MYTHIC PERSPECTIVE
Poetic Basis of Mind; Stories of the Soul
Poetic Basis of Mind; Stories of the Soul
"Culture has the possibility of rising up when a handful of people fall in love with each other’s ideas." --James Hillman (CITY & SOUL Uniform Edition Vol. 2)
The new or the different is "judged" on the basis of difference and not on its own image. It is about living the images so that they live in us. The same is true of those who present a new way of being in relationships, faced with incomprehension. James Hillman is approached, presenting the ideas and paths of this author, articulating this conception, illustrating the view that builds on Hillman's work.
"I loved Jung's pearls but never bought the whole necklace. I guess I wanted to string them my way, until the day I realized that each strand too easily becomes a suffocating choker and one gets trapped in the noose (Ananke) I don't really have a thread. And why? Because psychology for me is to open the oysters and clean the pearls, that is to recover and bring to light and daily wear the life of the imagination, which may not redeem the tragedy, it does not alleviate suffering, but can enrich and make them more tolerable, interesting and precious." -J.H.
"If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred. Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest. On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us. For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else."
-James Hollis
′′What is manifested in our psyche is not of our psyche; both love and soul in the end and from the beginning belong to the realm of archetypical reality. This psychological lesson gives impersonal quality to the entire creative opus of soul-making in each individual's subjectivity." -James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, p. 115
“I am suggesting that we read the animal and not only about the animal. I am suggesting that the dream animal can be amplified as much by a visit to the zoo as by a symbol dictionary, and I am suggesting that we dream interpreters not reduce the dream to the symbol but reduce ourselves, our own vision, to that of the animal – a reduction that may be an extension, an amplification, of our vision so as to see the animal with the animal eye.”
––Animal Presences, Uniform Edition vol 9, by James Hillman, pg. 32
“ Animals were gods because they were eternal. The American Indian saw the buffalo that appeared in the spring as the same buffalo that had disappeared in the fall. The animals went down into the earth and then came back again, like the sun. We see the same sun rise every morning; they see the same animal always returning. That absolute perfection – that the animal is always the same – is a divine quality. So of course if you kill one to eat it, you have to propitiate it, to go through a ritual.”
–– Animal Presences, Uniform Edition vol 9, by James Hillman, pg. 181
“The dog’s association with the underworld and death occurs widely in folklore, in stories and revenants, hauntings and uncanny intuitions, and in the myths of many cultures. Most well-known for our tradition is the twelfth labor of Hercules, his most arduous of all, it was said: the retrieval of the Hound of Hell, Hades’ guardian dog, Cerberus. To wrestle this terrifying creature into daylight means more than overcoming death and hell as in the Christian example of Jesus’s descent, which aimed to do away with the underworld and overcome death. Hercules’ struggle is also about the dog.”
–– Animal Presences, Uniform Edition vol 9, by James Hillman, pg. 159
EVOCATION OF IMAGINATION
An Imaginal, Aesthetic
& Phenomenological Approach
About symptom by James Hillman
" Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind-that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard. "
The Grail is the soul
"recognize that the grail is the soul brings the consciousness back to itself. In the glass of the wound there is the soul. This means that it is the psyche the purpose of our bleeding love, and that the wound is a grail. Opus is not Jerusalem, it's right here, in our wounds ".
James Hillman, essays on the puer
Soul-making trusts that the skills that give form to images enhance the skills that give form to the soul, and that the soul and the created image reflect each other. It is an ancient game at once athletic and ascetic ... between the soul and the outside world. “Realizing” or "seeing through" is a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality. a form of concentrated self-awareness.
Hillman on imagination, Archetypal Psychology (2013)
“The Mundas Imaginalis [imaginal realm] offers ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. The value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality, which is always ontologically more than actuality in its limits... The Mundas imaginalis provides for archetypes a valuation and cosmic grounding, when this is needed, different from such bases as biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistic and social transmission, biochemical reactions, and genetic coding” (p. 14)
James Hillman, founder of Archetypal Psychology, teaches us that the Soul is the metaphorical root of psychology. To look for it is to search for the images it is made of, for this is the way through which the psyche introduces itself. Thus, every act of consciousness depends on, and is submitted to, the command of the images. Therefore, any direct and immediate knowledge can only be acquired through the acknowledgment of the psychic images.
The Soul communicates through a metaphorical and mythical language. The movement of returning to the soul, preeminently a psychological movement, means returning to the images, now regarded as presentations and not as representations. The objective of Archetypal Psychology is not the symbol but the image, since the first tends to erase and exclude the singularities conveyed by the latter. Instead of the symbolistic approach, we create an imaginal approach, since the symbols only appear (can only appear) in images and as images. Hillman says that symbols are abstractions of the psyche and that it is exactly this condition that enables us to research their meanings in indexes and dictionaries.
Images are not signs, representations, symbols or allegories.It is through the experience of the image and through the experience triggered by it that one can realize what Hillman calls "the individuation of images."
For a psychology that considers the images as its field of interest, avoiding the reduction of these images to mere concepts is an ethical must.
Archetypal Psychology opposes any reductionistic attempt to translate images into concepts as well as any attempt to conceptualize the imagination and the world of images. Hillman alerts for the danger of privileging the conceptual over the imaginal, of trying to interpret the images, of translating images based on a predetermined code of meanings of which the analyst is the translator par excellence. This movement, according to Hillman, produces, as a consequence, the loss and the setting aside of the image, therefore preventing the Soul-making.
The fundamental rule of Archetypal Psychology is to stick to the image, for it always opens an unlimited field of imaginative possibilities to us. Due to its radical polysemy, the image is, and will always be, much more complex than any concept.
As an alternative, Hillman offers the practice of interpretation, the analogy. Analogy will be defined as resemblance in the function but not in the origin. Analogy keeps us in a mode of functional operation of the image, in patterns of similarities without locating a common point for these similarities. The operational term of analogy is the "as if" instead of the "this is" of the interpretative perspective. It has to do with preventing the images from being reduced into concepts, the analogies into interpretations, the similar functions into a common point, so that the innumerable metaphorical possibilities of the Soul can be respected.
The word image, according to this perspective, is connected to a poetic usage, to an image of fantasy. The images organize themselves into fantasies, according to this or that archetypal pattern. Thus, we always find ourselves in an archetypal configuration, in this or that fantasy. We will always be involved in some sort of archetypal fantasy, a mythical perspective.
Therefore, the work consists of trying to approach the images of fantasy and the individual behavior to a figure, to an archetypal process, a myth, and to consider all behavior and fantasy as metaphorical expressions of the Soul. Archetypal Psychology considers it impossible to separate what is individual from what is collective. It will always look for the archetypal perspective in what is considered "purely" personal.
The objective is not to reduce them to their simplest elements or to a one fixed meaning. On the contrary, we try to circumambulate them through different aspects until various and different meanings arise. Nothing in the psychic world has only one meaning. The amplification becomes a method of Soul-making since it unveils culture in the interior of the psyche. If an individual is included in cultural, symbolic and historical processes, they will eventually arise in the images of the psyche.
In his book Timaeus, in which he explains his cosmology or system of the universe, Plato states the existence of two fundamental principles in action: the first is Nous, the Logos, intellectual principle, order, intelligibility, that is, everything that refers to Reason.
The second principle is Ananke, Necessity. The operations arising out of this principle are described with words such as: errant, dispersive, lost, irrational, irregular and aleatoric. Necessity acts by means of deviations. It can be recognized in the irrational, in the irresponsible, in the indirect. It is mainly associated to that area of experience which is unable to be persuaded or subjected to the command of Reason. Necessity resides in the Soul as an inner cause, constantly producing uncomfortable results.
Plato proposes the connection between Nous and Ananke as follows: " Our inner discourse has made evident the works forged by the art of Reason, Nous; now, we also need to bring into light the things generated by Necessity, Ananke, since the creation of this universe is the result of the combination of Necessity and Reason. Reason has dominated Necessity, persuading it to orient the biggest part of created things towards the best; thus, and according to this principle, the universe has been designed by the victory of the rational persuasion over Necessity. Therefore, if we really want to tell how things begin according to this principle, we also need to mention the intervention of the errant cause ".
Plato states that the two real Arché, primordial substance, are Nous and Ananke. They are both creative principles that take part in the formation of the universe. They are not derived from anything else. Ananke needs always be present, never being gradually surpassed by the enlargement of the domain of Reason. Like the demiurge, who never reduces all the chaos into order, Reason can never persuade of all Necessity. " On the whole, and in each part, Nous and Ananke cooperate; the world is a result of this combination". © 1999 Marcus Quintaes.
" https://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/231-nous-ananke-and-eros-reflections-about-the-images-of-the-soul
"Caro Hillman... Venticinque scambi epistolari con James Hillman" (only in Italian) Bollati Boringhieri, Torino,2004
https://www.amazon.it/Hillman.../dp/8833914364/ref=sr_1_1...
ENSOULED CULTURE
*Sources of Archetypal Psychology*
Archetypal psychology, first named by Hillman (1970b), had from its beginning the intention of moving beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy by situating itself within the culture of Western imagination. It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. The term “archetypal.” in contrast to “analytical” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work which attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics. By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
Archetypal psychology can be seen as a cultural movement part of whose task is the re-visioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of the Western cultural imagination.
In an early review of the field and an examination of its main thrusts, Goldenberg (1975) regards archetypal psychology as a “third generation” derivative of the Jungian school in which Jung is recognized as the source but not as the doctrine. Two themes of its directions which she singles out—the emphasis upon psychopathology and the radical relativization and desubstantiation of the ego—will be discussed below.
It is without doubt that the first immediate father of archetypal psychology is Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist (1875-1961). Hillman, Lopez-Pedraza, Berry, Kugler, M. Stein, Guggenbühl, Garufi, Grinnell, and many others of the authors referred to below were trained as Jungian analysts. (However, a significant number of other authors mentioned —e.g., Miller, Casey, Durand, Watkins, Sardello—did not receive this specific Jungian formation and contribute to archetypal psychology from phenomenology, literature, poetry, philosophy, religious studies, etc.) From Jung comes the idea that the basic and universal structures of the psyche, the formal patterns of its relational modes, are archetypal patterns. These are like psychic organs, congenitally given with the psyche itself (yet not necessarily genetically inherited), even if somewhat modified by historical and geographical factors. These patterns or archai appear in the arts, religions, dreams, and social customs of all peoples, and they manifest spontaneously in mental disorders. For Jung, they are anthropological and cultural, and also spiritual in that they transcend the empirical world of time and place and, in fact, are in themselves not phenomenal. Archetypal psychology, in distinction to Jungian, considers the archetypal to be always phenomenal (Avens 1980), thus avoiding the Kantian idealism implied in Jung (de Voogd 1977).
The primary, and irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths. These can therefore be understood as the most fundamental patterns of human existence. To study human nature at its most basic level, one must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed. The full implication of this move away from biochemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature and toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman as “the poetic basis of mind” (q.v.). Support for the archetypal and psychological significance of myth, besides the work of Jung, comes from Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kerényi, Erich Neumann, Heinrich Zimmer, Gilbert Durand, Joseph Campbell, and David Miller.
The second immediate father of archetypal psychology is Henry Corbin (1903-1978), the French scholar, philosopher, and mystic, principally known for his interpretation of Islamic thought. From Corbin (1971-73) comes the idea that the mundus archetypalis (’alam al-mithal) is also the mundus imaginalis. It is a distinct field of imaginal realities requiring methods and perceptual faculties different from the spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naive formulation. The mundus imaginalis offers an ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits. (As phenomena they must appear, though this appearance is to the imagination or in the imagination.) The mundus imaginalis provides for archetypes a valuative and cosmic grounding, when this is needed, different from such bases as: biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistic and social transmission, biochemical reactions, genetic coding, etc.
But more important than the ontological placing of archetypal realities is the double move of Corbin: (a) that the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination first and first presents itself as image, so that (b) the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative. Its exposition must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, and its therapeutic aim neither social adaptation nor personalistic individualizing but rather a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities. The aim of therapy (q.v.) is the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.
In extending the tradition of Jung and Corbin forward, archetypal psychology has had to go back to their predecessors, particularly the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium, Timaeus), and most anciently to Heraclitus. (Corbin’s works on Avicenna, Ibn’ Arabi, and Sohrawardi belong also in this tradition as does the work of Kathleen Raine on William Blake [1758-1835] and on Thomas Taylor, the English translator of the main writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists.)
The elaboration of this tradition by Hillman in Eranos lectures and in articles (1973a), by Miller in seminars at Syracuse University, by Lopez-Pedraza at the University of Caracas, and by Moore’s (1982) and Boer’s (1980) work on Ficino gives a different cast to archetypal psychology when compared with Jung’s. There the background is more strongly German (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Carus, von Hartmann, Kant, Goethe, Eckhart, and Böhme), Christian, psychiatric, and Eastern. Archetypal psychology situates itself more comfortably south (q.v.) of the Alps.
Especially—this Neoplatonic tradition is thoroughly Western even if it is not empirical in method, rationalist in conception, or otherworldly spiritual in appeal. This tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea). Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez-Pedraza 1977), as “esse in anima” (Jung [1921] CW 6, §66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy. Body, soul, spirit: this tripartite anthropology further separates archetypal psychology from the usual Western dualistic division, whose history goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople)» occurring also in the mediaeval ascension of Averroes’s Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism. Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology. A first methodologically consistent attempt to articulate one in a philosophical style belongs also within the perimeters of archetypal psychology (Christou 1963). ~James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology
Archetypal psychology, first named by Hillman (1970b), had from its beginning the intention of moving beyond clinical inquiry within the consulting room of psychotherapy by situating itself within the culture of Western imagination. It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. The term “archetypal.” in contrast to “analytical” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work which attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics. By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
Archetypal psychology can be seen as a cultural movement part of whose task is the re-visioning of psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy in terms of the Western cultural imagination.
In an early review of the field and an examination of its main thrusts, Goldenberg (1975) regards archetypal psychology as a “third generation” derivative of the Jungian school in which Jung is recognized as the source but not as the doctrine. Two themes of its directions which she singles out—the emphasis upon psychopathology and the radical relativization and desubstantiation of the ego—will be discussed below.
It is without doubt that the first immediate father of archetypal psychology is Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist (1875-1961). Hillman, Lopez-Pedraza, Berry, Kugler, M. Stein, Guggenbühl, Garufi, Grinnell, and many others of the authors referred to below were trained as Jungian analysts. (However, a significant number of other authors mentioned —e.g., Miller, Casey, Durand, Watkins, Sardello—did not receive this specific Jungian formation and contribute to archetypal psychology from phenomenology, literature, poetry, philosophy, religious studies, etc.) From Jung comes the idea that the basic and universal structures of the psyche, the formal patterns of its relational modes, are archetypal patterns. These are like psychic organs, congenitally given with the psyche itself (yet not necessarily genetically inherited), even if somewhat modified by historical and geographical factors. These patterns or archai appear in the arts, religions, dreams, and social customs of all peoples, and they manifest spontaneously in mental disorders. For Jung, they are anthropological and cultural, and also spiritual in that they transcend the empirical world of time and place and, in fact, are in themselves not phenomenal. Archetypal psychology, in distinction to Jungian, considers the archetypal to be always phenomenal (Avens 1980), thus avoiding the Kantian idealism implied in Jung (de Voogd 1977).
The primary, and irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths. These can therefore be understood as the most fundamental patterns of human existence. To study human nature at its most basic level, one must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed. The full implication of this move away from biochemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature and toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman as “the poetic basis of mind” (q.v.). Support for the archetypal and psychological significance of myth, besides the work of Jung, comes from Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kerényi, Erich Neumann, Heinrich Zimmer, Gilbert Durand, Joseph Campbell, and David Miller.
The second immediate father of archetypal psychology is Henry Corbin (1903-1978), the French scholar, philosopher, and mystic, principally known for his interpretation of Islamic thought. From Corbin (1971-73) comes the idea that the mundus archetypalis (’alam al-mithal) is also the mundus imaginalis. It is a distinct field of imaginal realities requiring methods and perceptual faculties different from the spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naive formulation. The mundus imaginalis offers an ontological mode of locating the archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena that are transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits. (As phenomena they must appear, though this appearance is to the imagination or in the imagination.) The mundus imaginalis provides for archetypes a valuative and cosmic grounding, when this is needed, different from such bases as: biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistic and social transmission, biochemical reactions, genetic coding, etc.
But more important than the ontological placing of archetypal realities is the double move of Corbin: (a) that the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to imagination first and first presents itself as image, so that (b) the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative. Its exposition must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical, and its therapeutic aim neither social adaptation nor personalistic individualizing but rather a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities. The aim of therapy (q.v.) is the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.
In extending the tradition of Jung and Corbin forward, archetypal psychology has had to go back to their predecessors, particularly the Neoplatonic tradition via Vico and the Renaissance (Ficino), through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato (Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno, Symposium, Timaeus), and most anciently to Heraclitus. (Corbin’s works on Avicenna, Ibn’ Arabi, and Sohrawardi belong also in this tradition as does the work of Kathleen Raine on William Blake [1758-1835] and on Thomas Taylor, the English translator of the main writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists.)
The elaboration of this tradition by Hillman in Eranos lectures and in articles (1973a), by Miller in seminars at Syracuse University, by Lopez-Pedraza at the University of Caracas, and by Moore’s (1982) and Boer’s (1980) work on Ficino gives a different cast to archetypal psychology when compared with Jung’s. There the background is more strongly German (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Carus, von Hartmann, Kant, Goethe, Eckhart, and Böhme), Christian, psychiatric, and Eastern. Archetypal psychology situates itself more comfortably south (q.v.) of the Alps.
Especially—this Neoplatonic tradition is thoroughly Western even if it is not empirical in method, rationalist in conception, or otherworldly spiritual in appeal. This tradition holds to the notion of soul as a first principle, placing this soul as a tertium between the perspectives of body (matter, nature, empirics) and of mind (spirit, logic, idea). Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed, has been described as Hermetic consciousness (Lopez-Pedraza 1977), as “esse in anima” (Jung [1921] CW 6, §66, 77), as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries or figures of the metaxy. Body, soul, spirit: this tripartite anthropology further separates archetypal psychology from the usual Western dualistic division, whose history goes back before Descartes to at least the ninth century (869: Eighth General Council at Constantinople)» occurring also in the mediaeval ascension of Averroes’s Aristotelianism over Avicenna’s Platonism. Consequences of this dualistic division are still being felt in that the psyche has become indistinguishable from bodily life, on the one hand, or from the life of the spirit on the other. In the dualistic tradition, psyche never had its own logos. There could be no true psychology. A first methodologically consistent attempt to articulate one in a philosophical style belongs also within the perimeters of archetypal psychology (Christou 1963). ~James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology
JAMES HILLMAN & ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
An Imaginal Compilation
A Depth Aesthetic
Archetypal Psychoogy is more psychoaesthetic than psychoanalytical, a counterbalance to rationalism, interpretations, medical, and scientific frameworks. With different values, the arts are its primary mode of inquiry -- a psychology of images that are not reduced to something other. Derived from attending to the sensory and psychic aspects of images, it lets them illuminate consciousness with their inherent meaning.
Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.” [The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World] While all of our senses may be involved in beholding an image, Hillman follows the ancients in insisting that the heart is the organ that perceives and feels the aesthetic impact of an encounter with an image—first the heart, then the mind. He further states: “psyche is image,” and to propose that we ourselves are images among images. [“An Inquiry into Image,” in Spring 1977]
Completeness is in the image not in what it means... "every time you say what an image means, get a slap in the face... the dream becomes a koan... if you can literalize a meaning, "interpret" a dream, we are off track, we lost our koan (The dream is the thing, not what it means)." --James Hillman
'James Hillman undoes. You enter his writing and a conversation or an argument will occur, either with him, with yourself, or with some well -worn belief system. Favorite theories will be turned on their head or you’ll be guarding them all the closer’ - ‘Hillman lifts rocks and reveals the strange creatures beneath. He locates fissures of narrow mindedness and drops into their blind spaces. Unraveling conventional wisdom and codified understanding, he makes new room for being psychological. The undoing always becomes an opening. The result is a different perspective, one that deepens before it explains. The consistent goal: To put psyche(soul) back into psychology'. Dr Glen Slater, Pacifica Graduate Institute
Beauty is in the phenomenon and in intuiting or discerning and poetically investigating the god or goddess behind its essence. Soul animates and imagines by way of symbols.
https://www.academia.edu/8001140/THE_ANGELS_CALL_THE_ANGEL_AND_THE_INDIVIDUATION_PROCESS
THE ANGEL’S CALL:THE ANGEL AND THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS2y Scott Duncan Gilliam 2004
“Thus, in scientific research, a great deal of our thinking is in terms of theories. The word ‘theory’ derives from the Greek ‘theoria’, which has the same root as ‘theatre’, in a word meaning ‘to view’ or ‘to make a spectacle’. Thus, it might be said that a theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e. a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world is.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
"Anima is the cure, as well as the disease. [...] The consciousness marked by Anima, the consciousness of the Soul, is first of all awareness of our unconsciousness. [...] Making soul precedes the identification of oneself. Because before we become conscious, we must get to know that we are unconscious, and where, and when, and to what extent. [...] Anima flourishes where unconsciousness dwells."
James Hillman
James Hillman writes, “The character truest to itself becomes eccentric rather than immovably centered, as Emerson defined the noble character of the hero. At the edge, the certainty of borders gives way. We are more subject to invasions, less able to mobilize defenses, less sure of who we really are, even as we may be perceived by others as a person of character. The dislocation of self from center to indefinite edge merges us more with the world, so that we can feel ‘blest by everything.’ ”
His re-visioning of aging takes as its central paradigm the notion of character, which he defines as the whole of one’s nature, “that particular person you have come to be and already were years ago.” It is character, he says, that forms how our faces look, what our habits are, our interests, friendships, eccentricities, ambitions, and work. It is what determines the way we give and receive; it affects our loves, our children. And, as we age, the force of our character naturally deepens. “As character directs aging,” Hillman contends, “aging reveals character.”
If character and soul are the primary ground of our being, then the physical body and its losses may be looked at in more open and imaginative ways; the agitations and miseries of aging can be seen in light of their psychological purposes and the insights they provide into character. For example, rather than being annoyed when one’s mother tells the same story for the hundredth time, one might see her as passing on the archetypal “Story” by which we understand our lives and convey ancestral lore and wisdom.
To grow old well, Hillman says, takes the courage to let go of useless negative ideas about aging, and to cultivate instead curiosity about this process, finding its value. We must, he insists, keep our eyes open to both the fading light and the blaze of beauty at sunset. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/296/old-soul
- “We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.”-- James Hillman
- “Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.”
-- James Hillman - “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”-- James Hillman
- “How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.”-- James Hillman
- ′′ I like to think that memory is not only contained in us but also in things. At a certain time a mysterious interaction occurs between us and it's a memory. Not a memory in the sense of "commemoration", according to a usual way of understanding memory, but a memory as an ′′event image′′: an image that unexpectedly jumps out of something and presents itself, thus creating a spontaneous event, Specific of that moment. Not being the cause of this sudden surprise, I think it may originate in a memory enclosed in the thing. Memory-image actually makes its entrance into the present as a whole new event, not as simple as the reproduction of a past experience. It's a common experience, to be immersed in the usual thoughts, when, suddenly, a memory-image gives rise, from the past, to an image-event in the immediate present. This fact seems crucial to me, for the life of imagination and artwork. This type of memory is part of matter, before imagination ".
Margot McLean (wife of James Hillman)
The "Infirmitas" of the Archetype.
"Fundamental to depth psychology and to the soul is hurt, affliction, disorder, peculiarity--"abnormal psychology" or "psychopathology." Depth psychology was called into existence as a treatment for abnormal psychology. Depth psychology was, and remains a logos for the pathos of the psyche. By "psychopathology" I mean that category of psychic events publicly and/or privately declared abnormal and which cannot be altogether repressed, transformed, or accepted. These intolerable aspects show themselves paradigmatically in the symptom which Freud said is the starting point of depth psychology by introducing the term pathologizing by which I mean: The psyche's autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior, and to imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective." The Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and Athene. Facing the Gods. James Hillman.
It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical,” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics.
By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
The source of images – dream images, fantasy images, poetic images – is the self-generative activity of the soul itself. In archetypal psychology, the word “image” therefore does not refer to an afterimage, the result of sensations and perceptions; nor does “image” mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external, nor semantic: “Images don’t stand for anything” (Hillman 1978). They are the psyche itself in its imaginative visibility; as primary datum, image is irreducible.
Hillman, James (2013-09-18). Archetypal Psychology (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman). Spring Publications.
"The desire for an indefinable elsewhere keeps one slightly estranged, unplanted, subject to inexplicable feelings of exile to which psychology gives names like “loneliness” and “abandonment”….Engagement with other earthlings does not assuage the unearthly longings. These are not longings for the world and they are not satisfied by anything we do any where with any body." Hillman, Force of Character, pg 129
AN AESTHETIC OF THE UNKNOWN
“I’ve been straining for decades to push psychology over into art, to recognize psychology as an art form rather than a science or a medicine or an education, because the soul is inherently imaginative.” ~James Hillman
′′The unconsciousness is where it has always been, at the edge of consciousness, braided to the conscience, where we don't look or don't want to see. The unconscious surrounds us. We are immersed in psyche. As alchemists insisted, gold of potential lies in the ugly waste of what we have at hand. Working this raw material of the real unconscious was always the job of the artist who didn't just express his personal suffering, but reflected the torment of the world soul, the suffering in the roots. By the artist I mean artifex, the creator, whether it's artist, alchemist or analyst. The one who collects the wood carried by the current, the cacophonic sounds, the pieces of crafting and returns this unconsciousness to its roots. Artifex works with the soul in the world soul." --James Hillman
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/James_Hillman
Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926. He identified himself as Jewish and European in ancestry. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944–1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1950. In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978. His 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, was on The New York Times Best Seller List that year. His works and ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularized by other authors such as Thomas Moore. His published works, essays, manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence (through 1999) reside at OPUS Archives and Research Center, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.
Archetypal psychology
Archetypal psychology, Archetype
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.
Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991).
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology
By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced” (p. xvii).
The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.
Psyche (psychology), OR Soul
Hillman has been critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g., biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. Main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman’s oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to what he believes to be "its proper place" in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Archetypal Psychology: A brief account was written in 1983 as a basic introduction to the psychology that Hillman has created. It covers the major themes set out in his more comprehensive work, Re-Visioning Psychology. The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place. Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture. This draws from a sense of images as that which a person is drawn to and looks at in a meaningful way. Indeed the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning. Further to Hillman's project is a sense of the dream as the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in "the Dream and the Underworld." In this text Hillman suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head. The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but rather there is a world full of images that this I inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology. He stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces it out of a medical understanding into a poetic one. In this idea sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon becomes known.
Dream analysis
Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung. Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”
For example, Hillman (1983) discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake. The dream work would include "keeping the snake" and describing it rather than making it something other than a snake. Hillman notes that "...the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions" (p. 53). One would inquire more about the snake as it is presented in the dream and by the psyche. The snake is huge and black, but what else? Is it molting or shedding its skin? Is it sunning itself on a rock? Is it digesting its prey? This descriptive strategy keeps the image alive, in Hillman's opinion, and offers the possibility for understanding the psyche.
The Soul's Code
Hillman's 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the 'acorn theory' of the soul. This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It describes how a unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human being, and is displayed throughout their lifetime, and shown in their calling and life's work when it is fully blossomed or actualized.
It argues against the 'nature and nurture' only explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul, is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration, and achievement. It also argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth, including the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns. While acknowledging the importance of external factors in the blossoming of the seed, it argues against attributing all of human individuality, character and achievement to these factors. The book suggests reconnection with the third, superior factor, in discovering our individual nature, and in determining who we are and our life's calling.
Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He complements the notion of growing up, with the notion of growing down, or 'rooting in the earth' and becoming grounded, in order for the individual to further grow. Hillman incorporates logic and rational thought, as well as reference to case histories of well known people in society, in whose daimons are considered to be clearly displayed and actualized, in the discussion of the daimon. His arguments are also considered to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul of the individual.
Bibliography
A Blue Fire - Selected Writings By James Hillman, Harper-perennial; Later Printing edition (2010)
City and Soul, Uniform Edition, Vol. 2 (Spring Publications, 2006)
Senex and Puer, Uniform Edition, Vol. 3 (Spring Publications, 2006)
Archetypal Psychology, Uniform Edition, Vol. 1 (Spring Publications, 2004)
A Terrible Love of War (2004)
The Force of Character (Random House, New York, 1999)
The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling (1997)
Dream Animals, (with Margot McLean). (Chronicle Books, 1997)
Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses (1995)
Healing Fiction (1994)
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse (with Michael Ventura) (1993)
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992)
A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman introduced and edited by Thomas Moore (1989)
Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985)
Inter Views (with Laura Pozzo) (1983)
The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (1983a)
The Dream and the Underworld (1979)
Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)
Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (1975a)
Pan and the Nightmare (1972)
Suicide and the Soul (1964)
Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926. He identified himself as Jewish and European in ancestry. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944–1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1950. In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978. His 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, was on The New York Times Best Seller List that year. His works and ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularized by other authors such as Thomas Moore. His published works, essays, manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence (through 1999) reside at OPUS Archives and Research Center, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.
Archetypal psychology
Archetypal psychology, Archetype
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.
Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991).
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology
By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced” (p. xvii).
The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.
Psyche (psychology), OR Soul
Hillman has been critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g., biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. Main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman’s oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to what he believes to be "its proper place" in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Archetypal Psychology: A brief account was written in 1983 as a basic introduction to the psychology that Hillman has created. It covers the major themes set out in his more comprehensive work, Re-Visioning Psychology. The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place. Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture. This draws from a sense of images as that which a person is drawn to and looks at in a meaningful way. Indeed the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning. Further to Hillman's project is a sense of the dream as the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in "the Dream and the Underworld." In this text Hillman suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head. The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but rather there is a world full of images that this I inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology. He stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces it out of a medical understanding into a poetic one. In this idea sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon becomes known.
Dream analysis
Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung. Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”
For example, Hillman (1983) discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake. The dream work would include "keeping the snake" and describing it rather than making it something other than a snake. Hillman notes that "...the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions" (p. 53). One would inquire more about the snake as it is presented in the dream and by the psyche. The snake is huge and black, but what else? Is it molting or shedding its skin? Is it sunning itself on a rock? Is it digesting its prey? This descriptive strategy keeps the image alive, in Hillman's opinion, and offers the possibility for understanding the psyche.
The Soul's Code
Hillman's 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the 'acorn theory' of the soul. This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It describes how a unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human being, and is displayed throughout their lifetime, and shown in their calling and life's work when it is fully blossomed or actualized.
It argues against the 'nature and nurture' only explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul, is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration, and achievement. It also argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth, including the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns. While acknowledging the importance of external factors in the blossoming of the seed, it argues against attributing all of human individuality, character and achievement to these factors. The book suggests reconnection with the third, superior factor, in discovering our individual nature, and in determining who we are and our life's calling.
Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He complements the notion of growing up, with the notion of growing down, or 'rooting in the earth' and becoming grounded, in order for the individual to further grow. Hillman incorporates logic and rational thought, as well as reference to case histories of well known people in society, in whose daimons are considered to be clearly displayed and actualized, in the discussion of the daimon. His arguments are also considered to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul of the individual.
Bibliography
A Blue Fire - Selected Writings By James Hillman, Harper-perennial; Later Printing edition (2010)
City and Soul, Uniform Edition, Vol. 2 (Spring Publications, 2006)
Senex and Puer, Uniform Edition, Vol. 3 (Spring Publications, 2006)
Archetypal Psychology, Uniform Edition, Vol. 1 (Spring Publications, 2004)
A Terrible Love of War (2004)
The Force of Character (Random House, New York, 1999)
The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling (1997)
Dream Animals, (with Margot McLean). (Chronicle Books, 1997)
Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses (1995)
Healing Fiction (1994)
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse (with Michael Ventura) (1993)
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992)
A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman introduced and edited by Thomas Moore (1989)
Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985)
Inter Views (with Laura Pozzo) (1983)
The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (1983a)
The Dream and the Underworld (1979)
Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)
Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (1975a)
Pan and the Nightmare (1972)
Suicide and the Soul (1964)
https://www.essaytown.com/subjects/paper/james-hillman-archetypal-psychology/400023
https://www.essaytown.com/subjects/paper/archetypal-psychology/15687
"We are enacting, telling, witnessing the
Story of our Souls." --James Hillman
Soul speaks in Images.
Images are complete and cannot be reduced or interpreted.
Personal soul is not separate from the world.
Soul is the process by which we experience the world.
Soul demands a subtle perspective to address its complexity.
Imagination is the agency of soul.
Psychology is the self-revelation, insight, or telling of soul.
"Depth psychology ... eventually leads to the recognition of soul and the deepening factor in personality, the factor which gives depth." (p. 52) Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
PSYCHOLOGICAL SOUL
IS NOT THE SAME AS NOTIONS OF A RELIGIOUS OR SPIRITUAL SOUL
Polytheistic psychology does not necessarily imply polytheistic theology.
It is a symbol for an unknown function. the soul is the seat of psychological experience, just as the body is the seat of sense perception and the mind that of conception.
https://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/book-reviews/890-this-talk-of-soul-what-does-it-mean
Every Proposition in Psychology May Be Inverted with Advantage
James Hillman is renowned for his style, but Hillman’s style is intellectual and expressed in the written word. One device he employs repetitively in his work is a literary move dubbed the “Hillman pivot” (Rowland2017, 150), wherein he demonstrates imagination, suppleness, and conceptual strength. Many scholars have written about Hillman’s use of language and the contribution of his thought to the field of psychology. To name a few recent examples, Rex Olson (2014) places Hillman’s use of metaphor in a postmodern position; Stanton Marlan (2014) notes Hillman’s aesthetic approach and his reference to Aphrodite Peitho, the goddess of rhetoric; and Dennis Patrick Slattery (2014) describes his use of mythopoesis. “Rather than looking at myths morally, archetypal psychology looks at moralities mythically” (Hillman 1975, 179). He argues that the rhetoric of archetypal psychology gives soul to language and finds language for soul (216). Hillman’s move neither incorporates a logical process nor attempts to persuade the reader. It contains no argument. It is instead archetypal psychology in action; it stimulates imagination to no end other than the making of soul. Berry wrote: Contrasts are ways of making points stand out clearly. Imagine a painting with a dark background and white figures in the foreground. The white figures stand out because of the contrasting background. When archetypal psychology sets up oppositions, it is important to remember that these oppositions are about contrast rather than literal exclusion....Aesthetically speaking, these “either/or” exclusions create contrasts to make a point. (2008, 187–188) The move personifies because it enlivens an image and creates ambiguity, which is the essence of conscious life for archetypal psychology. “Pathologizing,” wrote Hillman, is “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness,morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective”(1975, 57). He continued farther on, “The psyche does not exist without pathologizing” (70) and "All we know is that the psyche always defines some aspect of itself as mad, the reasons for which become one of the eternal questions for psychological reflection. Pathologizing provokes psychologizing. Like love, God, death, and the nature of soul itself, madness is one of the psyche’s fundamental thematic fantasies." Hillman wrote: “Psychological creativity concerns the soul as opus. It is limited to its effects there: the creating, engendering, awakening, enlightening, and individuating of the soul.” The Jeffrey Lauterbach, "James Hillman Makes a Move" aim is “Psychic consciousness: the experience of life as a mythical enactment and of the soul as the focus of individual destiny” (1972, 28).
"The soul wants many things – to be loved, to be heard, to be named and seen, to be taught, to be let out, out in the street, out of the prisons of psychological systems, out of the fiction of interiority which forces it to project itself to gain outer recognition. We know too it has a vital interest in the life and behavior of its keeper on whom it depends; but this interest is not in the life and behavior as such, to help it or cure it. Rather it seems to be an interest in life for soul’s sake. It seems to ask that our sense of first importance shift from life to soul, that life be given value in terms of soul and in preference to a soul valued in terms of life. Thus, it does not brook neglect in life – this above all; and so it is like the ancient gods who considered impiety to consist in one great sin, neglect." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
“As is so often the psychological rule, the sin that one commits is attributed to that which one commits it upon. Projection. The moral justification for destroying an enemy is that the enemy is destructive.”
(James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld)
Hillman's imaginal way of re-viewing psychology is seen in his master tropes:
Personifying
is the re-peopling of the universe of meaning, seeing images in ideas, and bringing thought to life by seeing life in thought. "Words are persons," Hillman notes with the poet, and he adds a psychologist's conclusion: "Personifying is the soul's answer to egocentricity."
Pathologizing
is discovering a mythology in symptoms, finding stories in hurts, transforming messes into variegated richness. This is perhaps most crucial of all the tropes, and it leads Hillman to say: "By clinging faithfully to the pathological perspective which is the differential root of its discipline, distinguishing it from all others, depth psychology maintains its integrity, becoming neither humanistic education, spiritual guidance, social activity, nor secular religion."
Psychologizing
(precisely the opposite of psychologism) is seeing through the literalism of every positivism, metamorphosizing through metaphor, forsaking both letter and spirit for soul. Hillman sees literalism psychologically as an ego viewpoint and suggests the strategy of metaphor (performing one activity as if it were another) as peculiarly felicitous for "soul-making" (his phrase for psychologizing). Hillman wants to "join Owen Barfield and Norman Brown in a mafia of the metaphor to protect plain men from literalism" — and from the egoism of one-dimensional self-understanding. This leads Hillman to his fourth trope,
Dehumanizing,
which is understood as the release of the personal into deeper soul power, a transcendence of epic voluntarism of ego into the mythological many-faceted nature of the archetypal self (not just Oedipus, but all the presiding metaphors of all the complexes). Since "humanism's psychology is the myth of man without myths," archetypal psychology means dehumanizing, archetypologizing, mythologizing, and theologizing.
"A re-vision of psychology," says Hillman, "means recognizing that psychology does not take place without religion, because there is always a God in what we are doing." Just the same, Hillman wishes neither to psychologize religion nor to redeem it: "Archetypal psychology's concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of soul." (David Miller, Gods & the soul)
"It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway: the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars—good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy." (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, xi-xii)
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." --James Hillman
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." --James Hillman
"Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making." - James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology
'Thought of the Heart'
http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Hillman%20Thoughts.htm
Marsilio Ficino was the most important Neoplatonic philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. He was tasked with translating the complete works of Plato from Greek into Latin. The influence of Ficino’s translations was magnified by the use of the recently-invented printing press. Ficino led the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, was tutor to Michelangelo, translated the Corpus Hermeticum (a series of Hellenistic dialogues from late Antiquity, believed at the time to have been written by an ancient Pagan sage Hermes Trismegistus), and coined the term ‘Platonic love.’
“This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music … this century appears to have perfected astrology.” -Marsillio Ficino, 1492
Story of our Souls." --James Hillman
Soul speaks in Images.
Images are complete and cannot be reduced or interpreted.
Personal soul is not separate from the world.
Soul is the process by which we experience the world.
Soul demands a subtle perspective to address its complexity.
Imagination is the agency of soul.
Psychology is the self-revelation, insight, or telling of soul.
"Depth psychology ... eventually leads to the recognition of soul and the deepening factor in personality, the factor which gives depth." (p. 52) Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
PSYCHOLOGICAL SOUL
IS NOT THE SAME AS NOTIONS OF A RELIGIOUS OR SPIRITUAL SOUL
Polytheistic psychology does not necessarily imply polytheistic theology.
It is a symbol for an unknown function. the soul is the seat of psychological experience, just as the body is the seat of sense perception and the mind that of conception.
https://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/book-reviews/890-this-talk-of-soul-what-does-it-mean
Every Proposition in Psychology May Be Inverted with Advantage
James Hillman is renowned for his style, but Hillman’s style is intellectual and expressed in the written word. One device he employs repetitively in his work is a literary move dubbed the “Hillman pivot” (Rowland2017, 150), wherein he demonstrates imagination, suppleness, and conceptual strength. Many scholars have written about Hillman’s use of language and the contribution of his thought to the field of psychology. To name a few recent examples, Rex Olson (2014) places Hillman’s use of metaphor in a postmodern position; Stanton Marlan (2014) notes Hillman’s aesthetic approach and his reference to Aphrodite Peitho, the goddess of rhetoric; and Dennis Patrick Slattery (2014) describes his use of mythopoesis. “Rather than looking at myths morally, archetypal psychology looks at moralities mythically” (Hillman 1975, 179). He argues that the rhetoric of archetypal psychology gives soul to language and finds language for soul (216). Hillman’s move neither incorporates a logical process nor attempts to persuade the reader. It contains no argument. It is instead archetypal psychology in action; it stimulates imagination to no end other than the making of soul. Berry wrote: Contrasts are ways of making points stand out clearly. Imagine a painting with a dark background and white figures in the foreground. The white figures stand out because of the contrasting background. When archetypal psychology sets up oppositions, it is important to remember that these oppositions are about contrast rather than literal exclusion....Aesthetically speaking, these “either/or” exclusions create contrasts to make a point. (2008, 187–188) The move personifies because it enlivens an image and creates ambiguity, which is the essence of conscious life for archetypal psychology. “Pathologizing,” wrote Hillman, is “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness,morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective”(1975, 57). He continued farther on, “The psyche does not exist without pathologizing” (70) and "All we know is that the psyche always defines some aspect of itself as mad, the reasons for which become one of the eternal questions for psychological reflection. Pathologizing provokes psychologizing. Like love, God, death, and the nature of soul itself, madness is one of the psyche’s fundamental thematic fantasies." Hillman wrote: “Psychological creativity concerns the soul as opus. It is limited to its effects there: the creating, engendering, awakening, enlightening, and individuating of the soul.” The Jeffrey Lauterbach, "James Hillman Makes a Move" aim is “Psychic consciousness: the experience of life as a mythical enactment and of the soul as the focus of individual destiny” (1972, 28).
"The soul wants many things – to be loved, to be heard, to be named and seen, to be taught, to be let out, out in the street, out of the prisons of psychological systems, out of the fiction of interiority which forces it to project itself to gain outer recognition. We know too it has a vital interest in the life and behavior of its keeper on whom it depends; but this interest is not in the life and behavior as such, to help it or cure it. Rather it seems to be an interest in life for soul’s sake. It seems to ask that our sense of first importance shift from life to soul, that life be given value in terms of soul and in preference to a soul valued in terms of life. Thus, it does not brook neglect in life – this above all; and so it is like the ancient gods who considered impiety to consist in one great sin, neglect." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
“As is so often the psychological rule, the sin that one commits is attributed to that which one commits it upon. Projection. The moral justification for destroying an enemy is that the enemy is destructive.”
(James Hillman, The Dream and The Underworld)
Hillman's imaginal way of re-viewing psychology is seen in his master tropes:
Personifying
is the re-peopling of the universe of meaning, seeing images in ideas, and bringing thought to life by seeing life in thought. "Words are persons," Hillman notes with the poet, and he adds a psychologist's conclusion: "Personifying is the soul's answer to egocentricity."
Pathologizing
is discovering a mythology in symptoms, finding stories in hurts, transforming messes into variegated richness. This is perhaps most crucial of all the tropes, and it leads Hillman to say: "By clinging faithfully to the pathological perspective which is the differential root of its discipline, distinguishing it from all others, depth psychology maintains its integrity, becoming neither humanistic education, spiritual guidance, social activity, nor secular religion."
Psychologizing
(precisely the opposite of psychologism) is seeing through the literalism of every positivism, metamorphosizing through metaphor, forsaking both letter and spirit for soul. Hillman sees literalism psychologically as an ego viewpoint and suggests the strategy of metaphor (performing one activity as if it were another) as peculiarly felicitous for "soul-making" (his phrase for psychologizing). Hillman wants to "join Owen Barfield and Norman Brown in a mafia of the metaphor to protect plain men from literalism" — and from the egoism of one-dimensional self-understanding. This leads Hillman to his fourth trope,
Dehumanizing,
which is understood as the release of the personal into deeper soul power, a transcendence of epic voluntarism of ego into the mythological many-faceted nature of the archetypal self (not just Oedipus, but all the presiding metaphors of all the complexes). Since "humanism's psychology is the myth of man without myths," archetypal psychology means dehumanizing, archetypologizing, mythologizing, and theologizing.
"A re-vision of psychology," says Hillman, "means recognizing that psychology does not take place without religion, because there is always a God in what we are doing." Just the same, Hillman wishes neither to psychologize religion nor to redeem it: "Archetypal psychology's concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of soul." (David Miller, Gods & the soul)
"It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway: the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars—good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy." (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, xi-xii)
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." --James Hillman
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." --James Hillman
"Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making." - James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology
'Thought of the Heart'
http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Hillman%20Thoughts.htm
Marsilio Ficino was the most important Neoplatonic philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. He was tasked with translating the complete works of Plato from Greek into Latin. The influence of Ficino’s translations was magnified by the use of the recently-invented printing press. Ficino led the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, was tutor to Michelangelo, translated the Corpus Hermeticum (a series of Hellenistic dialogues from late Antiquity, believed at the time to have been written by an ancient Pagan sage Hermes Trismegistus), and coined the term ‘Platonic love.’
“This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music … this century appears to have perfected astrology.” -Marsillio Ficino, 1492
PSYCHE HAS ITS OWN BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Anima is a Bridge to the Other Gods & Goddesses
“The intellect is prompted by nature to comprehend the whole breadth of being. … Under the concept of truth it knows all, and under the concept of the good it desires all.” -Marsilio Ficino
“This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music … this century appears to have perfected astrology.” -Marsilio Ficino, 1492
Archetypal Psychology
Imagination, Mythopoetics, Liminality, Numinosity, Image, World Soul, Psyche, Psychologizing, Seeing Through, Personifying, Pathologizing, Soul-Making, Metaphor, Polytheism, Alchemical Psychology, Archetypes, Dreams, Imaginal Realities, Psychic Phenomena, Beauty, Pathos, Daemon, Depth, Vocation, Psychic Reality, The Nonrational, The Feminine, Anima Mundi, Depth Aesthetics, Narrative, Gods & Goddesses, Calling, Healing Fictions, Character, Mythos, Fluid Subjectivities, Cultural Psychology, Cultural Wounding, Neoplatonism, Archetypal Astrology
We begin with the basics of Archetypal Psychology:
Archetype, Myth, Dream, & Soul Tending
Psyche = Soul = Image = Butterfly
Imagination = Anima Mundi
Daimon = Genius = Angel
Love = Eros = Mystery
Art = Therapy = Magic
Acorn = Character & Calling
Soul-Making = Mythopoesis
Knowledge = Mythological & Poetic
Narrative = Storytelling = Metaphor
Polytheism = Pluralism = Diversity
Archetypes = Gods & Goddesses
Invisible Presence = Felt Sense = Personification
Descent = Mythological Underground = Unconscious
Reconfiguring the Aesthetic
“Archetypal psychology...claims that it is mainly through the wounds in human life that the gods enter (rather than through pronouncedly sacred or mystical events), because pathology is the most palpable manner of bearing witness to the powers beyond ego control and the insufficiency of the ego perspective.” (Archetypal Psychology of James Hillman)
“… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22)
"The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul."
(James Hillman)
"The soul tries to understand 'herself' beyond herself and always strives strangely persistently and universally to go BEYOND the imagination."
(James Hillman, On the Need for Foundation, in Anima (Journal), 1988)
Hillman (1979, p. 107) writes on dreams:
"...there is an operation, which we call dreaming, that makes the heroic ego a more subtle body, enabling it to become a free soul. From one vantage point it seems as if dreaming releases the free or psyche-soul from the misapprehensions that it belongs to life. From another position it seems as if dreaming works at moving the ego or body-soul into a deeper more psychic dimension."
Imaginal psychology urges us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective. Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Continual Mutual Transformation
The images must flow. Every sensation, feeling, thought, or intuition that we have, every action and reaction, is accompanied by a self-generating fantasy. Archetypal psychology is paradoxical, ambiguous, non-binary, unlike Jung's foundation in opposites. It leaves an oppositional construct, since, "to abandon thinking in opposites is to lose consciousness, whose very definition (by this perspective) is the clarifying mode of seeing, knowing, and ordering" (Hillman, 1979, p. 83).
