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With the arrival of this book, the Jungian school known as Archetypal Psychology surrounding James Hillman finds itself at the same point as the London School in , when Volumes 1 and 2 of the Library of Analytical Psychology were published. The archetypal psychologists are established enough to present themselves in public as a group, to dialogue openly amongst themselves and to revise previous formulations. It is a display that gives the reader satisfaction even when he cannot agree with all that is being written, and I am reminded of Henderson's comment in his review of the two Library books: ‘it is an especially enlightening experience to read these papers as lively exchanges between colleagues’ (HENDERSON 1, p. 202). For the tyro in comparative religion though, it is convenient to take these three writers as being in general agreement.
A further point of similarity to the London group—it warrants stressing because mutual projections have made the two schools into polar opposites—is that work began in reaction to a Zürich monolithic approach, which was felt to define too exactly what individuation was, how you did it and how you could prove you had done it. A restrictive view of the psyche placed the self in a pre-eminent position compared, for example, to animus/anima, and this seems to have stimulated Hillman to dispute the primacy of the self, the quaternity, mandalas etc. In his appendix, which is a revision of a Spring paper, Hillman goes for psychological parity between the self and other psychic hypotheses. Insensate striving for wholeness is divested of glamour and a particularisation of psychic contents is sought. This, like Fordham's notion of individuation in childhood, is claimed by Hillman to stem from one side or aspect of Jung's work. Far from ‘the attainment of the self’, individuation processes might lead in some cases to fragmentation (not breakdown)—Cf. the deintegrative processes.
The book marshals arguments against monotheism and a monotheisti