You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Archetypal analysis in Hillman's hands has become above all a matter of cultural criticism, a broad brush with which to paint sweeping statements and put forth provocative and polemical propositions. In this address which reflects its oral origins and retains its stand-up style, Hillman presents Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as subversively seeking her archetypal due in a culture which has systematically sought to shun her. No ceremony summons her, no dogma dignifies her, she is criticized on campus and abhorred in the work place: her feminine seductiveness is universally viewed with suspicion.
Despite this denigration and exclusion, Aphrodite has extended her influence through the compulsively sexualized behaviour of her son, Priapus. Priapus as the sexual grotesque arises from Hera's censorial intrauterine touch, for, from the point of view of the goddess of marriage, this child of extramarital conception must be made unseemly and repellent. Priapus becomes Hillman's metaphor for pornography in a culture which seeks to domesticate sex and repress Aphrodite's celebration of eroticism.
However, Aphrodite herself is appalled by her misshapen son. Hillman recognizes that the sexuality of Priapus expresses its own archetypal realm, distinct from the sweet lust and seductiveness of his mother, but he does not acknowledge the problem this creates for his argument. Priapian sexuality may well be the archetypal basis for the pornographic imagination, with its concomitant experiences of shame, depravity and loneliness, but this is a gross deformation of Aphrodite's world, one that she disowns unequivocally. Hillman explicitly claims otherwise: Porn reveals Her power. In doing so he creates a conundrum. He agrees with feminist criticism that ‘the pornographic mind is the mind of our culture’ but would give credit to Aphrodite for this state of affairs. Whether Aphrodite could condone exploitation, sexualized violence, and an obsessionally phallic sensibility the reader must