It reflects an autonomous imaginal process of non-local resonance, visceral entrainment, and entanglement with the inherent depths of our being and our wounded world. It is still primarily at a subconscious level. We must also face the dimensions, diversity, even fragmentation of the collective.
Robert Sardello (2020) notes, "We, humanity, are within a stage of group rather than individual spiritual initiation. Initiation is always excruciatingly difficult, a time of trials, a time of the removal of absolutely everything, for it is not possible to experience the presence of the divine worlds as long as we are attached to the habitual world. Initiation cannot happen without the removal of everything personality relies on."
Archetypal Psychology stimulates our poetic imagination, provokes our senses and aesthetic eye, and helps us re-vision what we imagine as science. We can read the progressive theories of leading-edge science as modern myths. They both create and reflect changes in collective consciousness and the global worldview. These new myths permeate culture, fomenting change and opening new conceptual territory for exploration.
The "new myth" seems to be one of "guiding fictions," even "healing fictions." Hillman’s concept of healing fiction demonstrates how narratives result from mythopoetic collusion between psychological fictions. When believed as true and applied retroactively, they are used to reframe historical personal and cultural experiences.
Mythic consciousness and its practice, ritual life, requires a telos to create momentum--the dynamics of consciousness. The fictional carrot dangles, ever-present before us. As a culture, we are in the position of having to take ritual fictions (including scientific theories) seriously, while recognizing their status as fiction at the same time. This means being in two ontological "places" at once, facilitating the development of new ways of thinking about the nature of knowledge, being, and reality.
The myths are bigger than any one of us. Yet we can enter the imagination, not as an exercise in "doing our own thing," but as a disintegration or solution of the reference points that make it possible for the archetypal energies to live through us. Thus radical relativization of ego leads beyond the paradoxes of yoked opposites.
We engage with images however they arrive: wild and unorthodox, sensuous, terrifying, humorous, stubborn, kind, original and ultimately lovable. Images present themselves for our appreciation, not our interpretation. Images are not of our making. They arrive mostly unbidden, slipping past the rational mind. Images attract us with their presence, excite our interest, invite our response and offer the possibility of a relationship.
Emotional intelligence is really imaginal. The image "matters" as it is embodied. Cultivation of imaginal feedback consists in deliberate engagement with and contemplation of spontaneously produced images. Reciprocity is restoration.
James Hillman says, "If I am the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. I am a victim again. A result.” In his book The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Hillman suggests, “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling."
"First psyche, then world, or through the psyche to the world' says Hillman. 'This turning to the soul means taking in our complexes out of the world, out of the realm of senex power and system - it means that the search and questing is a psychological search and questing, a psychological adventure. It means that the messianic and revolutionary impulse connect first with the soul and be concerned first with its redemption." (Senex and Puer)
'Sooner or later something seems to call us towards a particular path. You may remember the 'something' as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation. This is what I must do, this is what I have got to have. This is who I am. If not this vivid or sure, the call may have been more like gentle pushing's in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Looking back you sense that fate had a hand in it'. (Soul's Code)
We are in continuous mutual or reciprocal engagement, deep relationship, and transformation with archetypal gods and goddesses and their infinite shape-shifting images. They inform us if we learn to attend to their invisible presence and entreaties. They help us relate the present moment, beyond our self-absorption, to the bigger picture. For every narcissistic impulse, egotistic sense of self-Importance, there are many echoes.
"Care of the soul requires us to see the myth in the symptom, to know that there is a flower wanting to break through the hard surface of narcissism. Knowing the mythology we are able to embrace the symptom, glimpsing something of the mysterious rule by which a disease of the psyche can be its own cure," says Thomas Moore.
In his Introduction to A Blue Fire, Thomas Moore reminds us that, "Narcissus was saved when he saw the beauty of his own face reflected in a pool of water. We are saved from our narcissistic distancing from the world when we see our own beauty in the display of everyday life and in the daily arts of the soul. We find our own face, the unique visage of our soul, in the world's display of itself."
In Care of the Soul, he argues, "The one-sidedness and moralism of the various attacks on narcissism suggest there may be some soul lying around in this rejected pile of ego and self love: anything that bad must have some value in it. Could it be that our righteous rejections of narcissism and love of self cover over a mystery about the nature of the soul's loves? Is our negative branding of narcissism a defense against a demanding call for the soul to be loved?"
"For when an emotion is not held aesthetically within its images… Then emotion runs rampant and we have to damp it down with drugs or exorcise it through therapies of release and expression. Instead, I am suggesting that restoration of the imagination is the fundamental cure of disordered emotion." (Hillman) For the full circle of emotional process to take place imagination needs to reflect not just the scenario that provoked the emotion but also elaborate the emotion itself as a dynamic state. Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and their Meanings for Therapy, Northwestern U P, 1960
James Hillman's approach to psychological soul or psyche is poetic and aesthetic, not developmental nor curative, but phenomenological. It is more artistic than scientific, but has its own psychological Logos, liberating therapy from analysis.
‘We have begun to move toward the end of analysis by ‘unthinking’, first, what was taken for granted about eros in analysis, then the language that has hurt the imagination, and finally that which has hitherto (and for reasons we have presented) been considered – wrongly, irreverently, blasphemously – to be Dionysian. It is so difficult to imagine, to conceive, to experience consciousness apart from its old identifications, its structural bedrock of misogyny, that we can hardly even intuit what this bisexual God might hold in store for regeneration of psychic life.’ (The Myth of Analysis, p298.)
Psyche's nature is image. In the imaginal view, we are spared the denial of our fragmented, pathological, disintegrating world, by refusing to model endless fantasies of integration. The message is that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth.
Hillman defines his sense of conscious community as ‘a kinship with independent people who love and share ideas’, ‘an erotic connection through ideas’. A community, he says, doesn’t need to live in the same place and it is better to keep the community ‘semi-imaginal’.
Hillman has a less literal view of community than a group of people living in the same place. Community is based on a shared sense of value around several core ideas. These would include the development of a sense of soul, deliteralizing the ego, and respect for the autonomy of the imaginal realms of consciousness.
He says: ‘I feel myself a member of a body, a community... a kinship with people who work with similar ideas or at least are trying to revision things. It can be therapy, it can be philosophy, it can be religion. It can be in criticism or classics or mythology. These people are not followers, not ‘my students’ – they’re often way ahead of me. Some are even older than me. And I doubt if psychology is their main focus. They are friends... there is nothing else to call them. Friends. We are all sort of in love with each other. There’s an emotion, an intensity, even though we are spread all over everywhere. It’s an active demonstration of what Alfred Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefühl, fellow feeling." (InterViews)
We can apply Earl Lovelace's bacchanal aesthetics ("The Wine of Astonishment") to soul-making (openness to the interconnection of things) and our own psychic diversity and decolonialization, ("While Gods Are Falling") “Finding the Darkness in Which to Grow":
"The greater the number of roads intersecting at a crossroads, the more vibrant (for those who understand the layout) or confusing (for strangers) it becomes. Bacchanal aesthetics is, therefore, the aesthetics of the crossroads as the meeting point of possibilities: the old and the new; official and unofficial interpretations; the cardinal points of meanings and/or the world; the secular and the mundane; and so on. Lovelace’s practice of bacchanal aesthetics recognizes the fluidity and instability inherent in all cultures as works-in-progress and welcomes such fluidity and instability as rationales for the artist’s freedom to experiment in order to advance the frontiers of style and vision."
Polytheism frees us from the monotheistic idea that we must “get it all together.” It better accounts for the nature of human beings, and helps us keep in touch with the richness and diversity of life. We find “a new function for the old Gods and Goddesses” with a modern sensibility. Polytheism focuses on the images of Gods and Goddesses. The new polytheism “is a discovery of the polytheism of the psyche” with many perspectives “many potencies, many structures of meaning and being," in everyday reality. (Miller)
Such fantasies and shared fantasies can be seen through with an archetypal psychology without conventional deconstruction. The same holds for over-striving repressive spiritual models or body-denying Ascensionism as a premature transcendence or escapist fantasy. Hillman's tools are psychologizing, pathologizing, and personification.
“To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real.” This polytheistic psychology differs from Jung’s Analytical Psychology in many crucial ways. It attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives -- the emergent phenomena of invisible, hidden, non-human or transpersonal energies -- of dialogical relationship and empathic resonance.
Psyche or soul has always inhabited the world and produces new worlds. Hillman argued that we are in psyche, rather that it being in us -- so it is Anima Loci as well as Anima Mundi. For Hillman, the psyche is an encompassing imaginal field encountered in images through a relationship of the dark side of the heart and soul. He aimed toward higher dimensional thinking, the end of paradox and a more adequate understanding of reality.
Archetypal psychology is not concerned with reconciling the outside, physical world with our inner, reflective self. As a social critic, Hillman demonstrates uncanny insight and ability to see clearly what others could not see.
Images are a way of seeing psyche's mythic sensibilities. He invites us to participate in our lives and the world around us as a continuation of the great mythological tales full of mystery and abounding in life and soul. Manifestations of the process are seen as images: ‘image as a way of seeing’.
"Our field needs to build rich and fantasy psychologies again such as classical mythology, the arts of memory and alchemy; like the psychology of Jung, like Neoplatonism, which gave order and culture to the madness of the Renaissance and the Romantics. Because what happens to our culture is what happens to - OUR - culture, our fantasies and individual images, they are moralized and repressed by us, or diagnosed and imprisoned, or exploited and betrayed, or drugged and derided. The soul of our civilization depends on the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture requires a culture of imagination." (Re-Visioning Psychology)
'Archetypal psychology cannot separate the personal and the collective unconscious, for within every complex, fantasy, and image of the personal psyche is an archetypal power' (Hillman, 1975, pp. 179-80). Hillman searches for an archetypal perspective on the personal.
The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Soul searches everywhere for the myths that will nourish it. Living myths are lived unconsciously as truths and have long-term consequences.
The soul is not of itself personal. Of course, the psyche presents itself in images of persons and in personal feelings, but it is more than personal. Soul has its own terrain, its own history and purposes, and its own principles of movement and stasis.
Psychic reality appears in the expressive form or quality of images that allows psychology to escape from its entrapment in “experience.” "Plato suggested to perceive desire, is to bring the soul into that state where it is close to its greatest light, to its becoming, to its true destiny. Individuation mirrors the soul's journey. The soul travels along the journey as it “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Richard Tarnas (2007), wrote, “It is an extraordinary act of human hubris. . .to assume that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is ultimately centered in the human mind” (p. 35). Hillman wanted a poetic basis for mind. He wanted to speak to the soul, "to shed light on obscure issues, but not the kind of light that brings an end to searching"..."to face our darkness to find our light."
Subjectivity here is freed from literalization in reflexive experience and its fictive subject, the ego. Instead, each object is a subject, and its self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance.
"Hillman found pathology not in a universal, spiritualized path to individuation, but inherent to each god, each archetypal pattern, and the goal of life, to the extent that Hillman names it, is to release the ego and individuate the daimon or the angel. ...Hillman emphasizes multiplicity and dissolution of one's personal identity. So moving closer to the gods does not result in transcendence of suffering, but a more nuanced understanding of it, in the sense of the infirmitas of the archetype." (Scott Becker)
Interiority, subjectivity, and psychic depth are all out there, including psychopathology. Hillman valued the Hermetic and Dionysian, the interior sun or radiant black sun of the underworld. He rules the borderlands of psychic geography, where his dance takes place.
"To affirm the Dionysian is to recognize and appreciate the place of pain and death in life, and to tolerate the full range from death to life and from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is 'delivered' from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural and familial expectations" (Thomas Moore, in James Hillman, ed., Puer Papers).
The soul has its own varied reasons. We can be in the world through the heart rather than the head. We can feel our congenital ties to the things of nature and of culture, discovering our actual attachments and thereby developing new intimacies. An embodied humanity seeks reconnection with the ensouled world via their mutual, imaginal participation in psyche (Hillman, 2006, p. 28).
Therapy on our own souls is ultimately ineffective without equal attention to the world soul, Anima Mundi, a necessary and essential psychological phenomenon that requires fostering in the Western psyche. The enchanted world alive is, of course, animism. This living world (polytheistic pantheism) is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics.
"Archetypal psychology recognizes that the soul needs a vital relationship to the gods. The soul thrives when it acknowledges a divine factor in any human endeavor." (JH, Blue Fire)
To illustrate the multiple personifications of psyche Hillman made reference to gods, goddesses, demigods and other imaginal figures which he referred to as sounding boards “for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life”. He describes the essential meaning of soul as that part of human experience that is able to create and image.
‘Archetypal psychology is not a psychology of archetypes. Its primary activity is not matching themes in mythology and art to similar themes in life. Rather, the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry.’
(Hillman, James. A Blue Fire (p. 15).
Marion Woodman called poetry "the sanity of madness." In the writings of Hillman, Robert Sardello, Ginette Paris, Wolfgang Giegerich, and other archetypalists, this is not just a philosophical and mystical notion. If psychology is by definition work with the soul, and if nature and culture have soul, then psychology must concern itself with this larger sphere.
Hillman argues strongly against Jung's concept of Self, reducing soul to personal subjectivity, and reducing The Feminine, while naming personalism as one of the burdens of the modern era.
It views the inner world and outer world through the lens of myth and poetry, not science but on the aesthetic and poetic basis of the soul. He views consciousness as a thin layer of literalism, depriving the soul of much needed meaning and experience. Hillman harnesses the power of imagination and the image to bring a true and profound meaning to life. He prefers to let the dream interpret us.
Symptoms belong to the embodied soul. The metaphorical reality of the psyche is more than mere fiction but less than literal. Metaphors are more than symbolic ways of speaking. Metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be assimilated. They are ways of perceiving, feeling and existing. Through this imaginal reality we find soul, meaning, and significance in our suffering. Intractable problems create a continuous flow of psychological ideas, (Hillman, 1975).
Psyche connects us with the larger process and purpose of life. Then our symptoms reflect back to us other parts of ourselves that were alienated. They call attention to the way we live life that has made us feel disconnected, haunted, abnormal or afflicted.
Imaginal Ways of Knowing
His phenomenological and aesthetic approach gives imagination absolute priority over ego understandings and applications. The idea of a poetic basis of mind is a radical one, moving consciousness away from heroics toward a more receptive and malleable posture. It is a shift away from habitual perspectives into those of the imaginal beings we encounter.
Symptoms of suffering such as pathologizing, depression, and anxiety are in actuality a language of the soul. Knowing our fantasy life is to know ourselves profoundly. A strong sense of destiny comes from that particular kind of self-knowledge that is beyond ego.
There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
In "The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World", Hillman wrote: "Beauty refers to the Deus revelatus, the supreme theophany, divine revelation. Beauty is the essential condition of creation; the manifest anima mundi. It is neither transcendent to the manifest or hidden within, rather is the appearance as such, created as they are in the forms they are given. Venus Nudata, Aphrodite’s beauty refers to the luster of each event – its clarity, its brightness."
Hillman speaks strongly against guided imagery, developmental modes, dream interpretation, Gestalt techniques, the interpretation and application of images for life, drug-induced reverie, and studies in symbolism. Archetypal practice emphasizes one’s attitude toward an image.
For example, he does not see the child as a phase we grow out of, or as a shadowless source of creativity. He criticizes fantasies of personal growth and warns that we cannot enjoy the benefits of the eternal child unless we also tolerate the childishness and dependence that come along with it.
https://appliedjung.com/a-blue-fire/?fbclid=IwAR2Q37TNy-FKzibsKAX1TBvJLOjdwyktoO1LRJIvOZB_v_O5I9J4tBdDkG8
Hillman wants to preserve the phenomena. “Stick to the image” has become a rule of thumb. This means not translating images into meanings, as though images were allegories or symbols. Art also requires a devotion to the vision, a willingness to stick to the image as presented in the unconscious, to follow where it leads.
The practice of therapy has the same kind of creative requirement. Often it involves effort and struggle and the willingness to endure anxiety. Some people are just unwilling to make the necessary effort or to endure the unavoidable anxiety. They forego creative fulfillment as a result. They consume, rather than have a love affair with images.
"Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors." --James Hillman
https://www.scribd.com/document/373766545/James-Hillman-Re-Visioning-Psychology-Harper-Row-1975
James Hillman, "On Cosmology", Archetypal Process
“[W]hen the world is dead: ego psychology is inevitable, for the patient must find ways to connect the psyche of dream and feeling to the dead world so as to reanimate it.” –James Hillman, “The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World,” Spring Publications. Kindle Edition.
Hillman claims, “the psyche upsets us." He saw ego consciousness as one of many constellations of fantasies within a psychical cosmos of fantasies. He thought contemporary political movements devoid of effective ways to resist over-heroic capitalist/consumer culture, and its ego fantasies of manic growth, empty success and destructive progress at any cost.
In such arid culture, wounded soul is avoided with manic flights from deepening engagement. The heart suffers from how our lives and the exploited earth are degraded in the same toxic manner -- capitalist profiteering, barbarity, manic madness, and colonialism.
“[Our] dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—[…] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.” (James Hillman)
Hillman claims, “the psyche upsets us." He saw ego consciousness as one of many constellations of fantasies within a psychical cosmos of fantasies. He thought contemporary political movements devoid of effective ways to resist over-heroic capitalist/consumer culture, and its ego fantasies of manic growth, empty success and destructive progress at any cost.
In such arid culture, wounded soul is avoided with manic flights from deepening engagement. The heart suffers from how our lives and the exploited earth are degraded in the same toxic manner -- capitalist profiteering, barbarity, manic madness, and colonialism.
“[Our] dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—[…] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.” (James Hillman)
Reading Hillman is something of a practice—a devotion even—towards consciously re-wiring our neural pathways, because his writing unravels our accustomed ways of thinking. Hillman’s psychological processes of imagining, seeing through, falling apart, and soul-making apply to the events and experiences of our lives and communities.
The perspectives of archetypal psychology meet and deepen into areas as diverse as psychotherapy, art and literature, physical disability, career and organizational life, urban spaces, celebrities, romantic love, screenwriting, environmental issues, natural disasters, global conflict, current affairs, politics, and religion. Above all, we labor in this depth work with love: love of the rich panoply of life; love of diversity, wholeness, and creativity. We labor because of our love of soul and soul-making, and the ongoing task of Psyche’s reunion with Eros. -Slater, p91
https://www.cgjungny.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/summer2012-1.pdf
The perspectives of archetypal psychology meet and deepen into areas as diverse as psychotherapy, art and literature, physical disability, career and organizational life, urban spaces, celebrities, romantic love, screenwriting, environmental issues, natural disasters, global conflict, current affairs, politics, and religion. Above all, we labor in this depth work with love: love of the rich panoply of life; love of diversity, wholeness, and creativity. We labor because of our love of soul and soul-making, and the ongoing task of Psyche’s reunion with Eros. -Slater, p91
https://www.cgjungny.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/summer2012-1.pdf
,
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Self-appropriation is the personal discovery and personal embrace of the dynamic structure of inquiry, insight, judgment, and decision. We find in our own intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility the foundation of every kind of inquiry and the basic pattern of operations undergirding methodical investigation in every field.
The consistent practice of self-inquiry, self-study, and intention-setting can help you deconstruct negative habits and limiting beliefs. If we cultivate more inner wisdom, our self-compassion grows while relationships with others shift. Life is informed with a quality of knowing that comes from deep with within—the soul-guide (psychopomp) or inner teacher that guides toward ultimate destiny.
This language isn't logical or literal, but nonlinear, metaphorical, and mytho-poietic. Fantasies in thoughts and images reveal common themes. This is not developmental psychology of a manic or heroic, over-achieving ego but more akin to Romantic aesthetics, an artform of soul-making and imagination. We avoid the pitfalls of one-sidedness, fundamentalism, concreteness, and literalism in favor of a metaphorical perspective. If we have no beliefs, we can embrace all narratives as they are, as mythologies and phenomenological images, not dogmas.
A strategic model retains usefulness for comprehending our own nature in the environment, beyond yet integrated with the models of science. Transgressing the fortified boundary between natural science and the humanities, the hidden language of the archetypes of nature helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. Events are only probabilistic until they occur. The Corpus Hermeticum suggests that fate and necessity compel our destinies.
A multidisciplinary approach can present and explore a variety of theories without advocating them, ideally leading toward best practice. Complexity demonstrates a science of surprise that supersedes the boundaries of nature and culture, transcendental theorizing or unreflexive presumption. How can we understand the various cooperative effects of systems, whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology, biology, etc.?
Depth psychology is metapsychology -- a heuristic process applied to analyzing the deeper hidden meaning of many aspects of life and the world. Heuristic (hyu-RIS-tik) comes from the Greek meaning "to discover." The heuristic process means achieving some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by systematic formula. This strategy for using readily accessible information to initiate problem-solving is used in the fields of invention, computer science, psychology and law.
Heuristic thinking mobilizes intuition and generally results in reasonably close or plausible solutions or characterizations. It is a rule of thumb for solving problems, making predictions and gaining insight. The benefits are speed and expediency in revealing common underlying cultural and behavioral patterns. In psychology, heuristics reveal the rules of behavior or archetypal processes, which explain how people make decisions and judgements or solve problems. It enables understanding by moving from the known to explaining the unknown using the logic of discovery based on experience.
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Self-appropriation is the personal discovery and personal embrace of the dynamic structure of inquiry, insight, judgment, and decision. We find in our own intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility the foundation of every kind of inquiry and the basic pattern of operations undergirding methodical investigation in every field.
The consistent practice of self-inquiry, self-study, and intention-setting can help you deconstruct negative habits and limiting beliefs. If we cultivate more inner wisdom, our self-compassion grows while relationships with others shift. Life is informed with a quality of knowing that comes from deep with within—the soul-guide (psychopomp) or inner teacher that guides toward ultimate destiny.
This language isn't logical or literal, but nonlinear, metaphorical, and mytho-poietic. Fantasies in thoughts and images reveal common themes. This is not developmental psychology of a manic or heroic, over-achieving ego but more akin to Romantic aesthetics, an artform of soul-making and imagination. We avoid the pitfalls of one-sidedness, fundamentalism, concreteness, and literalism in favor of a metaphorical perspective. If we have no beliefs, we can embrace all narratives as they are, as mythologies and phenomenological images, not dogmas.
A strategic model retains usefulness for comprehending our own nature in the environment, beyond yet integrated with the models of science. Transgressing the fortified boundary between natural science and the humanities, the hidden language of the archetypes of nature helps us translate the dynamics of our Being and Becoming. Events are only probabilistic until they occur. The Corpus Hermeticum suggests that fate and necessity compel our destinies.
A multidisciplinary approach can present and explore a variety of theories without advocating them, ideally leading toward best practice. Complexity demonstrates a science of surprise that supersedes the boundaries of nature and culture, transcendental theorizing or unreflexive presumption. How can we understand the various cooperative effects of systems, whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology, biology, etc.?
Depth psychology is metapsychology -- a heuristic process applied to analyzing the deeper hidden meaning of many aspects of life and the world. Heuristic (hyu-RIS-tik) comes from the Greek meaning "to discover." The heuristic process means achieving some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by systematic formula. This strategy for using readily accessible information to initiate problem-solving is used in the fields of invention, computer science, psychology and law.
Heuristic thinking mobilizes intuition and generally results in reasonably close or plausible solutions or characterizations. It is a rule of thumb for solving problems, making predictions and gaining insight. The benefits are speed and expediency in revealing common underlying cultural and behavioral patterns. In psychology, heuristics reveal the rules of behavior or archetypal processes, which explain how people make decisions and judgements or solve problems. It enables understanding by moving from the known to explaining the unknown using the logic of discovery based on experience.
SOUL
In Archetypal Psychology, anima mundi is a soul-image in both males and females. Nonverbal transmission, healing, and transformations are described as processes of 'mirroring'.
Psyche mirrors Cosmos. Events can be grouped by meaning as well as cause. Nature is our mirror. Psyche is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche, a combination of the intentional and phenomenal. Dreams mirror and reflect psyche.
Images mirror another mirror, (perception), a filter through which and a mirror in which we see ourselves. We see ourselves made visible in metaphors. Biogenesis mirrors the cosmic process of creation. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but come face to face with Cosmos in the imaginal.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul": "By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
Hillman suggests (RVP), "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment.I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
"James Hillman wrote that words are angels – “angelos” means “messenger” – that within each word may be a hidden angel. "Our job is always to renew language, and to find the places that it connects with the wildness it came from. A language that has its origins in myth, in the symbols within tree branches, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of animals, the shapes of water, is also a language that can bear heartbreak, can mediate a dispute, can calm troubled waters and bring a story in the place of raw pain..."
