Psyche as Postmodern Condition: he Situation of Metaphor in James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology Rex Olson Alfred State College his article examines James Hillman’s notion of psyche in relation to metaphor as the foundation for his archetypal psychology. In pushing Jung to his imaginal limits, Hillman provides an archetypal corrective to the Cartesianism inherent in modern scientiic psychology in order to understand all aspects of contemporary psychological life. He proposes an ontological view of metaphor that locates psyche beyond language and mind to places in the world, thus seeking to establish a postmodern archetypal psychology. In the end his notion of psyche is not radical enough in its critique to advance archetypal psychology into acknowledging its postmodern condition. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. The Postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable [italics mine]. —Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1984 An old soldier ights his irst campaign again and again, in every new engagement. he last of life is illed with repetitions and returns to basic obsessions. My war—and I have yet to win a decisive battle—is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about being. Of these conditionings none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism). —James Hillman, 1999 Prelude to Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology James Hillman is no doubt one of this country’s most scholarly and thoughtful critics of contemporary psychological life. His more than twenty books, spanning nearly ifty years, have chronicled a life and career of intellectual battles that he has waged against all forms of psychological oppression. Despite his modest lament of not having won a decisive victory Janus Head, 13(12). Copyright © by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America