Henry Corbin, James Hillman, and Psychology as Esotericism
摘要
Despite the fact Henry Corbin has been labeled “the philosopher of the soul,” little scholarship has addressed Corbin’s relationship to psychology, etymologically the science of soul. This chapter begins to address this oversight through an examination of Corbin’s impact on the American psychologist James Hillman (1926–2011). Like Corbin, Hillman placed the soul at the center of his inquiry and refused any method that reduced soul to material or social foundations. Hillman adopts and translates Corbin’s concepts of the imaginal, taʾwil, phenomenology, imaginal ego, and divine twin into his own mature psychology, christened Archetypal Psychology. The result is a wholly unique psychological theory and practice; one that, to turn a phrase from William Parsons, offers psychology as esotericism. Put more prosaically, Hillman’s psychology offers a way for individuals to cultivate the powers of the imagination, perceive the world aglow with soul, and experience their own minds and sensations as gods in action.