"Our Guardian Angel", the Daimon.
“Seizing the wink of fate is an act of reflection. It is an act of thought; while fatalism is a state of feeling, an abandonment of weighting, attention to detail, rigorous reasoning. Instead of reflecting deeply on things, we abandon ourselves to the more generic mood of fatality. Fatalism explains life globally. Whatever happens can be inserted into the capable generality of identification, of my journey, of growth. Fatalism consoles, because it does not raise questions. There is no need to analyze, if everything really fits. The Greek term for fate, moira, means "assigned part, portion". Just as fate has only a part in what happens, in the same way the daimon, the personal, internalized aspect of the moira, occupies only a portion of our life, calls it, but does not possess it. Moira derives from the Indo-European root smer or mer, "to ponder, think, meditate, consider, cure". It is a profoundly psychological term, as it asks us to analyze events closely to determine which portion comes from the outside and is inexplicable, and which belongs to me, pertains to what I have done, I could have done, I can still do. Moira is not in my hand, it is true, but it is only a portion. I cannot abandon my actions, or my abilities and their realization, as well as their frustration or failure, to them, to the gods and goddesses, or to the will of the Daimonic acorn. Fate does not relieve me of responsibility; on the contrary, it requires much more. In particular, it requires responsibility for the analysis." (Soul's Code)
LOVE'S TORTURES
The torture of the soul seems unavoidable in every close involvement [...] Despite all one does to avoid and to alleviate suffering, it would seem that the process in which the people find themselves arranges it, as if we were driven by a mythical necessity to enact Psyche and Eros. Jung (CW 13, §439f) has discussed the motif of torture, raising the questions: What is tortured? What does the torturing? Our myth tells us that psyche suffers from love; a girl is tortured into womanhood, as a man's anima is awakened through torment into psyche, a torment which, as Neumann observes, transforms eros as well. Eros is tortured by its own principle, fire. It burns others; and it burns alone when cut off from psyche, that is, when it is without psychological insight and reflection. Psyche pursues its tasks, without hope or energy, loveless, inconsolable. Their separation is the split we experience: while eros burns, psyche figures out, does its duties, depressed. Before connection is possible, psyche goes through the dark night of the soul (the burned wings of the night moth), that mortificatio in which it feels the paradoxical agony of a pregnant potential within itself and a sense of guilty, cut-off separateness. The torment continues until the soul-work (Psyche's tasks) is completed and the psyche is reunited with a transformed eros. Eros needs to regress, it would seem, into a state of burning unrest and agitation, dominated by the mother, by Penia or deprivation, in order to realize that he has himself been felled by his arrow and has found his mate, Psyche. He gains psychic consciousness. Only then does the union take place, and for it the sanctification of the gods is required. [...] Without wings the soul cannot soar above its immediate compulsions, can gain no perspective. For our psyche to unite legitimately with the creative and bring to sanctified birth what it carries, we evidently need to realize both our loss of primordial love through betrayal and separation and also our wrong relation to eros-the enthrallment, servility, pain, sadness, longing: all aspects of erotic mania. As Jung says, ". .. for always the ardour of love transmutes fear and compulsion into a higher free type of feeling."
James Hillman, Blue fire, pp.268-269
"It is not only my pathology that projects itself onto the world, but it is also the world that floods me with its unheard suffering. After the hundred years of solitude of psychoanalysis, I am much more aware of what I project outward than of what is projected on me by the UNCONSCIOUS OF THE WORLD. [...] We cannot vaccinate the individual soul, nor isolate it from the disease that is inherent in the soul of the world." (Hillman, Anima Mundi. The return of the soul to the world)
_____________________________
"Entitled “On Psychological Creativity,” “On Psychological Language,” and “On Psychological Femininity,” the lectures were written to stand alone, though Hillman grouped them loosely under the central theme of the transformation of psyche into life, by which he meant also “taking life as psyche, life as a psychological adventure lived for the sake of soul” (1972, p. 5).
In counterpoint to the analytical direction that Jungian psychology had taken, an emergent intent here was to relocate psyche and the work of psychology outside the clinical realm. “Were the psyche to be conceived in this impersonal manner, the opus would transcend whatever you or I might make of our souls during our lives. Then we might speak of psychic development as opus and of psychology as a field quite independent of any particular human personality” (ibid., p. 22). The model of psychology Hillman amplifies, in the first essay in particular, is the engendering of soul through love.
One must read Hillman realizing the episodic and circular nature of his work and mode of rhetoric. Like Jung, he revised and broadened his notions throughout his career as his odeas grew.
We need to be polytheistic in our reading of Hillman, and surrender to infusion with a Hermetic sensibility, as he will not be systematized. Soul-making is metaphysical praxis, independent of clinical theory. With this in mind, there are two particular ideas in The Myth of Analysis that deserve fresh attention.
The first is Hillman’s pursuit of the myth that lies at the heart of psychology, for the emergence of analysis in the 20th century heralded “a ritual, a new life-form, that fatherless has entered the history of consciousness without having uncovered what myth is being enacted” (1972, p. 112).
The essence of psyche is myth, yet Hillman rejects the ongoing relevance of the Freudian Oedipal myth and the Jungian hero myth as keys to psychology’s paternity. To find the true father, he seeks “the specific nature of the creative principle within the field of psychology” (ibid., p. 18). After exploring typical notions of creativity and their archetypal backgrounds, Hillman finally proposes and deepens into Psyche and Eros as the central myth for a creative psychology today. For it is an inhuman factor, the mighty daimon
Eros, that engenders soul.
Eros is the God of psychic reality, the true lord of the psyche and the patron of the field of psychology (ibid., p.73). In analysis, the ritual that gives rise to this new mythical interpretation is the transference. Psychological creativity is the union of eros and psyche, and for this, human relationships are indispensible. True to the erotic and chaotic spirit of the times in which it was birthed, The Myth of Analysis (1972) is an opus in service to the emancipation of Psyche and her reunion with Eros.
"Love not only finds a way, it also leads the way as psychopompos and is, inherently, the “way” itself. Seeking psychological connections by means of eros is the way of therapy as soul-making. Today this is a way, a via regia, to the unconscious psyche as royal as the way through the dream or through the complex." (ibid., p. 90)
The other idea prepares the way for understanding Hillman’s later writing, is his section entitled “Toward an imaginal ego” (Hillman, 1972,p. 183 ff ). Hillman argues that analytical psychology has anachronistically retained a nineteenth century concept of a reality-coping ego consciousness, which Jung himself had moved beyond.
“We need a more complete view of the ego in order to adapt to Jung’s later psychology, which, though it began as analytical, became archetypal” (ibid., pp. 187-188): analysis itself being, according to Hillman, an enactment of anarchetypal fantasy and still substantially invested in the hero myth. Psyche has become enslaved by a language of psychology that has lost its imagination. Part of contemporary “mental illness” is the sickness of psychology’s speech, which has become a kind of speech without the feminine ground of soul (ibid., pp. 211-212).
Indeed, the call to tend to Psyche in reunion with Eros is crippled by the inappropriate style of language. The cultivationof a soul-based psychology flowers more readily in the softer Hermetic language of myth, dream, and imagination, rather than the Apollonian terrain of logic, law, and literalism.
However, living in a society still deeply steeped in modernity, we face an ongoing challenge to slip the subtler chains of psychological language. Hillman advocates for the rectification of psychological language, beginning with the renunciationof the term unconscious, a word which only makes sense anyway within a definition of consciousness that excludes the imaginal memoria, and which operates to maintain “a fantasy of opposites through which the psyche is divided against itself between head and body, ego and shadow, day side and night side” (ibid., p. 173).
Instead, Hillman (1972) proposes the idea of an imaginal ego, which is adapted to Jung’s experience of psychic reality, including the memoria, and to Corbin’s mundus imaginalis . This imaginal ego builds awareness of the deep psyche into the field of consciousness.
We need a new way of looking, an imaginative way, a way that starts from within the imaginal itself. . . .that is not estranged from the imagination and its fantasies; and the conventional ego and its usual views would also become objects of this new consciousness. We could then see through our habitual ego, see the myths working within it to create our so-called ego psychology and its usual psychopathology. We might then also be less threatened by the grotesque, horrible, and obscene, since, from the imaginal perspective, the bizarre would simply belong. (p. 201)
Hillman developed this new way of looking and a language to summon it in
Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), which has become a central text of archetypal psychology. Drawing upon John Keats’poetic insight that the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul, Hillman begins with the pivotal idea that soul is “a perspective rather than a substance, a view-point toward things rather than a thing itself.” This perspective is reflective, it transforms events into experiences and it opens the imaginative possibility in our natures, locating us in a mode “which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (p. xvi)
more in Quadrant XXXXII
https://www.academia.edu/5808955/Creative_Eros_Connecting_with_Awakening_Psyche
"A psyche with few psychological ideas easily becomes a victim ", says Hillman. Discussion of ideas in therapy is not necessarily a defense against emotion, but it is predicated upon emotion as it carries it itself, Hillman has insisted that ideas, as well as the soul, and for the safety of the soul, need therapy. Giegerich asks this question as follows: "Abstract thinking is what the soul needs today. She requires more intellect. The soul doesn't need more feelings, emotions, body works. All of this is and continues to be egoic material." This, in my opinion, a radical movement within Jungian thought, a third wave of Jungian, even if this movement was already incipiently present in the works of Jung and Hillman. I quote Jung: ′′Patients' thoughts should be taken seriously. They adapt as only to how they can intellectually understand the situation ". Jung's perspective is generally ignored by contemporary Jungians both in theory and practice ′′ - David Miller, ′′ Dialectics & Analytical Psychology ′′ - The El Capitain Seminars.
· ·
· ·
In Archetypal Psychology, anima mundi is a soul-image in both males and females. Nonverbal transmission, healing, and transformations are described as processes of 'mirroring'.
Psyche mirrors Cosmos. Events can be grouped by meaning as well as cause. Nature is our mirror. Psyche is both a mirror of the subjective ego and a reflection of the whole psyche, a combination of the intentional and phenomenal. Dreams mirror and reflect psyche.
Images mirror another mirror, (perception), a filter through which and a mirror in which we see ourselves. We see ourselves made visible in metaphors. Biogenesis mirrors the cosmic process of creation. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but come face to face with Cosmos in the imaginal.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul": "By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
Hillman suggests (RVP), "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment.I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
"James Hillman wrote that words are angels – “angelos” means “messenger” – that within each word may be a hidden angel. "Our job is always to renew language, and to find the places that it connects with the wildness it came from. A language that has its origins in myth, in the symbols within tree branches, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of animals, the shapes of water, is also a language that can bear heartbreak, can mediate a dispute, can calm troubled waters and bring a story in the place of raw pain..."
"Our Guardian Angel", the Daimon.
“Seizing the wink of fate is an act of reflection. It is an act of thought; while fatalism is a state of feeling, an abandonment of weighting, attention to detail, rigorous reasoning. Instead of reflecting deeply on things, we abandon ourselves to the more generic mood of fatality. Fatalism explains life globally. Whatever happens can be inserted into the capable generality of identification, of my journey, of growth. Fatalism consoles, because it does not raise questions. There is no need to analyze, if everything really fits. The Greek term for fate, moira, means "assigned part, portion". Just as fate has only a part in what happens, in the same way the daimon, the personal, internalized aspect of the moira, occupies only a portion of our life, calls it, but does not possess it. Moira derives from the Indo-European root smer or mer, "to ponder, think, meditate, consider, cure". It is a profoundly psychological term, as it asks us to analyze events closely to determine which portion comes from the outside and is inexplicable, and which belongs to me, pertains to what I have done, I could have done, I can still do. Moira is not in my hand, it is true, but it is only a portion. I cannot abandon my actions, or my abilities and their realization, as well as their frustration or failure, to them, to the gods and goddesses, or to the will of the Daimonic acorn. Fate does not relieve me of responsibility; on the contrary, it requires much more. In particular, it requires responsibility for the analysis." (Soul's Code)
LOVE'S TORTURES
The torture of the soul seems unavoidable in every close involvement [...] Despite all one does to avoid and to alleviate suffering, it would seem that the process in which the people find themselves arranges it, as if we were driven by a mythical necessity to enact Psyche and Eros. Jung (CW 13, §439f) has discussed the motif of torture, raising the questions: What is tortured? What does the torturing? Our myth tells us that psyche suffers from love; a girl is tortured into womanhood, as a man's anima is awakened through torment into psyche, a torment which, as Neumann observes, transforms eros as well. Eros is tortured by its own principle, fire. It burns others; and it burns alone when cut off from psyche, that is, when it is without psychological insight and reflection. Psyche pursues its tasks, without hope or energy, loveless, inconsolable. Their separation is the split we experience: while eros burns, psyche figures out, does its duties, depressed. Before connection is possible, psyche goes through the dark night of the soul (the burned wings of the night moth), that mortificatio in which it feels the paradoxical agony of a pregnant potential within itself and a sense of guilty, cut-off separateness. The torment continues until the soul-work (Psyche's tasks) is completed and the psyche is reunited with a transformed eros. Eros needs to regress, it would seem, into a state of burning unrest and agitation, dominated by the mother, by Penia or deprivation, in order to realize that he has himself been felled by his arrow and has found his mate, Psyche. He gains psychic consciousness. Only then does the union take place, and for it the sanctification of the gods is required. [...] Without wings the soul cannot soar above its immediate compulsions, can gain no perspective. For our psyche to unite legitimately with the creative and bring to sanctified birth what it carries, we evidently need to realize both our loss of primordial love through betrayal and separation and also our wrong relation to eros-the enthrallment, servility, pain, sadness, longing: all aspects of erotic mania. As Jung says, ". .. for always the ardour of love transmutes fear and compulsion into a higher free type of feeling."
James Hillman, Blue fire, pp.268-269
"It is not only my pathology that projects itself onto the world, but it is also the world that floods me with its unheard suffering. After the hundred years of solitude of psychoanalysis, I am much more aware of what I project outward than of what is projected on me by the UNCONSCIOUS OF THE WORLD. [...] We cannot vaccinate the individual soul, nor isolate it from the disease that is inherent in the soul of the world." (Hillman, Anima Mundi. The return of the soul to the world)
_____________________________
"Entitled “On Psychological Creativity,” “On Psychological Language,” and “On Psychological Femininity,” the lectures were written to stand alone, though Hillman grouped them loosely under the central theme of the transformation of psyche into life, by which he meant also “taking life as psyche, life as a psychological adventure lived for the sake of soul” (1972, p. 5).
In counterpoint to the analytical direction that Jungian psychology had taken, an emergent intent here was to relocate psyche and the work of psychology outside the clinical realm. “Were the psyche to be conceived in this impersonal manner, the opus would transcend whatever you or I might make of our souls during our lives. Then we might speak of psychic development as opus and of psychology as a field quite independent of any particular human personality” (ibid., p. 22). The model of psychology Hillman amplifies, in the first essay in particular, is the engendering of soul through love.
One must read Hillman realizing the episodic and circular nature of his work and mode of rhetoric. Like Jung, he revised and broadened his notions throughout his career as his odeas grew.
We need to be polytheistic in our reading of Hillman, and surrender to infusion with a Hermetic sensibility, as he will not be systematized. Soul-making is metaphysical praxis, independent of clinical theory. With this in mind, there are two particular ideas in The Myth of Analysis that deserve fresh attention.
The first is Hillman’s pursuit of the myth that lies at the heart of psychology, for the emergence of analysis in the 20th century heralded “a ritual, a new life-form, that fatherless has entered the history of consciousness without having uncovered what myth is being enacted” (1972, p. 112).
The essence of psyche is myth, yet Hillman rejects the ongoing relevance of the Freudian Oedipal myth and the Jungian hero myth as keys to psychology’s paternity. To find the true father, he seeks “the specific nature of the creative principle within the field of psychology” (ibid., p. 18). After exploring typical notions of creativity and their archetypal backgrounds, Hillman finally proposes and deepens into Psyche and Eros as the central myth for a creative psychology today. For it is an inhuman factor, the mighty daimon
Eros, that engenders soul.
Eros is the God of psychic reality, the true lord of the psyche and the patron of the field of psychology (ibid., p.73). In analysis, the ritual that gives rise to this new mythical interpretation is the transference. Psychological creativity is the union of eros and psyche, and for this, human relationships are indispensible. True to the erotic and chaotic spirit of the times in which it was birthed, The Myth of Analysis (1972) is an opus in service to the emancipation of Psyche and her reunion with Eros.
"Love not only finds a way, it also leads the way as psychopompos and is, inherently, the “way” itself. Seeking psychological connections by means of eros is the way of therapy as soul-making. Today this is a way, a via regia, to the unconscious psyche as royal as the way through the dream or through the complex." (ibid., p. 90)
The other idea prepares the way for understanding Hillman’s later writing, is his section entitled “Toward an imaginal ego” (Hillman, 1972,p. 183 ff ). Hillman argues that analytical psychology has anachronistically retained a nineteenth century concept of a reality-coping ego consciousness, which Jung himself had moved beyond.
“We need a more complete view of the ego in order to adapt to Jung’s later psychology, which, though it began as analytical, became archetypal” (ibid., pp. 187-188): analysis itself being, according to Hillman, an enactment of anarchetypal fantasy and still substantially invested in the hero myth. Psyche has become enslaved by a language of psychology that has lost its imagination. Part of contemporary “mental illness” is the sickness of psychology’s speech, which has become a kind of speech without the feminine ground of soul (ibid., pp. 211-212).
Indeed, the call to tend to Psyche in reunion with Eros is crippled by the inappropriate style of language. The cultivationof a soul-based psychology flowers more readily in the softer Hermetic language of myth, dream, and imagination, rather than the Apollonian terrain of logic, law, and literalism.
However, living in a society still deeply steeped in modernity, we face an ongoing challenge to slip the subtler chains of psychological language. Hillman advocates for the rectification of psychological language, beginning with the renunciationof the term unconscious, a word which only makes sense anyway within a definition of consciousness that excludes the imaginal memoria, and which operates to maintain “a fantasy of opposites through which the psyche is divided against itself between head and body, ego and shadow, day side and night side” (ibid., p. 173).
Instead, Hillman (1972) proposes the idea of an imaginal ego, which is adapted to Jung’s experience of psychic reality, including the memoria, and to Corbin’s mundus imaginalis . This imaginal ego builds awareness of the deep psyche into the field of consciousness.
We need a new way of looking, an imaginative way, a way that starts from within the imaginal itself. . . .that is not estranged from the imagination and its fantasies; and the conventional ego and its usual views would also become objects of this new consciousness. We could then see through our habitual ego, see the myths working within it to create our so-called ego psychology and its usual psychopathology. We might then also be less threatened by the grotesque, horrible, and obscene, since, from the imaginal perspective, the bizarre would simply belong. (p. 201)
Hillman developed this new way of looking and a language to summon it in
Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), which has become a central text of archetypal psychology. Drawing upon John Keats’poetic insight that the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul, Hillman begins with the pivotal idea that soul is “a perspective rather than a substance, a view-point toward things rather than a thing itself.” This perspective is reflective, it transforms events into experiences and it opens the imaginative possibility in our natures, locating us in a mode “which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (p. xvi)
more in Quadrant XXXXII
https://www.academia.edu/5808955/Creative_Eros_Connecting_with_Awakening_Psyche
"A psyche with few psychological ideas easily becomes a victim ", says Hillman. Discussion of ideas in therapy is not necessarily a defense against emotion, but it is predicated upon emotion as it carries it itself, Hillman has insisted that ideas, as well as the soul, and for the safety of the soul, need therapy. Giegerich asks this question as follows: "Abstract thinking is what the soul needs today. She requires more intellect. The soul doesn't need more feelings, emotions, body works. All of this is and continues to be egoic material." This, in my opinion, a radical movement within Jungian thought, a third wave of Jungian, even if this movement was already incipiently present in the works of Jung and Hillman. I quote Jung: ′′Patients' thoughts should be taken seriously. They adapt as only to how they can intellectually understand the situation ". Jung's perspective is generally ignored by contemporary Jungians both in theory and practice ′′ - David Miller, ′′ Dialectics & Analytical Psychology ′′ - The El Capitain Seminars.
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ARCHETYPES
The ideas and principles behind archetypes are a cornerstone in the psychology of C.G. Jung. Jung viewed them as living organisms that transcend history, cultures, races, and time. Erich Neumann (1963) draws on Jung to identify archetypes as the structural dominants of the psyche that transcend consciousness and direct unconscious behavior. in the form of mythological motifs or symbols, archetypes impact “feeling, intuition, and sensation” (p. 17).
Archetypal theory as articulated by Jung evolved throughout his life’s work and was not without criticism. Post-Jungian scholars have taken archetypal theories in many directions. James Hillman (1976) identifies archetypes with the fundamental metaphors of life and as “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning” (p. xix).
Hillman (1975) places so much importance on archetypes that he developed a distinct approach, which is called Archetypal Psychology. He embraces the idea that archetypes contain a multiplicity of meanings and must be viewed metaphorically. He views the psyche as an expression of specific archetypes that represent the names and stories of mythic Gods. These include the Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, and Puer.
He identifies these as root metaphors that impact all of our psychic functioning. They provide access to the roots of the soul, which governs our perspective of the world:
"These persons keep our persons in order, holding into significant patterns the segments and patterns of behavior we call emotions, memories, attitudes, and motives. When we lose sight of these archetypal figures we become, in a sense, psychologically insane: that is, by not “keeping in mind” the metaphorical roots we go “out of our minds”—outside where ideas have become literalized into history, society, clinical psychopathology or metaphysical truths." (p. 128)
Hillman’s view of the psyche is in alignment with Plato’s concept of eidos, in which all knowledge is viewed as an expression of ideas “that have psychic premises in the archetypes” (1997, p. 132). He believed that a deeper understanding of myth and archetypes aids in our personal development.
[MEANING of MYTH]
"...mythology was historically the mother of the arts and yet, like many mythological mothers, the daughter, equally, of her own birth. Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological interpreters render it ridiculous. Literary criticism reduces it to metaphor. A new and very promising approach is opened, however, when it is viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature — of which our brain itself is but the most amazing flower." (p. 42)
"According to this view, a functioning mythology can be defined as a corpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli fostering the development and activation of a specific type, or constellation of types, of human life. . . . Our science is to be simultaneously biological and historical throughout, with no distinction between “culturally conditioned” and “instinctive” behavior, since all instinctive behavior is culturally conditioned, and what is culturally conditioned in us all is instinct." (p. 48)
Joseph Campbell (1969), The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin).
Tarnas (2006), in his work Cosmos and Psyche, draws the connections between archetypes and numinous universal myths that are associated with the heavens: "The earliest form of the archetypal perspective, and in certain respects its deepest ground, is the primordial experience of the great gods and goddesses of the ancient mythic imagination. In this once universal mode of consciousness, memorably embodied at the dawn of Western culture in the Homeric epics and later in classical Greek drama, reality is understood to be pervaded and structured by powerful numinous forces and presences that are rendered to the human imagination as the divinized figures and narratives of ancient myth, often closely associated with the celestial bodies." (p. 80)
https://acutonics.com/news/the-role-of-archetypes-myths-in-medicine/
"archetypes are prototypes that are copied and patterned within a
culture or particular sub-culture. In psychology, they are the psychic frameworks with which the patient identifies, both positively and negatively. When an archetype is working for a person, it helps shape and enrich the sense of self as it is indicative that anima is alive in that engagement. When an archetype begins to crumble and no longer works for the patient, the anima becomes suffocated, stagnant, trapped or dismembered and that is when soul disturbance resonates through health issues. It is in these moments that anima needs to be resuscitated, stirred alive, reconnected and liberated."
https://www.academia.edu/1016682/THE_ANIMA_IN_ANIMATION_MIYAZAKI_HEROINES_AND_POST-PATRIARCHAL_CONSCIOUSNESS?email_work_card=view-paper
The ideas and principles behind archetypes are a cornerstone in the psychology of C.G. Jung. Jung viewed them as living organisms that transcend history, cultures, races, and time. Erich Neumann (1963) draws on Jung to identify archetypes as the structural dominants of the psyche that transcend consciousness and direct unconscious behavior. in the form of mythological motifs or symbols, archetypes impact “feeling, intuition, and sensation” (p. 17).
