ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the groundwork of imagining the source of our creativity through the idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious.
The chapter first presents Jung’s understanding of archetypes and the implications for creativity. Recognizing the collective factors that energize creativity honors the otherness of the creative impulse, opening the way for relating to those factors in imagination. Archetypes, arising from repeated experiences of events as images—a foundational creative act—are the imaginative possibilities of our creative nature and the collective power of created works.
Second, the chapter presents Hillman’s understanding of archetypes and the implications for creativity. Archetypes are the intentional force in all psychic functions. They are the organizing factors of dream imagery, emotions, symptoms and styles of consciousness, including complexes and modes of thought. They are more metaphors than things, most fittingly described in personified images. It is never quite clear whether they imagine us or vice versa. Archetypal energies choose us and, in a relationship of claim and response, they give direction, form and collective power to creative expression and coherence to a body of work.
The chapter concludes with Casey’s idea of archetypal topography that maps an imaginal space in which archetypes operate in complex interrelated clusters.
