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The long-awaited reply to Wolfgang Giegerich's challenging paper, initially delivered to the Festival of Archetypal Psychology in honour of James Hillman at Notre Dame, Indiana () and subsequently printed in Spring 54 (reviewed by John Haule in this Journal, July 1994), has finally arrived. There had been strangely little comment at the time by Hillman, but he sallies forth now in stingingly brilliant, adamantine analysis of Giegerich's paper. The strength and ferocity of the response however, leave us to wonder if indeed there may not be some fraying going on within the archetypalist camp.
Hillman accuses Giegerich of three major fallacies. First is ‘the fallacy of historical models’, with special focus on the need for actual blood sacrifices in order to have real gods. While rituals are acknowledged as essential in the commerce between the human and the divine, Hillman protests Giegerich's perceived retrograde and reactionary urges towards a repetition of archaic blood rites for soul-making, especially in the modern word. Thus his ‘… grasp of religious reality, his piety, is fundamentalist’ — strong words to a formerly kindred spirit. For Hillman, Giegerich's images are held too literally in a ‘romantic atavism’, an oxymoronic imaginal acting out, and we are urged instead towards an imagination of killing, killing as metaphor. In this the gods cry out not primarily for blood, but to be remembered, ‘to be kept in mind, recollected as psychological facts’.
Second is the ontological fallacy, ‘the mistake of declaring what is real’. Giegerich's assignment of actual facts (of the tangible, observable, scientifically verifiable variety, I believe) to the place of primacy in the cosmogony of the soul's universe is considered the most dangerous. To debunk this psychological Joe Friday, ‘just the facts ma'am’, a radical relativizing of realities (abstract, ideal, actual, contingent, logical, economic, biological, artistic, social, and linguistic) is proposed. Each is governe