Archetypal theory as articulated by Jung evolved throughout his life’s work and was not without criticism. Post-Jungian scholars have taken archetypal theories in many directions. James Hillman (1976) identifies archetypes with the fundamental metaphors of life and as “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning” (p. xix).
Hillman (1975) places so much importance on archetypes that he developed a distinct approach, which is called Archetypal Psychology. He embraces the idea that archetypes contain a multiplicity of meanings and must be viewed metaphorically. He views the psyche as an expression of specific archetypes that represent the names and stories of mythic Gods. These include the Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, and Puer.
He identifies these as root metaphors that impact all of our psychic functioning. They provide access to the roots of the soul, which governs our perspective of the world:
"These persons keep our persons in order, holding into significant patterns the segments and patterns of behavior we call emotions, memories, attitudes, and motives. When we lose sight of these archetypal figures we become, in a sense, psychologically insane: that is, by not “keeping in mind” the metaphorical roots we go “out of our minds”—outside where ideas have become literalized into history, society, clinical psychopathology or metaphysical truths." (p. 128)
Hillman’s view of the psyche is in alignment with Plato’s concept of eidos, in which all knowledge is viewed as an expression of ideas “that have psychic premises in the archetypes” (1997, p. 132). He believed that a deeper understanding of myth and archetypes aids in our personal development.
[MEANING of MYTH]
"...mythology was historically the mother of the arts and yet, like many mythological mothers, the daughter, equally, of her own birth. Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological interpreters render it ridiculous. Literary criticism reduces it to metaphor. A new and very promising approach is opened, however, when it is viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature — of which our brain itself is but the most amazing flower." (p. 42)
"According to this view, a functioning mythology can be defined as a corpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli fostering the development and activation of a specific type, or constellation of types, of human life. . . . Our science is to be simultaneously biological and historical throughout, with no distinction between “culturally conditioned” and “instinctive” behavior, since all instinctive behavior is culturally conditioned, and what is culturally conditioned in us all is instinct." (p. 48)
Joseph Campbell (1969), The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin).
Tarnas (2006), in his work Cosmos and Psyche, draws the connections between archetypes and numinous universal myths that are associated with the heavens: "The earliest form of the archetypal perspective, and in certain respects its deepest ground, is the primordial experience of the great gods and goddesses of the ancient mythic imagination. In this once universal mode of consciousness, memorably embodied at the dawn of Western culture in the Homeric epics and later in classical Greek drama, reality is understood to be pervaded and structured by powerful numinous forces and presences that are rendered to the human imagination as the divinized figures and narratives of ancient myth, often closely associated with the celestial bodies." (p. 80)
https://acutonics.com/news/the-role-of-archetypes-myths-in-medicine/
"archetypes are prototypes that are copied and patterned within a
culture or particular sub-culture. In psychology, they are the psychic frameworks with which the patient identifies, both positively and negatively. When an archetype is working for a person, it helps shape and enrich the sense of self as it is indicative that anima is alive in that engagement. When an archetype begins to crumble and no longer works for the patient, the anima becomes suffocated, stagnant, trapped or dismembered and that is when soul disturbance resonates through health issues. It is in these moments that anima needs to be resuscitated, stirred alive, reconnected and liberated."
https://www.academia.edu/1016682/THE_ANIMA_IN_ANIMATION_MIYAZAKI_HEROINES_AND_POST-PATRIARCHAL_CONSCIOUSNESS?email_work_card=view-paper
IMAGE
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
... a trauma is not a pathological event, but an IMAGE that has become intolerable". James Hillman
“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” ― Albert Camus.
"The image amplifies itself without the act of amplification; that is, its volume increases through what Berry calls “restatement.” In alchemical terms, what we have been doing is an iteratio of the prima materia: going over and over again the same opaque “unpsychological” stuff, giving more and more possibility for connections to appear and psychic patterns to emerge. Psyche emerges, but not in straight messages given by interpretative meanings. Rather, psyche emerges as we merge with or get lost in the labyrinth of the image.
Restatement and iteratio are also a mode of admitting one’s lostness in front of the image, which in turn heightens the value of the image. If this had been your dream in therapy, one analogy after another would have struck home in regard to your fantasies and behaviors, your ambitions, your styles of reflection and sexuality, attitudes toward yourself, life, old women, boys, growth, and shit. The dream would have gathered value, that all-encompassing sense of importance we tend to call archetypal.
“Archetypal” now is the result of an operation, given not with the image but with what happens with the image—a function of making rather than a function of being. The image grows in worth, becomes more profound and involving, that is, it becomes more archetypal as its patterning is elaborated.
We are following Jung here quite strictly: Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning (CW 8: 402). It portrays. It makes a picture of its own meaning—not one supposed by interpretation. As shape emerges, meaning emerges. Image-making = meaning. And all this without our usual interpretative moves."
(James Hillman, From Types to Images)
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
... a trauma is not a pathological event, but an IMAGE that has become intolerable". James Hillman
“Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.” ― Albert Camus.
"The image amplifies itself without the act of amplification; that is, its volume increases through what Berry calls “restatement.” In alchemical terms, what we have been doing is an iteratio of the prima materia: going over and over again the same opaque “unpsychological” stuff, giving more and more possibility for connections to appear and psychic patterns to emerge. Psyche emerges, but not in straight messages given by interpretative meanings. Rather, psyche emerges as we merge with or get lost in the labyrinth of the image.
Restatement and iteratio are also a mode of admitting one’s lostness in front of the image, which in turn heightens the value of the image. If this had been your dream in therapy, one analogy after another would have struck home in regard to your fantasies and behaviors, your ambitions, your styles of reflection and sexuality, attitudes toward yourself, life, old women, boys, growth, and shit. The dream would have gathered value, that all-encompassing sense of importance we tend to call archetypal.
“Archetypal” now is the result of an operation, given not with the image but with what happens with the image—a function of making rather than a function of being. The image grows in worth, becomes more profound and involving, that is, it becomes more archetypal as its patterning is elaborated.
We are following Jung here quite strictly: Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning (CW 8: 402). It portrays. It makes a picture of its own meaning—not one supposed by interpretation. As shape emerges, meaning emerges. Image-making = meaning. And all this without our usual interpretative moves."
(James Hillman, From Types to Images)
Decentred – Polycentred – Polytheist Psyche - Ensouled World
Myth offers a polycentric world, "with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere worlds in disguise (...) so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise” (Hillman, 1975, pp. 33-34).
Hillman’s “soul-making perspective” is a polytheist perspective enabling us to get across the diversity of the soul, rejecting monotheist prejudices and implying radical relativism. In Vannoy Adams’ words, Hillman proposes a de-literalizing of reality, i.e. putting an end to the reality principle and substituting it with a fantasy principle (Vannoy Adams, 2004, pp. 1-19).
(PDF) Beyond the myth of “self-domination” (Imaginal psychology in the pursuit of cultural shift). ALEŠ VRBATA
David Miller says, “the Gods are Powers” that transcend the personal, the historical, and the social. Yet they are also immanent in the world as potencies “in each of us, in societies, and in nature.” Indeed, “as they manifest themselves in life they are felt to be informing powers that give shape to social, intellectual, and personal behavior.” They are the basic structure of reality, “the names of the plural patterns of our existence.”
These powers are “the Gods and Goddesses of ancient Greece — not Egypt, not the Ancient Near East, not Hindu India, not Ancient China or Japan. Greece is the locus of our polytheism simply because, willy-nilly, we are Occidental men and women.” Do these many different gods act harmoniously? Miller says no. They often act in “contention.” Life may even be characterized as “a war of the Powers.” David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1974).
"The psyche creates reality everyday”, Jung says. “The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy”. If, as Jung succinctly says, “image is psyche” and if the psyche creates reality, then what creates reality is the image."
--Michael Vannoy Adams
If reality is the function of psychic imaging, human life consists of psychic images. Experience of reality results from the psyche’s capacity to produce images. The human being is “primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made of” (Hillman, 1975, p. 23).
The psyche creates reality every day. Experiencing the inner and outer world occurs in images whose source transcends the conscious psyche. “Reality” has a paradoxical quality, resulting from the psyche’s capacity to produce images and imagery becomes the place of origin of meaning.
Imaginal psychology defends essential sovereignty and the equality of all images and ... psyche of an essentially archetypal nature, Hillman started to question Jung ... and if the psyche creates reality, then what creates reality is the image.
For Hillman it is fantasy that rules the psyche. His perspective views the psyche as an entity with a natural propensity to personify, to mythologize and to produce images. At the same time it postulates the psyche as naturally dividing itself into many parts and images.
The autonomous psyche wields power over us through images that spontaneously irrupt from the deep psyche. We must interact with the images in order to gain access to that power. In other words, images are libido—they are psychic energy. If we hope to access the knowledge they contain we must interact with them actively on the imaginal level, which is to say, inside the image itself, inside the fantasy, inside the dream (Jung, 1928/1966, para. 350).
Jung explained that psychological experience cannot be separated from images. In his own words, “everything of which we are conscious is an image. Image is psyche” (Jung, 1929/1967, p. 54, CW13 para. 75). An imaginal approach to inquiry, research, and knowledge is, therefore, more yielding and less authoritatively reasonable or logical for the images cannot abide in logic. They are inherently erotic. It is up to us to translate them into a language which brings cohesive fusion to eros and logos dynamics. (Khoie)
"Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics. The source of images – dream images, fantasy-images, poetic images – is the self-generative activity of the psyche itself. The word ”image”, therefore, does not refer to an after-image, the result of sensations and perceptions, nor does ”image” mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings which it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external nor semantic: images don't stand for anything. As Jung said, they are the psyche itself in all its imaginative visibility. As primary datum, image is irreducible." (jh, AP)
As we wrestle with an author, we come to know where we agree, where we are challenged, and where we cannot agree. James Hillman is such a controversial author. He changed classical Jungian assumptions, terms, and practice.
He found insight by turning psychological assumptions on their heads, by reversing and deconstructing them as erroneous concepts. Innate psychic aspects of emotions disclose soul's organic nature through time and trace back to their archetypal sources.
From Hillman's archetypal perspective, emotions are primary and irreducible, valuable, transhuman and ubiquitous. Forcing "unconsciousness" on us, "emotions are the theme of earthly life." Alterations in the soul -- "autochthonous depressions, deepenings of grief, manic increases of energy, oceanic expansions of love, or flaring, all-consuming rages" -- increase its capacity, the "inner space" of the subjective soul.
For example, Personification is a psychic process or “mode of thought” upon which anthropomorphism or animism rests and thus forms the basis of ancient mythologies, dreams, and fantasies. Hillman defines it as a “‘mode of thought’ which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine” (Hillman, 1975, p. 12).
Emotions lead to a source that is "beyond human." Hillman distinguishes "between emotions signifying the world and offering information about it, and those that seem wholly interior—that is, those movements of the Heart or Heaven—neither sort of emotions is mine, subjective."
"To be in the grips of an emotion makes us instantly intelligible and commonly human—and beyond human, too." Therefore, his method sometimes "uses the expressive arts because their focus is mainly on emotion, rather than cognition, family systems, insight, recall, dream analysis, hypnosis, and so on."
The Passions of the Soul
Hillman's focus is "what actually goes on when a patient begins to dance, to choreograph or paint his or her state of soul, to speak aloud freely in a dramatic tirade or a poetic soliloquy, to sculpt it in clay or lay it out in a collage. And I want to ask about the "it" that is being presented, expressed, shown, or formed by means of these various arts."
"Clearly, the "it" is an emotion, an emotionally tinged state of soul. For even if it is said to be a trauma, a memory, a dream scene, or a present confusion and helplessness, what we like to call a "problem," with a lover, an employer, a parent—the emotion is the content that brings the person to therapy. Only when a "problem"—a relationship, a memory, a dream—becomes suffering, when we are affected by the problem, does it enter us and we enter therapy." http://www.pantheatre.com/pdf/2-MT09-JH.pdf
Hillman's archetypal psychology is an inquiry into the poetic, mythical, and divine logos of the soul. Psychological soul provides a transitional space, a liminal or in-between aspect that creates the creative space for entry of the divine into this world.
Entering the mysterious Labyrinth is a classic image of Descent. The ways of soul are labyrinthine, Hillman says. So is his method, following the meanderings and leaps of imagination rather than the rational grid of a plan. Hillman addresses the importance of the “unrest” of passion: “We hunger for that."
"Certainly, emotion is inside the skin, deep inside the hippocampus, the hormonal system,the animal body, residing in the core of our inmost being." "A principle intention of an emotion is to connect our animal nature with the world in which it is embedded. Emotions respond immediately to the truth of things. They are the most alert form of attention. Disgust turns away from decay, fear warns of danger, desire recognizes beauty, and pity responds to need. Unfortunately, therapy sometimes forgets this primary aspect of emotion."
Hillman contends, "that though they be felt deeply, and we suffer emotions physically and inwardly, this fact does not make them "ours." Rather, I believe that emotions are there to make us theirs. They want to possess us, rule us, win us over completely to their vision. ...William Blake said, "Some good we may do when the man is in a passion, but no good when the passion is in the man." To have a passion in me is demonic; to be in a passion, in the world of the emotion and grasped by the way it signifies all things with a specific vision or insight, may move the psyche to a deeper and epiphanic connection with the world." (Chapters XI and XV).
''We would save the phenomena just as they are, untreated, uncured.'' If memory fixates on intense moments of discomfort and joy, over time memory and fantasy meld together. Blake called emotions "divine influxes," suggesting that "they are the way the Gods flow into the soul, moving it to a more-than-human condition of excitement and fury, of sorrow and mourning, of folly and ecstatic desire."
So each emotional condition asks, "what does the emotion want?" In Hillman's view, the soul doesn't need to be straightened out but looked deeper into, ''seen through'' to the mythic, impersonal ground of its most intimate complaints.
"Outside and inside, life and soul…we have to see the inner necessity of historical events out there, in the events themselves, where ‘inner’ no longer means private and owned by a self or a soul or an ego, where inner is not a literalized place inside a subject, but the subjectivity in events and that attitude which interiorizes those events, goes into them in search of psychological depths." (Healing, 24-25).
AESTHETICS
Hillman followed his own call, knowing that vocation and passion is what distinguishes us from the herd. When we are called, we are called back to the images themselves, to express the scope of the perceptive field. Working with images is the theoretical basis of archetypal psychology. Intuition braids emotion, its expression, and the act of reflection.
He preferred the word imagination to unconscious, not to organize ideas about the image as concepts, that is, with a “thinking” or “intellectual” ordering. He remained in the mode of perception, expressing the ideas with a minimal of intellectual ordering, or "compartmentalization through the intellectual."
The aesthetic regime of art is a paradigm whose structure of connections between art and the everyday exceeds the classical territoriality of practices, skills and traditional classifications of art: it transpires in the overcoming of the boundaries between artistic practices and life, previously unexplored modes of creation, production, reception and reflection.
Aesthetics has been reaffirming the potential of aesthetics to affect the perception of the sensible. Imaginal aesthetics explores the permeable boundary between the sensuous and the intelligible, once established by Plato.
An "aesthetic kind of thinking" suggests a mental processing that merges perception with an intellect attuned to the arts. Aesthetic experience relates back to more everyday aesthetic concerns and practices, a field of immediacy organized within a distribution of the sensible.
There is an increasing interest in aesthetics that deliberately distances or even frees itself from aesthetic discourse primarily centered on art and could provide a deeper knowledge of transformations in contemporary society. Aesthetics does not necessarily refer back to art, but focuses on actions and activities that are more general, as processes of subjectivation.
Rancière approaches this question: "[h]ow can the notion of “aesthetics” as a specific experience lead at once to the idea of a pure world of art and of the self-suppression of art in life, to the tradition of avant-garde radicalism and to the aestheticization of common experience?"
Individuals rarely adopt and follow overarching narratives and ideologies directly and connect them to their personal integrity. Rather, these narratives and ideologies affect us by being transposed into the sensuous. From the very beginning, aesthetics was conceived as the uncanny intrusion of the sensible in the form of outrageous and anarchist poetry. The chaos of the becoming, aisthesis emerges as a fundamentally ambiguous and even tumultuous realm.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2018.1506209
Because we have an on-going dialogue with the author, Hillman's interest in politics and aesthetics can be extended into an imaginal exploration of the politics of aesthetics, a fundamental feature of the aesthetic regime that extends from art to other domains of life, to other forms of daily activity.
A recent approach by Jill Bennett envisages this new version of aesthetics as primarily “practical”. By practical aesthetics she understands a "means of apprehending the world via sense-based and affective processes—processes that touch bodies intimately and directly but that also underpin the emotions, sentiments and passions of public life.”
"Creating and viewing visual art are both nonlinear experiences. Creating a work of art is an irreversible process involving increasing levels of complexity and unpredictable events. Viewing art is also creative with collective responses forming autopoietic structures that shape cultural history. Artists work largely from the chaos of the unconscious and visual art contains elements of chaos." (Tobi Zausner)
Hillman's vision is pluralistic. The approach is aesthetic. The frame is archetypal. Thematic structures are metaphorical. Pathos is the grammar of emotion. Primordial image is our canvas. Dreams are liberated from interpretation. History is denial of mystery. But we can embrace history through mystery, awe, wisdom, and the fluid center of life. Our whole being is liberated from any sort of judgement. Each problem in life, symptom, tension, restlessness, aimlessness, is also an evocation.
Hillman was trying to "bring back a style of thought which has to do with “figure” – persons, figures, rhetoric, style – with a psychology that’s not conceptual." A psychological idea becomes a mode of self-discovery in a personal and collective way, because we are up against the problem of living. Emotional charge of the passionate nature is expressed in images. Experience is is immediate engagement.
We can’t help but be engaged. That is part of "the aesthetic – immediate sense-awareness, like an animal who lives by sense-intelligence." We sense what our image and particular narrative fiction says about the psychological process we are immersed in. We see-in to art work, to "taste" the experience of its images and to see what images within us reside with it.
Sharing between the visible and the invisible, the near and the far, the present and the absent”, introduces a shift in the sensorium and this shift is aesthetic in the sense that it redefines the very constituency of the sensorium.
Hillman brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. Archetypal psychology is “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (RVP).
Rather than desiring empty objects, Hillman says to "see where that desire is really, what it really wants, and where it really goes." What instincts are affected, repressed, or blocked?
Hillman followed his own call, knowing that vocation and passion is what distinguishes us from the herd. When we are called, we are called back to the images themselves, to express the scope of the perceptive field. Working with images is the theoretical basis of archetypal psychology. Intuition braids emotion, its expression, and the act of reflection.
He preferred the word imagination to unconscious, not to organize ideas about the image as concepts, that is, with a “thinking” or “intellectual” ordering. He remained in the mode of perception, expressing the ideas with a minimal of intellectual ordering, or "compartmentalization through the intellectual."
The aesthetic regime of art is a paradigm whose structure of connections between art and the everyday exceeds the classical territoriality of practices, skills and traditional classifications of art: it transpires in the overcoming of the boundaries between artistic practices and life, previously unexplored modes of creation, production, reception and reflection.
Aesthetics has been reaffirming the potential of aesthetics to affect the perception of the sensible. Imaginal aesthetics explores the permeable boundary between the sensuous and the intelligible, once established by Plato.
An "aesthetic kind of thinking" suggests a mental processing that merges perception with an intellect attuned to the arts. Aesthetic experience relates back to more everyday aesthetic concerns and practices, a field of immediacy organized within a distribution of the sensible.
There is an increasing interest in aesthetics that deliberately distances or even frees itself from aesthetic discourse primarily centered on art and could provide a deeper knowledge of transformations in contemporary society. Aesthetics does not necessarily refer back to art, but focuses on actions and activities that are more general, as processes of subjectivation.
Rancière approaches this question: "[h]ow can the notion of “aesthetics” as a specific experience lead at once to the idea of a pure world of art and of the self-suppression of art in life, to the tradition of avant-garde radicalism and to the aestheticization of common experience?"
Individuals rarely adopt and follow overarching narratives and ideologies directly and connect them to their personal integrity. Rather, these narratives and ideologies affect us by being transposed into the sensuous. From the very beginning, aesthetics was conceived as the uncanny intrusion of the sensible in the form of outrageous and anarchist poetry. The chaos of the becoming, aisthesis emerges as a fundamentally ambiguous and even tumultuous realm.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2018.1506209
Because we have an on-going dialogue with the author, Hillman's interest in politics and aesthetics can be extended into an imaginal exploration of the politics of aesthetics, a fundamental feature of the aesthetic regime that extends from art to other domains of life, to other forms of daily activity.
A recent approach by Jill Bennett envisages this new version of aesthetics as primarily “practical”. By practical aesthetics she understands a "means of apprehending the world via sense-based and affective processes—processes that touch bodies intimately and directly but that also underpin the emotions, sentiments and passions of public life.”
"Creating and viewing visual art are both nonlinear experiences. Creating a work of art is an irreversible process involving increasing levels of complexity and unpredictable events. Viewing art is also creative with collective responses forming autopoietic structures that shape cultural history. Artists work largely from the chaos of the unconscious and visual art contains elements of chaos." (Tobi Zausner)
Hillman's vision is pluralistic. The approach is aesthetic. The frame is archetypal. Thematic structures are metaphorical. Pathos is the grammar of emotion. Primordial image is our canvas. Dreams are liberated from interpretation. History is denial of mystery. But we can embrace history through mystery, awe, wisdom, and the fluid center of life. Our whole being is liberated from any sort of judgement. Each problem in life, symptom, tension, restlessness, aimlessness, is also an evocation.
Hillman was trying to "bring back a style of thought which has to do with “figure” – persons, figures, rhetoric, style – with a psychology that’s not conceptual." A psychological idea becomes a mode of self-discovery in a personal and collective way, because we are up against the problem of living. Emotional charge of the passionate nature is expressed in images. Experience is is immediate engagement.
We can’t help but be engaged. That is part of "the aesthetic – immediate sense-awareness, like an animal who lives by sense-intelligence." We sense what our image and particular narrative fiction says about the psychological process we are immersed in. We see-in to art work, to "taste" the experience of its images and to see what images within us reside with it.
Sharing between the visible and the invisible, the near and the far, the present and the absent”, introduces a shift in the sensorium and this shift is aesthetic in the sense that it redefines the very constituency of the sensorium.
Hillman brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. Archetypal psychology is “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (RVP).
Rather than desiring empty objects, Hillman says to "see where that desire is really, what it really wants, and where it really goes." What instincts are affected, repressed, or blocked?
.PSYCHE IS WORLD
James Hillman's Pluralistic Vision
"There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us." (Hillman, 1996)
"By entering the imagination we cross into numinous precincts. And from within this territory all events in the soul require religious reflection." James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 226
Living an Imaginative Life
Archetypal/imaginal psychology is the mythological underground. It defends the essential sovereignty and equality of all images and imagery, and resultant polytheist psychology. Liberty to imagine is considered the first and most important liberty of human being.
Images are representative phenomena emerging from the unconscious and identified or intuited as images. All philosophical concepts or works of art are preceded by mental images. Archetypes are prototypical timeless subjects of knowing. Experiencing inner and outer world takes place in images whose source transcends conscious psyche.
Today we know that imagery shares importance with other fundamental mental functions of human personality. Imagery makes part of human nature and surely plays its role not just in subjective life but also in external world of humankind. Taking imagery seriously is a quite contemporary phenomena, no longer restricted to art, religion, or “pseudoscientific disciplines.”
James Hillman's conceptual framework is a participatory perspective and vision. Archetypal psychology values the imaginal realm for what it is and how it makes us feel, not for what it means or signifies. Archetypal psychology provides a way to add a sacred dimension to human experience.
Psyche is animated by a host of imaginal figures, a movement of consciousness into psychological reality. Recognition of the multiple persons of the psyche is akin to the experience of multiple personality. Personifying means polycentrity, implicating us in a revolution ofconsciousness — from monotheistic to polytheistic” (1997, p. 35).
Felt Presence
A primarily interpretive approach to archetypal material is antithetical to the archetypal psychology perspective. Rather, we begin with how it feels to be in this image. Images and emotions are entangled and move us from one state to another, carefully considered glimpses of imaginal experience. We invoke a polytheistic, mythic, poetic, metaphoric sense of what is fatefully real.
