Archetype and image schema

inthesaltmine started an IPS thread on James Hillman, wherein I asked how Hillman might relate to the following:

From this article:

"Jungian analyst Jean Knox suggests that recent work...makes the inheritance of images and ideas impossible. (Knox, 2003). Her synthesis of current positions of neuroscience, cognitive science and the developments in attachment theory makes a convincing case for the archetype as emergent, based on the presence of genetically catalysed image schemas which are elaborated into images of archetypal complexity by actual affective experience."

And Knox from Archetype, Analysis, Attachment (Routledge 2003):


"The earliest psychic structures, image schemas, offer a contemporary developmental model for archetypes, in that they organize experience while they themselves remain without content and beyond the realm of conscious awareness. The image schema would seem to correspond to the archetype-as-such and the archetypal image can be equated with the innumerable metaphorical extensions that derive from image schemas" (65).

And recall this post quoting Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) on imagination and reason:

“What we are offering in the experientialist account of understanding and truth is an alternative which denies that subjectivity and objectivity are our only choices. We reject the objectivist view that there is absolute and unconditional truth without adopting the subjectivist alternative of truth as obtainable only through the imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances. The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature” (138-9).

And this post:

In "Developmental aspects of analytical psychology" Jean Knox shows that we must recontextualize Jung's notion of archetype into the more recent and accurate notion of image schema. The former is still caught in a metaphysical net of at best a priori mental constructs and at worst involutionary givens.

"This developmental model for archetypes requires us to re-categorize them, removing them from the realm of innate mental content and acknowledging them as early products of mental development" (27).

This also supports my notion that these early enactments of embodied, pre-reflective and unconscious development are what we use to contact those seemingly metaphysical, nondual ‘states’ of unity consciousness.