JHAPA

Jung Hillman Archetypal Psychoanalysis Association

The Jung Hillman Archetypal Psychoanalysis Association (JHAPA) is directly inspired by the thought and work of Carl Gustav Jung and James Hillman, pioneers of an archetypally oriented development of psychoanalysis.

The archetypal psychoanalytic approach not only seeks the causes of psychological disturbances in lived events, but examines how the patient narrates and imagines those experiences in order to identify the underlying archetypal pattern at work. Psychopathology is understood as a “staging” of the patient’s imagination: it is not the event itself that produces suffering, but the image and meaning attributed to it. Events are viewed as dreamlike, metaphorical images whose narration already contains both the elements of the pathology and the potential for transformation. The therapist’s task is to bring the active archetypal pattern into consciousness, enabling the patient to gain distance from it, interrupt identification with it, integrate it, and develop a new, broader, and more reflective narrative. In this process, imagination plays a central role, as images are regarded not merely as projections, but as symbolic psychic realities that give profound expression to the deeper contents of the psyche, often enshrined in mythology.

JHAPA was created in 2009 in Florence by Daniele Cardelli as the International Confederation for Lay Psychoanalysis, philosophical psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis for individuation. JHAPA’s lay approach to psychoanalysis draws on Sigmund Freud’s fundamental reflections, particularly in his famous—already a century old—1926 work “The Question of Lay Analysis,” (1) concerning the problem of analysis conducted by non-medical/clinical doctors (and, in modern terms, one could add, by non-psychologists). JHAPA also builds upon what has emerged from the multi-year debate regarding the difference between psychotherapy and the practice of psychoanalysis. Freud supported the right of trained psychoanalysts to practice independent of medical qualification, asserting that psychoanalysis constituted an autonomous scientific discipline to cure the soul, that should not be absorbed by medicine (nor religion). After a major dispute settled in the United States in 1988, this distinction was ultimately made by the legislator who neither included nor mentioned psychoanalysis in the law that establishes and regulates the profession of psychologist and psychotherapist.

JHAPA functions as a refined forum for discussion and coordination among the various associations and training schools in the field of psychoanalysis—particularly those with an analytical and archetypal orientation—to be practiced also as a lay profession in accordance with legislation. It offers training in psychoanalysis to people from all academic and professional backgrounds that want to make a career out of it. The International School on Soul Studies, as the James Hillman Institute’s training arm, offers psychoanalytic training to lay as well as previously certified clinical professionals, enabling students and alumni of the School to be recognized by JHAPA, as per the categories outlined below.

JHAPA Recognition Categories

*JHAPA recognizes psychotherapists through the Symbolon Institute, School of Archetypal and Analytical Psychotherapy accredited by the Ministry of University and Research of Italy

(1) Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, intro. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989)