For example, fusing body with soul and giving it voice through the imaginal language of poetry was the soul pattern of Rainer Maria Rilke. His soul-making poetry is therefore deeply religious for it fuses art, religion, and psychology (into one unified and inseparable whole. Its primary concern is with the soul's relationship to the gods. We are co-creators of an ensouled world and an enlivened cosmos.
Hillman wrote that "words are angels – “angelos” means “messenger” – that within each word may be a hidden angel. Our job is always to renew language, and to find the places that it connects with the wildness it came from. A language that has its origins in myth, in the symbols within tree branches, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of animals, the shapes of water, is also a language that can bear heartbreak, can mediate a dispute, can calm troubled waters and bring a story in the place of raw pain..."
In From Types to Images, Hillman describes the distinct features of an image:
"…an image is nothing more than a complex depiction in any medium that is precisely qualified by a specific context, mood, and scene."..."By context I mean the psychological entanglement within a mood and scene. I could call this entanglement ‘resonance,’ ‘implication,’ or ‘depth.’ … Entangled in an image is its implication whose depth amplifies into the wide world." (Hillman, 2019)
He continues to describe the phenomena of images:
"… I do want to suggest the peculiarity in an image. Images, you know, are very odd arrangements. They are heightened intensified moments. All the events of an image occur together. Simultaneity contrasts with the sequential reading of narrative in which events follow one after the other." (Hillman, 2019)
In archetypal psychology, interpretation spoils the image. The image as metaphor opens it up to the fullest individual experience of the image. The intent is a deepening of our experience of the image (soul-making), not a widening of the image to the universal. Failing to realize our soul pattern impoverishes not just ourselves, but the transpersonal anima mundi or world soul.
When image and symbol become the voice for a living archetype, the mutifaceted representative of a god, transformation can occur. This keeps the gods alive and well, and makes for a sacred practice. The sacred occurrence brings us deeper connection and relationship with the larger cosmos. This is a connection with our own daimon of fate, and gives life purpose, meaning, and significance.
Our experience of an image is uniquely personal. It is not what we see, but the way in which we see. It is a seeing of the heart. So, the images cannot be read empirically as sense perception or intellectually as explanation, but must be engaged with imagistially, poetically, and metaphorically. Jung notes, archetypal representations (i.e. images and ideas) as “mediated as by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such."
The way to deepen our experience of the image is to fully engage with it phenomenologically, rather than teleologically. The importance is not on where the image leads or what it means, but what it feels like to be engaged with the image. He advises us to move away from literalism and towards the symbolic image and metaphor, finding correlations to the message the gods wish to deliver.
The image is something to experience, not something to use. It is the experiencing of the image that enriches and fills us with a sense of depth and soul. When we’re at the edge of something, we’re at the boundary of the unknownm a somewhat chaotic experience. At the edge, images often come that we feel are “not me.”
Hillman encourages us to see and think in multifaceted, polytheistic ways about the psyche. He was at the forefront of the integration of pluralism, polytheism, and diversity. Archetypal psychology allows a recovery of myriad perspectives that polytheism allows.
In our approach to psyche, we are in a position analous to Giordano Bruno in 1600 when he claimed that the universe has no center, that the stars like our Sun are infinite, around which a multitude of planets orbit, some of which could to be inhabited by other living beings. Today, over 400 years later, not a day passes that Giordano Bruno does not have his revenge through extrasolar discoveries. Psyche and matter emerges from a non-local timeless three-dimensional dynamic quantum vacuum.
In Archetypal Psychology, Hillman states that archetypal psychology benefits us and our wider culture by embracing the wisdom, which is present for us in a polytheistic perspective. Polytheism and archetypal psychology, taken together, offer another method of undertaking religious studies and also of understanding religious perspectives. Hillman, cited David L. Miller, calling this a “new polytheism”.
If our psyches are ill, and our culture is ill, perhaps our conventional psychologies are also ill. James Hillman contends it is so and he revisioned Jungian psychology as Archetypal Psychology to restore soul to its central place in the care of the psyche and the re-enchantment of the world. He concluded that therapy needed to change the world rather than focus only on people's inner lives. When the gods have fled or were declared dead, the hero serves only the secular ego.
"The emotional self looks to psychology - that discipline that calls itself after the soul-to connect it with this soul. But this expectation for nourishment, for help in the psyche's struggle for awareness, is frustrated by psychology itself. The language of psychology insults the soul. It would sterilize metaphors into abstractions. We are made ill because it is ill'." --James Hillman
In We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse, 1993, Hillman made clear his belief that pathology lies in cultures as well as individuals, and we deprive the world of something when we take our rage and our grief exclusively to the therapist. Hillman never shied away from critiques of the world at large. Depression is “an appropriate response” to the world we live in, he said.
"By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! …Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.” (1991)
As for politics: Hillman begins with a general discussion of polarized thinking. “Polarity,” he reminds us, is an electrical engineering term. Batteries have poles; the psyche is far more nuanced than that, dwelling in shades of gray rather than black or white. Ideological extremes subvert our ability to judge individual issues on their merit.
In America and the Shift in Ages, Hillman suggests that rigidity has to do with futile attempts to shore up outmoded systems and institutions during a period of massive change. Not just one but “three or four” myths that are central to our culture are collapsing.
Everything we fear has already happened said Hillman: “The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial.” Other beliefs and structures are crumbling as well, he said. White supremacy, male supremacy, the influence of monotheistic religions, and the belief that we are “the good people."
If such institutions do not appear to be in decay, it’s because they are so staunchly defended, and that, Hillman says, is a sign of their lack of vitality — “If they were vital they wouldn’t need to be defended. And the fanaticism we’re witnessing goes along with the deterioration of the vitality of these myths."
Many of our fundamental beliefs are under scrutiny and need to be. Hillman mentions the meaning of “freedom.” For many, freedom means, “I can do any goddamn thing I want on my property; that I am my own boss and don’t want government interference; that I don’t want anybody telling me what I can and can’t do.”
This, he says, is the freedom of an adolescent boy (puer archetype). What of the different kinds of freedom, such as “freedom from the compulsions to have and to own and to be someone?” What of the freedom Nelson Mandela found in prison?
Hillman cites economic assumptions that need to be questioned as well. Falling demand needs to be stimulated, according to current assumptions, but from an ecological point of view, that’s exactly what the world needs at this time. Sustainability models, which may be our hope for the future, terrify those in positions of power.
Many of our current fears, says Hillman – from fear of immigrants crossing our borders, to fear of failing education, to fear of cancer, to economic insecurity, terrorists, and of course fear of “the other” political party, results from the lack of a wider framework in which to understand the massive shifts that are already underway. There is no going back, but as obsolete structures crumble, we can glimpse, if we look, new forms emerging.
Hillman said it’s important not to try to fit emerging structures into the patterns of the past. For our peace of mind, a new kind of faith is required: “I think it’s a matter of being free-wheeling, and trusting that the emerging cosmos will come out on its own, and shape itself as it comes. That means living in a certain open space — and that’s freedom.”
Hillman sensed the anxieties that the shift in the meaning of national boundaries and cultures would bring:
“Multinational consumerism, tourism, and the worldwide web of Internet communications are the evident and superficial levels of this collective consciousness, this globalism. Within it, and permeating globalism as a subliminal mood, is a sense of diffuse identity, an anxiety about borderlessness, what we in clinical psychology refer to as borderline personality disorders, panic attacks, paranoid defenses, and narcissistic rages. That is, diffuse borders and paranoid purisms, as well as retreats into intense, isolated self-centeredness, worries about one’s immune system, with hatred for everything invasive (including immigrants), a syndrome of characteristics owing to the loss of personal certitude, self-definition and location within well-defined borders."
To find again these personal and local borders we sometimes revert to hostile measures of exclusion. We try to resist the incursions of the Other into our private sphere. We join separatist movements, pledge allegiance to cults where the Other merely mirrors me, thereby avoiding the challenge of difference.
These regressive defenses against dissolution attempt to recapitulate the older security structures of the ego, prior to its displacing and deconstruction by globalism. These moves take political form in xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or…walls and fences at the U.S. border.
Hillman's essay, On Paranoia,
the opening:
"I shall begin with two statements from authorities of religion so as to place my topic, paranoia, within the broader context of this Tagung, the Hidden, and to affirm at the start that this lecture will be located at that juncture where psychology cannot be fully separated from religion — religion as relation with divinity and as relation with community — that is, where psychology is drawn to consider theology and politics. The first of these statements is from a psychologist, William James:
'Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.'
The second statement is from Kittel’s major theological dictionary, the entry on ”Revelation.”
All religion is concerned in some way with the manifestation of deity. This consists in removing concealment. There can be no direct access to deity . . . deity is hidden. Even primitive man knows this. On the other hand, there could be no dealings, let alone fellowship, with a God who remained permanently hidden.
In the broadest sense, then, all religion depends on revelation . . . it belongs to the nature of deity to manifest itself. What really counts is the correct method.
“What really counts is the correct method.” Not revelation as such is the essential but correct revelation, or, in James’s words, "harmoniously adjusting ourselves” to the unseen order.
The definitions of correct revelation belong to theology, while the determinations of wrong, false or deluded revelation belong to abnormal psychology and its category of paranoia (a term I shall be using to embrace paranoid, paranoiac, etc.). Particularly, this style of behavior and this type of character is where we find sincere attempts to adjust to the unseen order, lives lived to accord with revelation that must — following from our two authoritative opening statements — be granted the description of lives lived religiously. And yet paranoia is a profound, central, often disastrous, and chronic craziness. Whereas our focus shall at first be upon the incorrect, or paranoid, method of revelation, our aim intends more; for it is the supposition here that by investigation of the incorrect, or delusion, we may gain insight into the correct, or revelation.
We hope to gain even a further insight so as to understand why this language of correct and incorrect appears so crucial in the contexts of both paranoia and revelation. ' -James Hillman, On Paranoia
Themes of spiritualism, literalism, belief versus delusion (or belief-as-delusion), revealed truth, faith and imagination are central to Hillman's approach to the topic of paranoia.
………………………….
Like all of the great ones who live at the border of psyche and spirit, Hillman counseled us not to ignore our symptoms and pathologies, nor to take them literally and act from them.
He asked us to listen to them, as mysterious messengers, who might have something important to tell us. Until we can do so, as individuals and as a nation, things will continue to fall apart, and we will continue to destroy whatever elements of an imagined past greatness still remain.
________________________________________________
"It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical,” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics."
"By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul." (Archetypal Psychology)
"I 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. … Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the … brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of the imagination." (RVP)
"Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics. The source of images – dream images, fantasy-images, poetic images – is the self-generative activity of the psyche itself. The word ”image”, therefore, does not refer to an after-image, the result of sensations and perceptions, nor does ”image” mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings which it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external nor semantic: images don't stand for anything. As Jung said, they are the psyche itself in all its imaginative visibility. As primary datum, image is irreducible." (AP)
Hillman writes: Here I want to remind you of Jung’s position, from which I have developed mine. Jung’s psychology is based on soul. It is a tripartite psychology. It is based neither on matter and the brain nor on the mind, intellect, spirit, mathematics, logic, metaphysics. He uses neither the methods of natural science and the psychology of perception nor the methods of metaphysical science and the logic of mentation. He says his base is in a third place between: esse in anima, ‘being in soul. And he found this position by turning directly to the images in his insane patients and in himself during his breakdown years.
James Hillman's Pluralistic Vision
"There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us." (Hillman, 1996)
"By entering the imagination we cross into numinous precincts. And from within this territory all events in the soul require religious reflection." James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 226
Living an Imaginative Life
Archetypal/imaginal psychology is the mythological underground. It defends the essential sovereignty and equality of all images and imagery, and resultant polytheist psychology. Liberty to imagine is considered the first and most important liberty of human being.
Images are representative phenomena emerging from the unconscious and identified or intuited as images. All philosophical concepts or works of art are preceded by mental images. Archetypes are prototypical timeless subjects of knowing. Experiencing inner and outer world takes place in images whose source transcends conscious psyche.
Today we know that imagery shares importance with other fundamental mental functions of human personality. Imagery makes part of human nature and surely plays its role not just in subjective life but also in external world of humankind. Taking imagery seriously is a quite contemporary phenomena, no longer restricted to art, religion, or “pseudoscientific disciplines.”
James Hillman's conceptual framework is a participatory perspective and vision. Archetypal psychology values the imaginal realm for what it is and how it makes us feel, not for what it means or signifies. Archetypal psychology provides a way to add a sacred dimension to human experience.
Psyche is animated by a host of imaginal figures, a movement of consciousness into psychological reality. Recognition of the multiple persons of the psyche is akin to the experience of multiple personality. Personifying means polycentrity, implicating us in a revolution ofconsciousness — from monotheistic to polytheistic” (1997, p. 35).
Felt Presence
A primarily interpretive approach to archetypal material is antithetical to the archetypal psychology perspective. Rather, we begin with how it feels to be in this image. Images and emotions are entangled and move us from one state to another, carefully considered glimpses of imaginal experience. We invoke a polytheistic, mythic, poetic, metaphoric sense of what is fatefully real.
For example, fusing body with soul and giving it voice through the imaginal language of poetry was the soul pattern of Rainer Maria Rilke. His soul-making poetry is therefore deeply religious for it fuses art, religion, and psychology (into one unified and inseparable whole. Its primary concern is with the soul's relationship to the gods. We are co-creators of an ensouled world and an enlivened cosmos.
Hillman wrote that "words are angels – “angelos” means “messenger” – that within each word may be a hidden angel. Our job is always to renew language, and to find the places that it connects with the wildness it came from. A language that has its origins in myth, in the symbols within tree branches, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of animals, the shapes of water, is also a language that can bear heartbreak, can mediate a dispute, can calm troubled waters and bring a story in the place of raw pain..."
In From Types to Images, Hillman describes the distinct features of an image:
"…an image is nothing more than a complex depiction in any medium that is precisely qualified by a specific context, mood, and scene."..."By context I mean the psychological entanglement within a mood and scene. I could call this entanglement ‘resonance,’ ‘implication,’ or ‘depth.’ … Entangled in an image is its implication whose depth amplifies into the wide world." (Hillman, 2019)
He continues to describe the phenomena of images:
"… I do want to suggest the peculiarity in an image. Images, you know, are very odd arrangements. They are heightened intensified moments. All the events of an image occur together. Simultaneity contrasts with the sequential reading of narrative in which events follow one after the other." (Hillman, 2019)
In archetypal psychology, interpretation spoils the image. The image as metaphor opens it up to the fullest individual experience of the image. The intent is a deepening of our experience of the image (soul-making), not a widening of the image to the universal. Failing to realize our soul pattern impoverishes not just ourselves, but the transpersonal anima mundi or world soul.
When image and symbol become the voice for a living archetype, the mutifaceted representative of a god, transformation can occur. This keeps the gods alive and well, and makes for a sacred practice. The sacred occurrence brings us deeper connection and relationship with the larger cosmos. This is a connection with our own daimon of fate, and gives life purpose, meaning, and significance.
Our experience of an image is uniquely personal. It is not what we see, but the way in which we see. It is a seeing of the heart. So, the images cannot be read empirically as sense perception or intellectually as explanation, but must be engaged with imagistially, poetically, and metaphorically. Jung notes, archetypal representations (i.e. images and ideas) as “mediated as by the unconscious should not be confused with the archetype as such."
The way to deepen our experience of the image is to fully engage with it phenomenologically, rather than teleologically. The importance is not on where the image leads or what it means, but what it feels like to be engaged with the image. He advises us to move away from literalism and towards the symbolic image and metaphor, finding correlations to the message the gods wish to deliver.
The image is something to experience, not something to use. It is the experiencing of the image that enriches and fills us with a sense of depth and soul. When we’re at the edge of something, we’re at the boundary of the unknownm a somewhat chaotic experience. At the edge, images often come that we feel are “not me.”
Hillman encourages us to see and think in multifaceted, polytheistic ways about the psyche. He was at the forefront of the integration of pluralism, polytheism, and diversity. Archetypal psychology allows a recovery of myriad perspectives that polytheism allows.
In our approach to psyche, we are in a position analous to Giordano Bruno in 1600 when he claimed that the universe has no center, that the stars like our Sun are infinite, around which a multitude of planets orbit, some of which could to be inhabited by other living beings. Today, over 400 years later, not a day passes that Giordano Bruno does not have his revenge through extrasolar discoveries. Psyche and matter emerges from a non-local timeless three-dimensional dynamic quantum vacuum.
In Archetypal Psychology, Hillman states that archetypal psychology benefits us and our wider culture by embracing the wisdom, which is present for us in a polytheistic perspective. Polytheism and archetypal psychology, taken together, offer another method of undertaking religious studies and also of understanding religious perspectives. Hillman, cited David L. Miller, calling this a “new polytheism”.
If our psyches are ill, and our culture is ill, perhaps our conventional psychologies are also ill. James Hillman contends it is so and he revisioned Jungian psychology as Archetypal Psychology to restore soul to its central place in the care of the psyche and the re-enchantment of the world. He concluded that therapy needed to change the world rather than focus only on people's inner lives. When the gods have fled or were declared dead, the hero serves only the secular ego.
"The emotional self looks to psychology - that discipline that calls itself after the soul-to connect it with this soul. But this expectation for nourishment, for help in the psyche's struggle for awareness, is frustrated by psychology itself. The language of psychology insults the soul. It would sterilize metaphors into abstractions. We are made ill because it is ill'." --James Hillman
In We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse, 1993, Hillman made clear his belief that pathology lies in cultures as well as individuals, and we deprive the world of something when we take our rage and our grief exclusively to the therapist. Hillman never shied away from critiques of the world at large. Depression is “an appropriate response” to the world we live in, he said.
"By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! …Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.” (1991)
As for politics: Hillman begins with a general discussion of polarized thinking. “Polarity,” he reminds us, is an electrical engineering term. Batteries have poles; the psyche is far more nuanced than that, dwelling in shades of gray rather than black or white. Ideological extremes subvert our ability to judge individual issues on their merit.
In America and the Shift in Ages, Hillman suggests that rigidity has to do with futile attempts to shore up outmoded systems and institutions during a period of massive change. Not just one but “three or four” myths that are central to our culture are collapsing.
Everything we fear has already happened said Hillman: “The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial.” Other beliefs and structures are crumbling as well, he said. White supremacy, male supremacy, the influence of monotheistic religions, and the belief that we are “the good people."
If such institutions do not appear to be in decay, it’s because they are so staunchly defended, and that, Hillman says, is a sign of their lack of vitality — “If they were vital they wouldn’t need to be defended. And the fanaticism we’re witnessing goes along with the deterioration of the vitality of these myths."
Many of our fundamental beliefs are under scrutiny and need to be. Hillman mentions the meaning of “freedom.” For many, freedom means, “I can do any goddamn thing I want on my property; that I am my own boss and don’t want government interference; that I don’t want anybody telling me what I can and can’t do.”
This, he says, is the freedom of an adolescent boy (puer archetype). What of the different kinds of freedom, such as “freedom from the compulsions to have and to own and to be someone?” What of the freedom Nelson Mandela found in prison?
Hillman cites economic assumptions that need to be questioned as well. Falling demand needs to be stimulated, according to current assumptions, but from an ecological point of view, that’s exactly what the world needs at this time. Sustainability models, which may be our hope for the future, terrify those in positions of power.
Many of our current fears, says Hillman – from fear of immigrants crossing our borders, to fear of failing education, to fear of cancer, to economic insecurity, terrorists, and of course fear of “the other” political party, results from the lack of a wider framework in which to understand the massive shifts that are already underway. There is no going back, but as obsolete structures crumble, we can glimpse, if we look, new forms emerging.
Hillman said it’s important not to try to fit emerging structures into the patterns of the past. For our peace of mind, a new kind of faith is required: “I think it’s a matter of being free-wheeling, and trusting that the emerging cosmos will come out on its own, and shape itself as it comes. That means living in a certain open space — and that’s freedom.”
Hillman sensed the anxieties that the shift in the meaning of national boundaries and cultures would bring:
“Multinational consumerism, tourism, and the worldwide web of Internet communications are the evident and superficial levels of this collective consciousness, this globalism. Within it, and permeating globalism as a subliminal mood, is a sense of diffuse identity, an anxiety about borderlessness, what we in clinical psychology refer to as borderline personality disorders, panic attacks, paranoid defenses, and narcissistic rages. That is, diffuse borders and paranoid purisms, as well as retreats into intense, isolated self-centeredness, worries about one’s immune system, with hatred for everything invasive (including immigrants), a syndrome of characteristics owing to the loss of personal certitude, self-definition and location within well-defined borders."
To find again these personal and local borders we sometimes revert to hostile measures of exclusion. We try to resist the incursions of the Other into our private sphere. We join separatist movements, pledge allegiance to cults where the Other merely mirrors me, thereby avoiding the challenge of difference.
These regressive defenses against dissolution attempt to recapitulate the older security structures of the ego, prior to its displacing and deconstruction by globalism. These moves take political form in xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, genocide, or…walls and fences at the U.S. border.
Hillman's essay, On Paranoia,
the opening:
"I shall begin with two statements from authorities of religion so as to place my topic, paranoia, within the broader context of this Tagung, the Hidden, and to affirm at the start that this lecture will be located at that juncture where psychology cannot be fully separated from religion — religion as relation with divinity and as relation with community — that is, where psychology is drawn to consider theology and politics. The first of these statements is from a psychologist, William James:
'Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.'
The second statement is from Kittel’s major theological dictionary, the entry on ”Revelation.”
All religion is concerned in some way with the manifestation of deity. This consists in removing concealment. There can be no direct access to deity . . . deity is hidden. Even primitive man knows this. On the other hand, there could be no dealings, let alone fellowship, with a God who remained permanently hidden.
In the broadest sense, then, all religion depends on revelation . . . it belongs to the nature of deity to manifest itself. What really counts is the correct method.
“What really counts is the correct method.” Not revelation as such is the essential but correct revelation, or, in James’s words, "harmoniously adjusting ourselves” to the unseen order.
The definitions of correct revelation belong to theology, while the determinations of wrong, false or deluded revelation belong to abnormal psychology and its category of paranoia (a term I shall be using to embrace paranoid, paranoiac, etc.). Particularly, this style of behavior and this type of character is where we find sincere attempts to adjust to the unseen order, lives lived to accord with revelation that must — following from our two authoritative opening statements — be granted the description of lives lived religiously. And yet paranoia is a profound, central, often disastrous, and chronic craziness. Whereas our focus shall at first be upon the incorrect, or paranoid, method of revelation, our aim intends more; for it is the supposition here that by investigation of the incorrect, or delusion, we may gain insight into the correct, or revelation.
We hope to gain even a further insight so as to understand why this language of correct and incorrect appears so crucial in the contexts of both paranoia and revelation. ' -James Hillman, On Paranoia
Themes of spiritualism, literalism, belief versus delusion (or belief-as-delusion), revealed truth, faith and imagination are central to Hillman's approach to the topic of paranoia.
………………………….
Like all of the great ones who live at the border of psyche and spirit, Hillman counseled us not to ignore our symptoms and pathologies, nor to take them literally and act from them.
He asked us to listen to them, as mysterious messengers, who might have something important to tell us. Until we can do so, as individuals and as a nation, things will continue to fall apart, and we will continue to destroy whatever elements of an imagined past greatness still remain.
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"It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical,” which is the usual appellation for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b); it was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics."
"By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul." (Archetypal Psychology)
"I 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. … Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the … brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of the imagination." (RVP)
"Images come and go (as in dreams) at their own will, with their own rhythm, within their own fields of relations, undetermined by personal psychodynamics. The source of images – dream images, fantasy-images, poetic images – is the self-generative activity of the psyche itself. The word ”image”, therefore, does not refer to an after-image, the result of sensations and perceptions, nor does ”image” mean a mental construct that represents in symbolic form certain ideas and feelings which it expresses. In fact, the image has no referent beyond itself, neither proprioceptive, external nor semantic: images don't stand for anything. As Jung said, they are the psyche itself in all its imaginative visibility. As primary datum, image is irreducible." (AP)
Hillman writes: Here I want to remind you of Jung’s position, from which I have developed mine. Jung’s psychology is based on soul. It is a tripartite psychology. It is based neither on matter and the brain nor on the mind, intellect, spirit, mathematics, logic, metaphysics. He uses neither the methods of natural science and the psychology of perception nor the methods of metaphysical science and the logic of mentation. He says his base is in a third place between: esse in anima, ‘being in soul. And he found this position by turning directly to the images in his insane patients and in himself during his breakdown years.
