Alexandra Fidyk

“Hermaphroditus as Image-Maker: Connecting a Hermetic

Imagination to Healing”

To speak of healing and transformation begs the questions: “What does the soul want?” “How do we meet it?” The answer, simply, is thus: “Turn to images.” Jung writes: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining’ (CW 11, par. 889) . . . and these images are as real as you yourself are real” (CW 14, par. 753). Remember – Jung takes the term image from “poetic usage” (CW 6, par. 743); it does not arrive via thought nor is it the residue of perception. Image is spontaneous, primordial, always arising. Image is the soul presenting itself – “the only givens directly presented” (Hillman, 1983, p. 75). Everything else – the world, other people, other forms – are mediated to consciousness by this poetic ancestral factor: the image.

Thereby attention will be given to the archetypal images of Hermes, Aphrodite and their child Hermaphrodite and their significance to the field of education, in particular to the unfolding pedagogic act. This child born of the God of borders and hermeneutics, connections between worlds, communication and silence, trickery and thievery; and the Goddess of aesthetics and ethics, beauty and goodness, creativity and justice, conjoins two genders and reminds that one is never-only-one. Hermes appears in the interpretive act; and, Aphrodite in the creative one. Hermaphroditus (so named by Adler) conjoins not only two genders but also the themes of depth psychology: “hermetic secrets and hermeneutics with the erotic imagination which sexualizes what it undergoes” (Hillman, 1983, p. 101). To be able to hold the tension of complementary opposites as found between conscious and unconscious, masculine and feminine, positive and negative, public world and private soul is the goal of healing on both personal and collective levels, which includes the classroom and the learning community. Indeed, López-Pedraza (1989) named the hermaphrodite, a “hermetic paradox” whose bisexuality reconciles the conflict of opposites, as a “particular consciousness in itself,” one that is essential to depth work (p. 37). He suggested that the imagery of the hermaphrodite gives a decisive indication of both the transferential and psychic movement in deep therapeutic and pedagogic acts.

If Asclepius is considered the archetypal figure of the healer, Hermaphroditus is the archetypal figure of healing, the psychic healing of imagination, and according to Hillman, “the healing fiction, the fictional healer for whom no personal pronoun fits, impossible in life and necessary in imagination” (pp. 102-3). Here through image and commentary, marked by philos and poiesis, we will attend the questions: What does this figure and depth psychology have to do with education? What have we done that has led to the loss of our twin given with the soul? What can be done to reunite the twins? What healing and transformation might this image-maker bring to education? (435 w)

References

Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fiction. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.

Jung, C. G. (1953-1979). Collected works (Trans. R. F. C. Hull). In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire, (Eds.). Bollingen Series 17. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

López-Pedraza, R. (1989). Hermes and his children. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag.