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In The Archetypal Imagination James Hollis begins each of his chapters with this declaration: ‘What we wish to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp’. It is a call to the original meaning of being ‘Jungian’, an awareness that at the core of human desire is an extra-human imperative. Our longings and desires are only apparently material and literal. There is something in our desire which overshoots this world, which reaches for a beyond we cannot know, and tragically, may never attain. This is the greatness and the pathos of human desire: it strives to invest itself in the here and now and yet it reaches beyond the world to an unknowable source. For Hollis, the role of imagination and creativity is to fashion images of the beyond and provide symbols and myths that can satisfy our striving, lest we explode from the tension of unfulfilled longing.
In a book which is beautifully crafted and conceived, Hollis recalls us to the difficulty of being Jungian. To be Jungian means to see outside the human frame, to be aware of the presence of infinity and of responsibility to the gods. The Jungian professions, in both clinical and academic contexts, struggle with this burden. If we want to ‘fit in’ with our academic colleagues in the university, or with our clinical colleagues in psychotherapy, it would be a whole lot easier if we could return to being a branch of Freudian analysis. Can't we get rid of the gods and God? Can't we banish the archetypes and the collective unconscious? Can't we talk only of transference, clinic and ego development? Can't we forget Jung's cosmic reflections and knuckle down to the nuts and bolts of therapy? Hollis's answer is a resounding ‘no’ to these questions. He writes:
Psyche and soul have been split in our time, the former assigned to the uneasy calculations of the psychologists, the latter to the rigid fingers of the theologians. Yet, surely, the two are one, for what most deeply affects our relationship to depth, to