PSYCHE IS WORLD
James Hillman's Pluralistic Vision
“The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination.”
― James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
If our psyches are ill, and our culture is ill, perhaps our conventional psychologies are also ill. James Hillman contends it is so and he revisioned Jungian psychology as Archetypal Psychology to restore soul to its central place in the care of the psyche and the re-enchantment of the world. He concluded that therapy needed to change the world rather than focus only on people's inner lives. When the gods have fled or were declared dead, the hero serves only the secular ego.
"The emotional self looks to psychology - that discipline that calls itself after the soul-to connect it with this soul. But this expectation for nourishment, for help in the psyche's struggle for awareness, is frustrated by psychology itself. The language of psychology insults the soul. It would sterilize metaphors into abstractions. We are made ill because it is ill'." --James Hillman
In We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse, 1993, Hillman made clear his belief that pathology lies in cultures as well as individuals, and we deprive the world of something when we take our rage and our grief exclusively to the therapist. Hillman never shied away from critiques of the world at large. Depression is “an appropriate response” to the world we live in, he said.
"By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets – the sickness is out there. … The world has become toxic. … There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people – at least among the white middle class – so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! …Every time we try to deal with our outrage … by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we’re depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world.” (1991)
As for politics: Hillman began with a general discussion of polarized thinking. “Polarity,” he reminds us, is an electrical engineering term. Batteries have poles; the psyche is far more nuanced than that, dwelling in shades of gray rather than black or white. Ideological extremes subvert our ability to judge individual issues on their merit.
________________________________________________
"...in the goblet of the wound, there is the soul. This means that it is the psyche,
the purpose of our love, bleeding, and that the wound is a grail "
--James Hillman
Depth psychologist, James Hillman founded the school of archetypal psychology with the publication of Re-Visioning Psychology in 1975. By psychology, Hillman meant poetic vision. He continues to invite us to follow our uncertainty. He says, "Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul."
"There are choices, accidents, hints and wrong paths, and the ego you, or whatever you call yourself, is a factor in all this. But there is still this other factor that keeps calling. At some moment, people turn, in despair or when they are unable to go any longer on a certain route, and this inner voice says, "Where have you been? I've been waiting for you to turn to me for a long time."
"Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering."
We can consider archetypes as ’emergent’ principles related to experiences that are common to all of us through our natural, early human experiences. Archetypes, symbols, and images are multi-leveled and polyvalent. They help us learn who we are.
"For us history is a psychological field in which fundamental patterns of the psyche stand out; history reveals the fantasies of the makers of history, and at their back and within the fantasies and patterns are the archetypes" (Hillman, 1972, pp. 126-127).
Re-recognizing psyche beyond the intrapsychic opens the way for a psychopathology of the world, and a call for a psychotherapeia, a care of the soul of the world. Hillman’s own break with the confinement of soul work within analytic practice encourages archetypal psychology to approach community, cultural, and ecological concerns. (Watkins)
"Simply said, you make soul by living life, not by retreating from the world into “inner work” or beyond the world in spiritual disciplines and meditation removes .... [but rather by leaving behind] the Cartesian split between inner and outer —good soul inside and the world, the flesh, and the devil outside ....” —James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse, p.50-51
"The close examination of life always involves reflections about death: to face reality always means to face mortality. We never struggle enough with life until we are willing to test ourselves with death. ...Every deep and articulated involvement, with ourselves or with another, includes in itself the
issue of death." (SS)
How have and how might central ideas of archetypal psychology—noticing, attentiveness, aesthetic response, beauty and ugliness, multiplicity, dialogue, pathologizing, seeing through, archetypal dominants, holding reflection and action together, the call of the world soul, the imaginal—orient us as we work with and tend psyche in the world? (Watkins)
"I look to arts for understanding, to ritual for enactments, and to the lives...of the past and how they came through. I need something further than community and civilization for they may be too human, too visible. I need imaginal help from tales and images, idols and altars, and the creatures of nature, to help me carry what is so hard to carry personally and alone." (Hillman, 1989, p. 164)
"Appreciation of any phenomenon requires a phenomenological method. To meet your mother, study her, and don't compare her to your father, or her sister, or someone else's mom. Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself. We surround you from all sides (circumambulation), expanding you by increasing your volume (amplification), distinguishing between your everyday aspects (differentiations). We want your character to shine brighter - epiphanies, revelations."-Hillman.
Soul-focused Psychology
"It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth." (Force of Character)
Hillman (1975) stated, “The soul is immeasurably deep and can only be illumined by insights, flashes in a great cavern of incomprehension” (p. xvi). It is as, or more applicable as a 'way of life,' a way of being in the world, than as a clinical approach. Permeability supersedes penetration. Hillman often spoke of “seeing through” the literal statements of individuals or groups, to discover the imaginal underpinnings.
Hillman considered lieralism the greatest ill in our thinking and view of the world, our tendency to mistake imaginal and symbolic truths for literal and historic fact. Soul whispers that each of us is special, but when we take that literally, we end up with a dark history of chosen ones believing they have a divinely ordained license to kill or oppress “the other.”
Hillman challenges us to take the 'deep dive' within or without the context of therapy and apply those insights to the world. He is critical of the centrality of the ego in Western treatments. He seeks to dissolve its illusion, to dissolve the misconceptions of self-identity and self-narrative.
Another key point Hillman makes is the primacy of image in the life of the psyche. By taking everything as poetry, Hillman frees consciousness from its thin hard crust of literalism to reveal the depth of experience. The soul, he says, turns events into experience. But it is image that is experienced, not literalism. Our darker side is the Mystery self, the voice calling from the wilderness.
“Archetypal Psychology,” an extension of Jung’s thought, centered on the poetic, imaginal basis of psyche or soul: “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.”
Hillman did more than offer poetic metaphor; his goal was nothing less than a return to an earlier, three part formulation of the human person. The ancients conceived of soul as an intermediate faculty that inhabits an imaginal realm between the physical world of body and the disembodied heights of pure spirit.
He rejected the ontic approach, relating to entities and the facts about them; relating to real as opposed to phenomenal existence. Sticking to the image meant sticking with the phenomenology. Hillman lived in defense of Anima Mundi, the World Soul, that teaches animals, trees, and rivers are intelligent and alive, and that at some deep level of the psyche, we can hear their voices.
Cultural Imagination
In Hillman’s life work, observation of the modern psyche led to conclusions that mesh with the myths of the ancestors. Hillman is always provocative, inviting us to look deeper into, or “see through” the ideas that limit soul and its individual expression. Psychological literalism is often in his crosshairs, as when he says, “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.”
When Hillman used terms like “soul” and “the gods,” his concern was religious, but not in the way of the literal truths of most organized religions. For Hillman, such literalism was the enemy of soul. He spoke only and always of the truth of the psyche because it precedes every other kind of truth: “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.” (Revisioning Psychology, 1977).
Because Hillman's approach is 'irrational,' the language remains ambiguous, the notions elusive, and the methods vague. Neither a 'good parrot' nor preservationist, he didn't merely do what Jung said, but did what Jung did as an innovative pioneer in the exploration of pluralistic psyche -- interdependent, intrinsically existing co-arising. As a pluralist, Hillman is very wary of monist essences and encourages multiple perspectives.
Hillman rejected the ideal of holism, a “unified personality” which he felt overglorifies the “heroic ego,” which he long had viewed as a culprit in our social and environmental troubles. He thought an obsession with growth was an outworn identification with the child.
He argued for “polytheistic psychology” that recognizes the psyche as composed of a dynamic group of autonomous inner personalities. Rather than assign psychological labels to these archetypes and complexes, Hillman used the Greek myths and stories to clarify these inner “persons.” Jung had said, “there are gods in our symptoms,” and Hillman made much of that statement.
The scope of his thought and writing, over almost 50 years, is vast. He was not moving toward wholeness. In the spirit of Jung himself, Hillman moves beyond without transcending off into monomaniacal notions of heroism, unity, and ascensionism. Yet he retained the mysticism of Henry Corbin's approach to the mundus imaginalis of Sufism. He distinguished the imaginal from the imaginary.
But Hillman proposes a mythical method, not mystical. He kept and prioritized Jung's descent into the underworld. A grounding in Jung's later works is almost essential for grasping Hillman's notions, departures, and preferences - the yearning of the basis of reality.
We live in contradictory worlds, eternity and time. The iconoclastic author worked out a way of expressing those differences by taking his psychological school into the world at large, casting an archetypal eye on all areas of culture. He famously said, "to heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must heal the story where that person imagined himself."
We protect ourselves from darkness with rationality and science. Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt. (RVP, p.50)
He extended the notion that the unconscious locates itself in the world, as the World Soul. Hillman rejected Jung's metaphysical and spiritual slant and the interpretation of dreams and other psychic content. Yet he maintained a Hermetic taproot. He found more fitting source material in art, myth, philosophy, and other products of the imagination, and from a neglected stream of the Western cultural tradition that extends back to the Romantic era, the Renaissance, and ancient Greece.
In archetypal psychology, Hillman abolished Jung’s scientific claims, the theory of compensation, the “archetypes in themselves,” the categorization of archetypes, the interpretation of images as “symbols,” Jung’s “theology,” the linear nature of alchemical operations, even the Jungian interest in “meaning” (the big question of the meaning of life).
Beauty (being, knowledge, appearance) is Hillman's successor concept to meaning. Each individual inclination or behavior, even if it is distorted or pathological is an archetypal image with its own beauty, and can be “returned to the Gods” by "seeing through" to the myth operating in the background. Pathologizing is soul-making. Each individual feature, as distorted and pathological as it may be, is a phenomenon or image in its own right and with its own archetypal depth. (Giegerich)
Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic stance. Hillman emphasized Jung's notion of personification and its spontaneous phenomenology. It does not need to take the Gods ontologically and theologically, as Jung did; it takes them “psychologically,” “metaphorically,” “imaginally.” The upward looking is correspondingly no longer a literal and subjective act and attitude.
By looking at Jung's essence rather than his content, Hillman broke the mold of classical, developmental, and popular Jungianism. He staked out new territory for psychic exploration, informed by his own calling -- heeding the call of the soul for transformation. When our life facts take on a mythic dimension we experience them differently as they gain another meaning told through another tale.
"Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling."
Rather than tests, diagnosis, cognitive therapy, ego-strengthening, healing treatment or medication, Hillman brought the soul back to the heartful center of psychology. He revisioned pathology and pathological terms without moral prejudice.
Pathology is not a medical problem to be cured. According to Hillman, pathology calls forth the symbols, images and meanings. He shows that pathology belongs intrinsically to the psyche and that it reveals the unchanging, necessary, fecund depths of human nature. (LE)
Archetypal Psychology is an aesthetic psychology, deeply rooted in the arts and humanities — non-literal, metaphorical, poetic, and imaginal. For Hillman, the natural movement of soul is down, into the depths, where a darker kind of wisdom lies. His approach is clear:
"First, “soul” refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by “soul” I mean the imaginative possibilities of our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, x.)
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, “the fundamental fantasies that animate all life. The poetics of soul establishes authentic fictions that offer our life stories a coherence they would not have without its presence.
Hillman's books are continuous streams of ideas, so no summary comes near being a substitute for reading the book. He more than implies that images are food for the soul. He noticed the entanglement between neurosis of self and neurosis of world, psychopathology of self and world.
Psyche is more about eccentricity than centering. Deconstruction and Reconstruction became his Solve et Coagula. Myth-making is ongoing destruction and creation, shifting fictions. But, some people just don't "get" Hillman's theory, practice, or context -- his critiques, activism, excess, and rebellious streak.
"Not knowing anything about the personal life of James Hillman, I could never quite appreciate the intent of his writings. The unconscious defined as imagination; the emphasis on images and soul; the preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology; the insistence on treating the dream only in its own terms; the tendency to dismiss everyday reality in his therapeutic work; the defense of the puer; the positive acceptance of pathology; the constant play on words; the attempt to be original, indeed, revolutionary; and the conscious effort to develop his own school of psychology — what was it all about?" (V. Walter Odajnyk, The Psychologist As Artist: The Imaginal World of James Hillmam)
Archetypal Psychology is an exercise in awareness of what is implied by a change of myth. The method is quite simple, although simplicity is sometimes hard to attain. We start by replacing "why" with "who," "what," "when" and "how." Who (which archetype, which sub-personality, which cultural or personal myth), is organizing my perceptions? Who is this person in front of me? (Paris)
We hope to provide hints about what some of that is about. Beyond the clinical aspects, there are many approaches to archetypal psychology as a philosophical perspective. It has entered cultural history, affecting lives and minds in a wide range of fields.
It is also found in archetypal literary criticism which argues that archetypes determine the form and function of literary works, that a text's meaning is shaped by cultural and psychological myths. It focuses on recurring myths and archetypes in the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works.
“Our lives are on loan to the psyche for a while. During this time we are its caretakers who try to do for it what we can.” (RVP) We need a 'way' of being in the world and a soulful psychology can provide one. According to Hillman, “Myths talk to the psyche in its own language; they speak dramatically, sensuously, fantastically.” Myth supplies an imagery that is both universal yet private.
Dreams
"In "The Dream and the Underworld" James Hillman continues to deepen and to refine Jung's recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hillman's contribution lies in his "imaginal reduction"—relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of the psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness.
Dreams, understood poetically, are neither messages to be deciphered and used for the benefit of the rational ego (Freud) nor compensatory to the ego (Jung); they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also sees dreams as initiations into the underworld of death—the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld." (Avens)
Private & Universal
Hillman's revision is a transdiciplinary complexity, not a one-point perspective, converging towards a single 'vanishing point' on the horizon line. Outer historical facts are archetypally colored, so they disclose essential psychological meanings. The essence is grasped from within through an archetypal pattern. The task is to find connection to the continuum of life rather than living in ageless, timeless one-sidedness.
Each day we ask not “what happened?” but “what happened to the soul?” For this way of remembering events, memory needs to return again to its reminiscence of primordial ideas, to its original association with the root
metaphors of human experience. Memory thus transformed registers first the experiences of the soul and only secondarily the accidents of events.
Historical facts disclose the eternally recurring mythemes of history and of our individual souls. History is a stage where we enact the mythemes of the soul. Myth is a phenomenological dramatization of our encounter with depths.
“Mythology is a psychology of antiquity,” writes Hillman, in The Dream and the Underworld. And “psychology is a mythology of modernity.” Hillman's revelatory model is imaginal and psychological, rather than conceptual and cerebral (p. 1,8) . It is powered by the archetypes of the personal and collective unconscious.
Myths are true but not literal, they are rather “perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events; but they are not themselves events... They give an account of the archetypal story in the case history, the myth in the mess” (Hillman, 1975, p. 101).
Our psychological lives mimic myths. Our task is to discover those archetypal patterns -- the personal within the archetypal. This does not mean that perceptions are forced to fit categories; rather, the archetypal patterns are used to organize and bring meaning to these perceptions.
Hillman questioned the metanarratives of dream interpretation, telos and goal. His telos of soul is the underworld mysteries of the psyche. Hillman (2013) elaborated the significance he found in this mythic image of psyche as underworld, finding a correspondence in dreams to the living presence of ancestors and ancestry in our lives. The telos of his work is not to cure and eradicate pathos, or discard the old myth/mythologem to replace it with a new one.
Hillman's notion of mythopoesis recalls that “poetry” has its Greek and Latin roots in “to make”; therapy, too, is a making, a becoming, not intrinsically an understanding. Hillman's view of dreams and dreams in therapy is based on a respect for the creative imagery, for our real predicament in the world and our ultimate irreducibility to rote mechanism.
Dream taps a rich underworld of imagery and experience. Hillman says, “What does seem to matter to the soul is the nightly encounter with plurality of shades in an underworld, as if dreams prepared for death, the freeing of the soul from its identity with the ego and the waking state.”
Avens describes how, "In "The Dream and the Underworld" James Hillman continues to deepen and to refine Jung's recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hillman's contribution lies in his "imaginal reduction"—relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of the psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness."
"Dreams, understood poetically, are neither messages to be deciphered and used for the benefit of the rational ego (Freud) nor compensatory to the ego (Jung); they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also sees dreams as initiations into the underworld of death—the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld." (Journal of Religion and Health, V.19 No.3, 1980, Springer)
Hillman’s post-Jungian reading of archetypes is as images for an active “soul-making” that creates non-unitarian or multiple, transforming potentialities, a “visionary hermeneutics” of both image-making and self-making. “Hillman is interested in the phenomena that happen along the way as you work with the images.” (Bosnak)
Hillman questioned the practice of interpreting dreams into daily life. He noticed we are changed in soul "even without direct interpretative intervention. It is not what is said about the dream after the dream, but the experience of the dream after the dream. A dream compared with a mystery suggests that the dream is effective as long as it remains alive."
"The healing cults of Asclepius depended upon dreaming, but not upon dream interpretation. This implies to me [Hillman] that dreams can be killed by interpreters, so that the direct application of the dream as a message for the ego is probably less effective in actually changing consciousness and affecting life than is the dream still kept alive as an enigmatic image." (DU, 119-123)
The dream image comes from the imagination, not from the outer world of the senses. Archetypal Psychology provides perspectives we don’t get otherwise. "Hades has a hidden connection with eidos and eidolon, the archetypal intelligence given in images." (DU) Hillman argues that we experience the “archetypal” because we view it archetypally (“Inquiry into Image”).
As we wrestle with an author, we come to know where we agree, where we are challenged, and where we cannot agree. Such wrestling may wound our self-image even as it transforms us.
That wound challenges us when this vulnerable spot in psyche is touched with reverberations -- the aesthetic reverberations of the truth. "Soul-as-metaphor also describes how the soul acts. It performs as does a metaphor, transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance. Whatever is heard with the ear of soul reverberates with under-and overtones" (Moore, 1978).
"The perspective darkens with deeper light. But this metaphorical perspective also kills: it brings about the death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding. The relation of soul to death - a theme running all through archetypal psychology - is thus a function of psyche"s metaphorical activity. The metaphorical mode does not speak in declarative statements or explain in clear contrasts. It delivers all things to their shadows." (Archetypal Psychology, pg. 32)
As a wound closes one state, its scar simultaneously opens another -- a shifting identity, a straddling of worlds.
" Through simile, we find likenesses, and metaphor, bridges, linking
us by way of the figurative sense to what lies beyond our literal experiences, but not for the purpose of denouément, as in story consciousness, so much as the experience and amplification of the image—the beginning of soul-making, according to Hillman.
He writes, “Image-consciousness heals. The sense of ourselves as images in which all parts belong and are co-relatively necessary keeps ends and beginnings together, like the wound remembered by the scar” (“Puer Wounds” 240). Out of story, and into image, out of sentence and into sentience, or out of transience and into transparency. I am naked, I stand before you, I am scarred." (S.Asher Sund)
We live myth before we can understand it, as such. Hillman understood this. He calls on us to “speak for the soul” (RVP, p. 161). In doing so he is aware of the difficulty of such a task. Soul guides us beyond what is known into the unknown, into the great mystery of life. By opening to the soul we open to the transformational potential of being.
"This archetypal understanding could regenerate history in the sense of reversing it or cleansing it. Such work is immensely difficult...Psychological changes – changes of attitude, changes of personality, those fundamental lustrations of the soul – are also regenerations of history.
"Transforming my family’s attitudes by uncovering patterns in the entwined ancestral roots is not merely a personal analytical problem. It is an historical step towards freeing a generation from a collective pattern. By changing that collective, there is a change in history itself. ...what we do with our psychological life is of historical import, not merely on the inner plane of salvation of the individual soul from history. More, it is the way in which history, as that which goes on collectively outside us, itself may be washed and healed." (PP)
The image has autonomous compelling qualities. They can shatter or enhance our worldview. "Soul sees by means of affliction." (BF 149) James Hillman addresses our wound and gives it a voice, animated by the invisible voice of life. Our imaginal faculty transmutes inner states into outer reality. Imagery resonates throughout multiple levels of existence.
Hillman writes, “In analytical practice, we have learned that an
archetypal understanding of events can cure the compulsive fascination with
one’s case history. The facts do not change, but their order is given another dimension through another myth. They are experienced differently; they gain anothermeaning because they are told through another tale” (“An Aspect” 34).
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman describes "the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and the healer are one and the same." In the essay "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar" in Senex and Puer, Hillman explains that the act of healing is not "because one is whole, integrated, and all together, but from a consciousness breaking through dismemberment" (234).
Only the wounded heal, but wounds don't heal the way we want them to, but heal the way they need to. What is being wounded? What is being healed? Hillman says that myths ‘represent archetypal styles of existence from which we cannot escape and from which we cannot heal.’ (SS)
Dreams provide important clues. Our art is not only in the dreaming but in remembering it, remembrance of it. A myth is something that explains the world; it is, mysteriously, bigger than itself. Consciousness is altered through the naming and healing of psychic wounds - the part of us we do not know. The multitude are images or voices of the dead, that figure as they are personified. The multitude of voices speak.
"In “saving” image, symbol, and even the “mystical,” from an analytic, disembodied, and misogynist reductionism, Hillman’s archetypal psychology champions a form of transformational subjectivity, and personally redemptive mysticism, through an ontological affirmation of what Jung (1937) understood as the reality of the psyche." (Odorisio, 2018, Depth Psychology & Mysticism (Palgrave, Macmillan).
We don't know if those spirits and daimons exist beyond our images of them. We need a new mode of apperception of self, others, and cosmos. Hillman describes the subtle body as the union of immaterial spirit and physical reality (psychic and somatic unconscious), "a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, taste, influence, and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights..."
Our task is to become truly sensitive to the soul. We cultivate deepening, our own quality of being in the world. We attend to and listen to a different order of meaning informed by self-originating archetypal phenomena. What is true about myth? Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information that we ignore at great peril.
We penetrate deeply into the imagination with courage and patience, avoiding the pitfalls of conclusions. As with our own psyche, there is no one-dimensional linear through-line in James Hillman's psychic labyrinth. He critiques, rather than systematizing or setting up a lot of principles. In fact, he upturns assumed truths, deliteralizing such ideas as goals, ending, success.
"It emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations. It embraces and prioritizes woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. Psychic numbing is denial."
He insists that seeing the image as the product of imagination is backwards. The image is primary and therefore universal. We must start with the phenomenon of the image, not the empirics of imagining. The phenomenon isn't the product of imaging, so attempts to analyze or guide images is a vain attempt to control them. Hillman broke the pattern of the usual interpretation of patterns.
Psyche has its own realm with its own logic -- [depth] psychology. Hillman formulated a new percolation of psychological theory, preferencing soul over personality, ego-development, or spiritual metaphysics. Hillman's dictum is not "Know Thyself" through reflection, but "Reveal Thyself." Unseen relationships structure inner life.
"For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount, and where eros may move freely-whether it be in analysis, in marriage and family, or between lovers or friends." (Myth of Analysis)
Jung and Hillman agreed that the personal and collective unconscious together is the psyche or the soul. Hillman by-passed Jung's metaphysical or religious contemplation for a fertile phenomenology with endless variations, including recurrence, fragmentation, and refraction.
Certain aspects of nonlinear dynamics and creativity inform artists and the artistic process. Like fractals, archetypes are dynamic process-structures that etch time into form -- archetypal patterns of self-organization and self-reflection. Strange attractors share some of the important characteristics attributed to archetypes.
Both are patterns of dynamical behaviors which reveal hidden levels of order, eccentricities, constraints or limitations on the possibilities of the behavior of the respective systems. Both are irrepresentable in their entirety but may be characterized by a succession of projected images, each of which reveals an aspect, but not the totality, of the system's behavior.
But, the simple identification of these two concepts should be avoided. Archetypes and strange attractors share similar rich vocabularies to describe the phenomena of their respective domains and the dynamical phenomena associated with archetypes. We cannot reductively conflate them as they are analogous or metaphorical.
Archetypal psychology is not prescriptive and is not a method. Soul is self-referential, recursive, non-linear: "it moves indirectly in circular reasonings," like a maze or spiral. Hillman asserts that it is "a post-modern way of thinking" . . . “a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.” Archetypal significance belongs in a myth.
