What does it mean to engage in the kind of phantasy work in which we imagine our lives? Indeed, what kind of phantasies, what kind of images do we have of ourselves as lawyers?

C.G. Jung, according to James Hillman, "considered the fantasy images that run thorugh our daydreams and night dreams, and which are present unconsciously in all our consciousness, to be the primary data of the psyche. These are not merely the flotsam ofmemory, the reproduction of perceptios, rearranged leftovers from the input of our lives. . . .

"Rather, following Jung, I [Hillman] use the word fantasy-image in the poetic sense, considering images to be the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns. Fantasy-images are both the raw materials and finished products of psyche, and they are the privileged mode of access to knowledge of soul. Nothing is more primary. Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to 'happen' at all. Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image." [James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology xi (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977)(1975)]

Hillman goes on to explain another term that has bearing on our efforts to "imagine" our lives.

One more word we need to introduce is archetype. The curious difficulty explaining just what archetypes are suggests something specific to them. That is, they tend to be metaphors rather than things. We find ourselves less able to say what an archetype is literally and more inclined to describe them in images. We can't seem to touch one or point to one, and rather speak of what they are like. Archetypes throw us into an imaginative style of discourse.... To take an archetypal perspective in psychology leads us, therefore, to envision the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginative way and to approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of the imagination.

Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic function, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms, that we find in other fields. For 'matter,' 'god,' 'energy,' 'life,' 'health,' 'society,' 'art,' are also fundamental metaphors, archetypes perhaps themselves, which hold whole worlds together and yet can never be ponted to, accounted for, or even adequately circumscribed.

But one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God. And Gods, religions sometimes say, are less accessible to the senses and to the intellect than they are to the imaginative vision and emotion of the soul.

The archetypal perspective offers the advantage of organizing into clusters or constellations a host of events from different areas of life. The archetype of the hero, for example, appears first in behavior, the drive to activity, outward exploration, response to challenge, seizing and grasping and extending. It appears second in the images of Hercules, Achilles, Samson (or their cinema counterparts) doing their specific tasks; and third, in a style of consciousness, in feelings of independence, strength, and achievement, in ideas of decisive action, coping, planning, virtue, conquest (over animality), and in psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masclinity, and single-mindedness.

This example limps, of course, because the hero archetype appears not so much in a list of contents as it does in maintaining the heroic attitude toward all events, an attitude now so habitual that we have come to call it the 'ego,' forgetting that it is but another archetypal style. . . .

The hero example does . . . serve to show the collective aspect of any archetype. First, by means of it we can collect together disparate personal events and discover a sense and depth in them beyond our individual habits and quirks. Second, the archetypal perspective provides a common connection between what goes on in any individual soul and what goes on in all people in all places in all times. It allows psychological understanding at a collective level. Archetypal, in other words, means fundamentally human." [xii-xiv]

Edward Whitmont, a Jungian analyst points out that "the hero archetype is a principal form of ego expression; it expresses the focusing of personal will or power effort...." In Whitmont's view "[t]he hero or heroine's quest and his or her encounter with mythological antagonists can be summarized in language as the ego's encounter with the ever-recurring typical form elements of the psyche. For everyone who works with the unconscious there arise the problems of initial adaptation to the outer and inner worlds (psychological types); the containing social group (persona); the conflict with the repressed or unacceptable part of one's personality (shadow); the necessity to establish a relationship with the contrasexual background elements in the psyche-male (anima) or female (animus); and finaly the encounter with the suprapersonal core of one's total personality and life-meaning (Self)." [Edward Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest 182, 137 (1969)]

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