Moral and Ethical Obligations to Expressions of Soul
In an interview with Lawrence Jaffe in 1998, the last interview medical psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Edward Edinger would give, he was asked what he thought of Hillman’s work. And the theme of Edinger's short response centered around his concern that the moral dimension of the depths was left out of Hillman’s work. Edinger said that Hillman was “a living example of what Jung warned us against, namely, the aesthetic attitude toward the psyche. He leaves out of account the moral dimension, the ethical dimension of relation to the depths." He added "there’s another angle to it. It’s the responsibility that one has for every new piece of consciousness acquired.” Jung held that whatever we experience from “the unconscious” incurred significant responsibilities - that we had an obligation to work to understand those experiences and what they meant both to us and to the world. This was one of the reasons, for example, Jung was opposed to the use of psychedelics for the sake of removing the veil of illusion to witness the beyond. There is tremendous cost to delving deeply into “the unconscious.”
However, I'm not sure Dr. Edinger was aware of certain differences between Archetypal Psychology and Analytical Psychology when it came to the expressions of Soul and to the moral or ethical obligations in witnessing those expressions. Expressions of Soul, according to Hillman, are complete in themselves “just as it presents itself” - nothing more is required. There is no notion of the compensatory function of the unconscious. The Soul is completely free to express itself however it chooses to. In *Healing Fiction*, Hillman emphasized:
*Understanding psychological events through the general principle of opposites—depth psychology’s main method—is too mechanical. It presents all soul events within a compensatory system of pairs: mind and body, ego and world, spirit and instinct, conscious and unconscious, inner and outer, and so on interminably. But soul events are not part of a general balancing system or a polar energy system or a binary information system. Soul events are not parts of any system. They are not reactions and responses to other sorts of events at the opposite end of any fulcrum. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies autonomously, ceaselessly, spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else; nor is soul-making.*
As I understand it, our obligation is fidelity to Soul and to its variegated expressions. Hillman also talks about “psychological faith” in *Re-Visioning Psychology* - “The work of soul-making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul.” And he emphasizes that image becomes a psychopompos and our *spiritus rector*.
Beyond this, what are the additional obligations within Archetypal Psychology to the experiences of Soul?
**References**
*Re-Visioning Psychology* by James Hillman
“An Inquiry into Image” by James Hillman in *Spring*
“A Further Note on Image” by James Hillman in *Spring*
“Image-Sense” by James Hillman in *Spring*
*Healing Fiction* by James Hillman
*Interview with Edward F. Edinger by Lawrence Jaffe*
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