| The founder of archetypal psychology, James Hillman (2004a) identified "the addiction to innocence, to not knowing life's darkness and not wanting to know, either" as America's "endemic national disease" (p. 133). His diagnosis sheds light on the oppression and suffering that breathe in the shadow of American idealism. It calls attention to the perpetual patterns of amnesia, denial, and dissociation. From the depth psychological perspective, this addiction to innocence implies many possibilities: a pathology, a complex, a defense, a psychic wound, an illusion, a myth, a metaphor, and essentially, a state of possession by an invincible archetypal force.;The purpose of this critical hermeneutic inquiry is to provide a psychological understanding of the multiple, multifaceted, and often paradoxical meanings innocence holds in the American psyche. Through the lenses of depth and archetypal psychology, and interdisciplinary analysis, this study also seeks to explore the entangled relationships between the mythologem of innocence, violence, and America. As a cultural and psychological collage, it brings together various interpretative processes to witness psychic realities of historical, political, and social phenomena---such as in war, immigration, racism.;Depth psychology arrives at critical interpretations and interventions through the use of creative, mythopoetic approaches. This inquiry enters into an image of innocence and begins descending into its depths. Layer by layer it meets the different symptoms, listens to their call and suffering and dialogue with them. The telos of this work is not to cure and eradicate pathos, or discard the old myth/mythologem to replace it with a new one. Rather, it is to make the unconscious relationship between innocence, violence, and American psyche conscious, see through the collective fictions, and provide space for the narratives, voices, and images that have often been overlooked by dominant ideologies in the United States. |
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