Psyche Logos - On the Depth Principle

I'm reading from the 'Uniform Editions' of James Hillman, which are currently being published by Spring publications, and are thematically arranged from Hillman's major lectures, writings, scholarly essays, clinical papers and interviews. I'm working on the second volume 'City and Soul,' but read a couple more of his works recently including 'Suicide and the Soul,' and 'The Dream and the Underworld.' The recent Hillman biography by Dick Russell is really superb and contextualizes his work wonderfully, though it is quite a substantial read at over 700 pages. It can take some time to develop perspective on precisely what Hillman was doing in his particular approach to psychology, and his style and approach can be somewhat grating. By his own admission, his approach to psychology was largely one of critique, and particularly critique of science and scientific psychology. This critical approach to scientific psychology is not only peculiar to Hillman's own personality, but was largely the result of time he spent interning at psychiatric facilities. His first book 'Suicide and the Soul' puts forth the thesis that biomedical psychiatry and scientific psychology make certain blanket assumptions that wholly ignore the psyche-itself, and so devalue and dehumanize clients at the clinical level. Some of the suggestion is that psychiatry isn't really psychology per se. Hillman's philosophy of psychology is largely pre-Socratic and Greek in origin, particularly derived from the writings of Heraclitus. Hillman very much embodies both archetype of the puer (eternal youth), as well as the figure of the Socratic gadfly; his critique of scientific psychology is so direct, blunt and clear that it has traditionally been pretty threatening to scientific psychology. 

The primary nub of contention is in Hillman's assertion--in line with the the Greeks, that the psyche-itself is not a concrete-ancillary phenomenon, but a formless dimension of transparency and depth. His work demonstrates again and again that when the psyche-itself is viewed on these depth terms in the form of dream, creativity, mythologem, art etc., the hard-fast-tidy findings of scientific psychology are often reduced to absurd curioso. I think his work highlights a situation in contemporary psychology that is analogous to a situation in psychology that existed in the late 50s. By the late 50s, the scope of psychology had become primarily limited to the behavioral paradigm of B.F. Skinner, who argued that complex behaviors such as language were entirely reduced to classical and operant conditioning. So grunts and cries were subtly re-inforced until they became the complex languages of adulthood. In Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of Skinnner's book 'Verbal Behavior,' he demonstrated that the complexity of language necessitated an a priori conditioning factor or template for language in the human nervous system, thus was born the field of 'cognitive psychology' which re-claimed the domains of cognition and thought for psychology as a whole. I believe Hillman's work re-claims another vital domain for the field of psychology. 

Interestingly enough, the very Greeks upon which Hillman's 'Archetypal Psychology' is based, are ALSO the very same Greeks who laid the ontological, epistemological and metaphysical foundations for the scientific method. So it is very interesting, I personally feel there is an immense amount of very honest potential in science, but perhaps it will require a more original and primordial approach to psychology before that depth potential in science is realized.