliness is where the divine exists—see Spinoza’s Ethics, Maimonides’s Guide, the founding inspiration in Zionism’s “homeland,” and again see Levinas’s ontological priority of ethics. So the saving grace for the Jews, like the recent task of archetypal psychology, is working on the world, in the world, for the world, as the path of soul-making. This path deviates from the high road of therapy which, sad to say, may often be a secular disguise for Christian recovery from worldliness, sin and evil. Before there was therapy, even before Christianism, there was being around on the planet, living in the world and informing it with soul and the soul with the world, an archetypal teaching which was, maybe, the old job of the Rebbe.