"...Soul is distinct from body because soul may not be identified with any literal presentation or perspective. As the perspective that sees through, the psyche cannot itself be another visibility. As connecting link, or traditional third position, between all opposites(mind and matter, spirit nature, intellect and emotion), the soul differs from the terms which it connects. Its distinction from the body is only in terms of literalism, the literal motion of body, encased in skin, out there. This notion also distorts soul into some sort of pious ghostly vapor, running the physiological machine as a little invisible subject in a control tower.

But the moment we realize body also as a subtle body - a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights - then body and soul lose their borders, neither more literal or metaphorical than the other. Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors."


You will have noticed that we have been speaking of archetypes in the plural. We are working from the premise that there are many valid points of view toward any psychological event, and that these points of view have an archetypal basis. Our psychology is, to begin with, polytheistic, less out of religious confession than our of psychological necessity. The many sidedness of human nature, the variety of viewpoints even within a single individual, requires the broadest possible spectrum of basic structures. If a psychology wants to represent faithfully the soul's actual diversity, then it may not beg the question from the beginning by insisting, with monotheistic judgment, upon unity of personality. The idea of unity is, after all, only one of many archetypal perspectives.

If we are willing to accept internal controls upon the imagination, we will have succumbed already in soul to the same authoritarianism that would dominate that would dominate the body politic.



This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity....It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self.



We can do little exploration of the imaginal until we have surmounted our own egocentricity, that capital I appearing in the monotheism of consciousness (Jung), in monotheistic science and metaphysics, and in the root of all: the monotheism of Christian humanism with its tolerance for but one historical, unique divine personification.... We are driven, therefore, to learn somethiing from psychopathology, taking imaginal persons as seriously (if not as literalistically) as does someone with his delusions or hallucination.... This means nothing less than dethroning the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity -- that real meaning, real beauty and truth require a unified vision. It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self. Instead of trying to sure pathological fragmentation wherever it appears, we would let the content of this fantasy cure consciousness of its obsession with unity.