“A Return to Imagination and the Rejection of Positivism in Psychology: From Jung to Hillman”

From Freud to the present—that is, since the emergence of experimental psychology and behaviourism—this field has been subjected to many criticisms. Among the strongest were those advanced by psychologists and thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Marcuse, who emphasised that we cannot study the human being in the laboratory while separating that person from history, economy, and culture.
From the beginning, the great problem of experimental and scientific psychology has been this: how can we formulate psychology in such a way that it is not reduced to animal psychology, and can study the human being specifically, without changing its own experimental method?
A positivist method cannot regard inference, image, and imagination independently of brain structure and, ultimately, cannot study the human being without reducing the human being to animal physiology.

Jung freed himself from the trap of this closed form of thought and returned psychoanalysis to its original territory: philosophy. More specifically, he returned it to Platonic philosophy and gave that philosophy a striking rebirth. Jung understood that the natural activity of the human mind is the production of imagination and image, not merely the production of logical thought and language. We are capable of moving beyond our five sensory faculties and, through mathematical operations in the mind, reaching beyond our sensory framework; we create music, poetry, image, and culture. This is a distinctively human capacity.

Heidegger once warned that the great problem of the contemporary world is not that it seeks science and technology; the great problem is that it has compelled us to look at everything—even the human spirit—through an empirical and scientific lens.

James Hillman, too, in his remarkable lecture at the time of the publication of Jung’s Red Book, pointed out that the language of psychology exists fundamentally before dialectic and before logic because, like all animals, we share the capacity to see and form images. Something far deeper and more ancient than linguistic structure exists within our minds: a deep imaginal structure connected to the unconscious, whose history in the brain is far older than the history of language.

Video link from “Steps in Illumination” on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/-5nRYoIkJf4