Soul, the objective psyche, is the process by which we experience the world. Our being is imaginal being. Our psychic substance is images. The autonomous Psyche speaks the language of the soul. We can trace the deep connections between our inner ecologies and the outer world simply by noticing what aspects of the natural world hold our attention and excite our passions the most. Soul is its own meaningful reality, with archetypes as expressions of the anima mundi, the world soul and transforming path.
Images cannot be interpreted and thereby reduced. They are already complete within themselves. His non-dualistic observation suggests that we are equally stirred by the world as we are imagined by it. Mary Watkins notes, "we see things around us, then we recognize that they are subjectively perceived, yet finally, we notice that images have a life of their own."
The World Within Us
With the full absorption of the psychic realm as third domain, the anima or soul that shares a certain affinity with Renaissance Neo-Platonism, breaks through the ultimate residues of dualism and opens to multiplicity, to the polytheism of the pagan anima.
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The angel, the notion of a personified cosmos, translates our individual and collective psychic, archetypal, and spiritual experience. Its power is that of Presence. Such living presences mediate our encounters with Mystery. The angel's strength springs from the imaginal ground of Being, as Hillman expresses in his notion of soul in his masterwork, Re-Visioning Psychology (1977).
"It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed."
The innate image is angelic intention that "has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons." Turning back to the images themselves concealed in emotions means turning back to the angels themselves. It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it -- an angelology.
Hillman struggled to include culture, ecology, politics, cosmos and philosophy, an approach to psyche as a vast field of social, psychic and cultural relations. The breadth and depth of his opus is too vast for any easy introduction to him. Supra-personal memory traces reemerge in personal forms of memory, life's freedom and poetry. For Hillman the locus of soul is not abstract and it is not spiritual.
Hillman offers up his notion -- weaving soul-stories -- as a response to his own call. He attempted to develop an organic psychology, grounded in a living center, an animating spirit and a general way of seeing and proceeding. The living reality of the archetypes and their determining influence in psyche and culture is what is most distinctive and important about it.
Archetypes give definite form to certain psychic content, but can only become conscious secondarily, as images. We inherit the archetypes collectively and express them individually. We give soul earthly reality instead of psychologizing experience into the bodiless ether of pure reflection.
Sensation is form of imagination that is a potent way of encountering figures of the soul. Sensible form is an external quality and ideal form is an eidetic structure that instantly expresses a psychic, pathos-driven content of emotive potentials, disassociated from all of the nuances between phenomenon and noumenon, between archetypal image and the archetype itself.
Satinover says, "Hillman and his followers pursue rather a never ending process of poetic interpretation and story-telling whereby any (and every) firm belief save one can ultimately be “seen through,” as they put it: deconstructed ... into a set of transcendental self-serving illusions (“gods”)."
Their wisdom is about life, death, and transcendence. They speak in hushed tones about a life we are meant to live, letting us know what we have to do to live in accordance with Destiny. Turning back to the images themselves concealed in emotions means turning back to the angels themselves. What is it their Presence brings into our lives?
Threshold Events
In archetypal psychology, we wrestle as we 'wrestle with our Angel' or fate, over the most crucial issues in life. Hillman describes such relationships of Presence:
"By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images, a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. "Perhaps--who knows," writes Jung, "these eternal images are what men mean by fate." We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?"
Gods, demons, and angels can manifest as phobias, fears, inspirations and superstitions. Jung suggested the deepest recess of our psyche is an angel, a source of grace. The angel and the wound are bound together as a complex, revealing the dynamics of psyche.
James Hillman, controversial author and maverick thinker, suggests we wrestle with our angel to find out what it wants. He broke with the conformity of classical Jungianism, emphasizing Jung's late-life passions for radical imagination, archetypes, and alchemy.
Hillman pushed beyond Jung to the pulsating heart, searching for the root principle of a true psychology. Hillman suggests the restitution of the imagination to an affective gnoseological dimension (Hillman 2000, in which the image recovers its status as daimon, and images return to being daimonic or angelic mediators, instead of “demonic” forces. Thomas Moore calls the daimonic, "the source of both human creativity and human depravity." He encourages "feeling and sensing through to the heart of the daimonic."
Where Jung emphasized the unitary and the integrative, Hillman promoted the mythic, multiple, and dynamic. Hillman says in "Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?", Uniform Editions Vol. 1: "Myths have no 'authorized version' ... Myths are best authorized on the authority of their teller. ... Myth allows many versions; myth contains many versions; myth requires many versions." (153).
Hillman followed his own call, knowing that vocation and passion is what distinguishes us from the herd. When we are called, we are called back to the images themselves, to express the scope of the perceptive field. Working with images is the theoretical basis of archetypal psychology. Intuition braids emotion, its expression, and the act of reflection.
He preferred the word imagination to unconscious, not to organize ideas about the image as concepts, that is, with a “thinking” or “intellectual” ordering. He remained in the mode of perception, expressing the ideas with a minimal of intellectual ordering, or "compartmentalization through the intellectual."
An "aesthetic kind of thinking" suggests a mental processing that merges perception with an intellect attuned to the arts. Individual perception is the aesthetic of historic supra-personal memory.
His vision is pluralistic. The approach is aesthetic. The frame is archetypal. Thematic structures are metaphorical. Pathos is the grammar of emotion. Primordial image is our canvas. Dreams are liberated from interpretation.
Our whole being is poetically liberated from any sort of judgement. Each problem in life, symptom, tension, restlessness, aimlessness, is also an evocation, from which flows inexhaustible echoes of interpretations that reverberate with evocative power. There is an intrinsic connection between anima, memory, imagination and rhetoric.
Hillman was trying to "bring back a style of thought which has to do with “figure” – persons, figures, rhetoric, style – with a psychology that’s not conceptual." A psychological idea becomes a mode of self-discovery in a personal and collective way, because we are up against the problem of living. Emotional charge of the passionate nature is expressed in images. Experience is is immediate engagement.
We can’t help but be engaged. That is part of "the aesthetic – immediate sense-awareness, like an animal who lives by sense-intelligence." We sense what our image and particular narrative fiction says about the psychological process we are immersed in. We see-in to art work, to "taste" the experience of its images and to see what images within us reside with it.
Hillman brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. Archetypal psychology is “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (RVP).
Rather than desiring empty objects, Hillman says to "see where that desire is really, what it really wants, and where it really goes." What instincts are affected, repressed, or blocked? Hillman followed his own call, knowing that vocation and passion is what distinguishes us from the herd. When we are called, we are called back to the images themselves, to express the scope of the perceptive field. Working with images is the theoretical basis of archetypal psychology. Intuition braids emotion, its expression, and the act of reflection.
He preferred the word imagination to unconscious, not to organize ideas about the image as concepts, that is, with a “thinking” or “intellectual” ordering. He remained in the mode of perception, expressing the ideas with a minimal of intellectual ordering, or "compartmentalization through the intellectual." An "aesthetic kind of thinking" suggests a mental processing that merges perception with an intellect attuned to the arts.
His vision is pluralistic. The approach is aesthetic. The frame is archetypal. Thematic structures are metaphorical. Pathos is the grammar of emotion. Primordial image is our canvas. Dreams are liberated from interpretation. Our whole being is liberated from any sort of judgement. Each problem in life, symptom, tension, restlessness, aimlessness, is also an evocation.
Hillman was trying to "bring back a style of thought which has to do with “figure” – persons, figures, rhetoric, style – with a psychology that’s not conceptual." A psychological idea becomes a mode of self-discovery in a personal and collective way, because we are up against the problem of living. Emotional charge of the passionate nature is expressed in images. Experience is is immediate engagement.
We can’t help but be engaged. That is part of "the aesthetic – immediate sense-awareness, like an animal who lives by sense-intelligence." We sense what our image and particular narrative fiction says about the psychological process we are immersed in. We see-in to art work, to "taste" the experience of its images and to see what images within us reside with it.
Hillman brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. Archetypal psychology is “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (RVP).
Rather than desiring empty objects, Hillman says to "see where that desire is really, what it really wants, and where it really goes." What instincts are affected, repressed, or blocked? unpacked the imaginal aspects of psyche and the capacity for personification of the archetypes in his interpretation of myths, alchemy, and dreams. Hillman calls angels and daimons mentors and guides, liminal guardian spirits "through which the transcendent becomes immanent."
The angel is distinct from a daemon. It carries our essential and divine identity, but may be overwhelming, heartbreaking, unconventional, over-enthusiastic, even freaky. Imagination conveys divine thoughts through images. The angel is revealed through a dream, visionary experience, artistic creations, human persons, or a passionate encounter. Imagining becomes a divine act of reconnection.
Hillman followed his own call, knowing that vocation and passion is what distinguishes us from the herd. When we are called, we are called back to the images themselves, to express the scope of the perceptive field. Working with images is the theoretical basis of archetypal psychology. Intuition braids emotion, its expression, and the act of reflection.
He preferred the word imagination to unconscious, not to organize ideas about the image as concepts, that is, with a “thinking” or “intellectual” ordering. He remained in the mode of perception, expressing the ideas with a minimal of intellectual ordering, or "compartmentalization through the intellectual." An "aesthetic kind of thinking" suggests a mental processing that merges perception with an intellect attuned to the arts.
His vision is pluralistic. The approach is aesthetic. The frame is archetypal. Thematic structures are metaphorical. Pathos is the grammar of emotion. Primordial image is our canvas. Dreams are liberated from interpretation. Our whole being is liberated from any sort of judgement. Each problem in life, symptom, tension, restlessness, aimlessness, is also an evocation.
Hillman was trying to "bring back a style of thought which has to do with “figure” – persons, figures, rhetoric, style – with a psychology that’s not conceptual." A psychological idea becomes a mode of self-discovery in a personal and collective way, because we are up against the problem of living. Emotional charge of the passionate nature is expressed in images. Experience is is immediate engagement.
We can’t help but be engaged. That is part of "the aesthetic – immediate sense-awareness, like an animal who lives by sense-intelligence." We sense what our image and particular narrative fiction says about the psychological process we are immersed in. We see-in to art work, to "taste" the experience of its images and to see what images within us reside with it.
Hillman brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. Archetypal psychology is “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (RVP).
Rather than desiring empty objects, Hillman says to "see where that desire is really, what it really wants, and where it really goes." What instincts are affected, repressed, or blocked?
Hillman notes, "We may also conclude that the creative as instinct cannot be limited to the few, to geniuses and artists. This would be again to confuse the artistic with the creative. If it is a basic instinct along with hunger and sexuality, activity and reflection, then, like these, it is given to all."
Campbell (1969) says, there is "no distinction between 'culturally conditioned' and 'instinctive' behavior, since all instinctive behavior is culturally conditioned, and what is culturally conditioned in us all is instinct." (p. 48, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Penguin).
Mythic imagination is another mode of perceiving the life and depth of unconscious images. Campbell called mythology "the mother of the arts." When it calls, we can invite its presence into our life, where the ancient meets the modern. Imagination is the angelic mode of perception.
The lived experience of psyche helps us place a vivid personal experience within a universal cosmology, finding our place in relation to the Gods by personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.
Archetypes are numinous virtualities. The angel, winged disembodied spirit, is a companion who carries the true word of our destiny. This multifaceted archetype is an agent of change, capable of transforming our life. Engaging with or relating to the angel open the way to the invisibles of psychic life -- the world of soul and imagination. This reality communicates itself to us through images.
The Angel exists in a timeless virtual dimension, yet paradoxically can only be recognized through time, through penetrating the depths of our world. Tom Cheetham says here the world turns “inside out” and reveals its hidden secrets.
Henry Corbin claimed, "Each of us carries within himself an Image of his own world, his imago mundi , and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out."
Intuition connects the soul with visionary imagination. This act of intellectual penetration is essentially neoplatonic in that it depends on a vital, dynamic connection between the soul of man and the soul of the world in a cosmos illuminated and animated with divine energy. (Angela Voss) The angel opens the heart and the eyes of the soul.
Hillman advocates that the human soul exists and is intricately bound to death and the mythological underworld by imagination. While there are clinical applications, there is also an archetypal psychology to live by, an approach to soul and its relational function.
Descent refers to an underworld geography where conjuring the ancestral dead for advice about life, is possible. There are other realms in the mythic Underworld, but courageously facing Death and the dead is an archetypal theme in initiation rites. The Underworld is a locale deep with in you. Once you have entered a cave or underground labyrinth you realize it is engulfing, around and all about you, inside and out.
"Our society has become fixated with death, but in doing so, has focused solely on the act of physical death; the metaphorical aspect has been forgotten." (Hillman, 1979, pp.64) Imagination and the psyche are two key components of the underworld. Campbell notes, "Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood."
Human societies live and breathe through their myths. A myth is not a simple story but a complex way of making sense of the world. The long-forgotten craft of therapeia theôn, tending, serving, or caring for the gods sees the only real “therapy” as an “approach to the numinous.”
The mythical method is a poetics of soul. The world is dream-born. "We are the metaphysical models, the poetical characters, worked on by the imagination." We are headed to the very edge of reality, of mystery, inabsolute grounding.
"If the myths are the traditional narratives of the interaction between the Gods and humans, if they are a chronicle in dramatic form of the "daimones' exploits", then to find the Gods in our concrete life we must enter the myths, since that is where they they are. "Entering the myths" means recognizing our concrete existence as a series of metaphors, of the implementation of the myth." (RVP)
But the Gods are relationships, they always imply each other. "Let us remember: the mythical is a perspective, not a program; wanting to make practical use of the myth holds in the model of the heroic self, to learn how to correctly implement its endeavors." (P. 271)
"The soul is the only thing in a person that cannot be overwhelmed. The soul is also the seat and living source of human resilience. Even in the midst of a great crisis or a tragic descent, the soul can find salient points at which the human spirit can awaken further and a quickening of life can occur. Whether it is a crisis, a conflict or a great loss; creation is the only outcome that satisfies the soul." (Meade, 2019)
Archetypal psychology enjoys and respects the psyche rather than fearing and confining it. We can imagine a dense, informational, multidimensional space, an n-dimensional space, with an arbitrary number of dimensions. It is a hypercomplex state space for a system with many degrees of freedom, whose imaginary component is 0. Images, however, are limiting shapes, revealing and veiling the arc of becoming.
Embodied Participation
Knowledge of the soul and its aim are not for description but for transformation of it. The process of embodied participation has positive characteristics: self-enjoyment, creativity or novelty, and aim. Psychoanalytic concepts and ideas are considered expressions of imagination and the relating function, and read as metaphors.
We move between instinct, obsession, and compulsion, acting and simultaneously forming an image of the action. Images arouse behaviors, trigger instinctive mechanisms and these produce acts. In turn, these acts are carried out following the nature of the image they represent.
Tropes develop from the unconscious, and "return soul to world." Being-in-soul means being a "sensate-enjoying, image-making creature." "We are sensate creatures, animals in an ecological field that affords imagistic intelligibility," according to Hillman. The basis of our poetic instinct is reliance on the unconscious source, a bridge from the unconscious to conscious, from universal to specific.
“Since our psychic substance is composed of images, making images is a royal way to make soul. The production of the substance of the soul requires dreaming, daydreaming, imagining. Living psychologically means imagining things; being in contact with the soul means living in a sensual relationship with the imagination.
"Being in the soul means having experience of fantasy in every reality and of the fundamental reality of fantasy. The images of fantasy, which are the substance and values of the soul, are structured by the archetypes. They "direct all the activity of the imagination along its predetermined paths," says Jung. These paths are mythological; or rather, we see that fantasy flows into particular motifs (mythologems) and particular constellations of people engaged in actions (mythemes)." RVP, P. 64
"Imagination is perpetually creating nature and re-creating it in a new guise and that nature is archetypally psychological." Hillman described the process as, "an adventure incurring novelty, because the sense of process is always present. (MT 124). Like alchemical metaphysics, it "accounts for the unknown in terms of the more unknown."
In Anima Mundi, Hillman suggests that for psychology to help, the soul must be returned to psychology, a return of psychic depths to the world. In an "ensouled" world, psychological language is also appropriate to the world and its objects. Soul appears in the metaphorical drive, the poietic imperative. Taken on its own terms, metaphor is an archetypal image whose sufferings don't need to be subjected to rational cure.
Psychic reality implies that we must allow the emergence of a renaissance of soul in the midst of the world, and with it, from the depths of its breakdown and ours, a renaissance of psychology.
Hillman claims, "My fantasies and symptoms put me in my place. ... No longer is it a matter of where they belong – to which God – but where I belong, at which altar I may leave myself, within which myth my suffering will turn into a devotion."
Soul enters only via symptoms, tragedy and transgression, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or disguised as psychopathology. That is what Jung meant when he said 'the Gods have become diseases.'
"Complexes are not buried, but brought to life to engage with consciousness. “Image work restores the original poetic sense to images . . . ” Hillman continues, “ . . . freeing them from serving a narrational context, having to tell a story with its linear sequential, and causal implications that foster first-person reports of the egocentric actions and intentions of a personalistic subject."
Hillman's paradigm is the imaginally ensouled environment, with all its darkness, liminality, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Aesthetics is the non-linear realm of soul, symbol, and image. This common ground between poetics and psyche and memory's role in establishing authentic fictions offers our life stories a coherence they would not have without its presence, the “as-if” quality of our lives. The wounded nature of our narratives is a locus for mythmaking.
Hillman broke away from classical Jungian studies and clinical concepts to create and popularize innovative archetypal principles. This included the idea that the ego itself is an archetype to be relativized rather than literalized. Rather than quick-fix ego-psychologies developing ego-strength in the world, an aesthetic, imaginal, and poetic approach is resonant with narrative and the metaphorical mode. That aesthetic is responsive to our relational, emotional and, imaginative life and contexts in which we move.
Hillman argues for re-visioning psychology in a way that encourages us to get curious about the psyche rather than pathologize it. He argues that the more we embrace surprise and wonder and the less we focus on rational understanding, the more we will enjoy being alive. He speaks fervently about the importance of imagination and dreams, while encouraging us to cultivate a sense of awe.
Poetically, psyche is like "an underground river cascading through cavernous depths, forming a forest of stalactites, bursting out into daylight through an occasional series of cataracts—a story and its understory, rich and dense beyond imagining." (Hackwood)
Intuition or “immediate knowing” is linked to the idea of sympathetic resonance, where poetry, metaphor and symbol are used explicitly to connect directly with understanding. The images of fantasy and ordinary metaphor suggest poetic understandings of our experience that surpasses literal, discursive description.
Hillman cites Vico on the “poetic basis of Mind.” Vico’s 'First Oration' presents phantasia as a primary generative power. Knowledge of reality requires the “poetic wisdom,” lodged in the universals of imagination. The aesthetic imagination reconnects all images with metaphorical expression that manifests an affinity for uncanny relations.
Hillman doesn't provide conclusive explanations, or seek solution-based integration and unity, but notices the tensions and dynamics between archetypal forces. We are animated from within. Aesthetics is the realm of soul, symbol, and image. Crises and pressures can amplify drives that warp into literal fixations, obsession, and compulsivity.
He disintegrates our fixed patterns of thought so a bit of genuine creativity, a "Divine spark" or "Soul" can make its way through our routine system of beliefs. The work of the soul is psychic transformation, creating meaningful experience out of the facts of our life.
The poetic basis of mind relates to our dreams and our imagination coming from our psyche or Soul. "Archetypal Psychology" and "Re-Visioning Psychology" return to the mythic imagination and fantasy as instruments of the Soul and its desires.
We hear a call to return to the poetic as the Source of all Life & creativity -- a Soul with a unique Fate & Destiny. We have forgotten that Nature and our nature have mysterious ways, and need for certain potentiating experiences that facilitate our "Soul-making," as Hillman says in 'The Soul's Code."
Psyche is an image-maker, veiled in the reflection of images. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence. The phenomenology of soul includes tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize us as finite, bodily-existing positive facts.
He changed classical Jungian assumptions, terms, and practice, seeing psyche in the world, cultivating community and political awareness, and involvement in everyday life. Hillman questioned the individualist basis of therapy, advocating for changes in the political and social world. The world is entering a new moment of consciousness. Drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, it is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.
Archetypal psychology does not rely on development models or isolated
pathologies. We can't distinguish between our own pathology and that of the world. We're working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what's left out of that.
Because we are "animated" as animals from the soul of the World, alterations in the human psyche resonate with a change in the psyche of the world. "What's left out is a deteriorating world. So why hasn't therapy noticed" that the world has become toxic?
Hillman is polytheistic, episodic and circular in his work and aesthetic mode of rhetoric that restores imagination. He returns us to the archaic and
creative core of humanity, placing value on the uses and consequences of myth-making in the world and creative endeavor as an archetypal process, not a fixed repertoire of structures.
Thomas Moore says, "Soul is also depth, a metaphor we use to point to a certain intensity of experience. Having soul we feel a reverberation and resonance carrying through beneath the surface of everyday experience. With soul, events are not merely two-dimensional; they carry an invisible but clearly felt dimension of depth."
"...Soul, then, involves a dying to the natural world, and indeed imagination is not unlike digestive transformation. To live with soul requires a willingness to descend into the depths of events, to let their literalness and our own literal reactions die in favor of another perspective, to see the world as if from below." (p. 41) There is a resonance between individual and image. When we relate deeply, we merge our hearts resonantly with the heart of the world.
Metaphorical Resonance
Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor that deepen the affective and imaginal resonance of engagement. Imagery and fantasy, rather than analysis and reflection, are the vehicles of Soul-making. Myth is the poetic basis of mind and universe.
Archetypal encounters synchronize conscious and unconscious resonances. The ordinary ego resonates with the dream ego. Phenomena arise in our psyche depending on the responding archetypal resonance. Metaphors resonate with the truth of myth. Myth is imagined, personified, and always presents itself as fiction.
Metaphysics is vision and synthesis. Are such truths psychologically satisfying? "Astrology, alchemy and medicine, the allegories of painting and poetry, Latin literature and Greek hermeticism, orphism and neo-Platonism - each of these fields showed the world of nature and the psyche in personified terms."
Gods and goddesses may be more than useful therapeutic metaphors. Astrology is a language of traits, with "a sky full of characteristics that refer the individual soul to archetypal powers."
In "Heaven Retains Within It's Sphere Half of All Bodies and Maladies", he said:
"Quite simply for me, astrology returns events to the Gods. It depends upon images taken from the heavens. It invokes a polytheistic, mythic, poetic, metaphoric sense of what is fatefully real. That’s what makes astrology as a field, as a language, as a way of thinking, efficacious. It is the carrier into the popular mind of the great tradition that holds we all abide in an intelligible cosmos, thus giving to human questions larger than human answers. It forces us to imagine and to think in complex psychological terms. It is polytheistic and thus runs counter to the dominant mind of Western history."
Hillman was attracted to the language of astrology, but didn't "believe in it" literally, or practice it. "Astrology does not propose any moral correction program; it merely offers metaphorical intuitions, so that one can live one's character with greater intelligence." Astrology tries to find out which fate, or archetypal hand, asks for attention and commemoration.
"Neither the real stars nor the astrological planets [literally] govern the personality. Astrology is a metaphorical way of recognizing that personality rulers are archetypal powers that are beyond our personal reach and yet are necessarily involved in all our vicissitudes. These powers are mythical people, gods and their movements are not described in mathematics, but in myths." (J. Hillman, Figures of Myth.)
"Astrology returns events to the gods." (Hillman, 'Astrology as Cosmology' lecture) Planetary astrological bodies correspond with metaphysical bodies of gods, making a metaphysical field traceable to the void beyond human affairs -- a mythical fiction. The imaginal 'beyond' is a mythical region of poesis, image-making, stimulating and "generating cosmological imaginings."
So do the alchemical elements. Like Jung, Hillman found therapeutic value in alchemical language. In an interview on "The Soulless Society", Hillman notes it, "no longer understands the deep connection between beauty & tragedy, in a world gripped by fear, & the fear of terrorism, & or the Other or "the alien" etc. Psychological beauty is twisted, even ugly to catch the attention.
Hillman’s explanation of “the pathologized image,” refers to those dream images – the psyche’s metaphorical language – that strike us with exceptionally moving power. “Imagination works,” Hillman wrote, “by deforming and forming at one and the same moment.” A pathologized image “touches our sense of life. It both vitiates and vitalizes, a quickening through distortion.” (RVP)
Hillman taught that the life giving waters rise from the great mythic imagination of the world, the World Soul, or the Anima Mundi, with all their gods, goddesses & creation stories etc. -- the Eternal realities of life, or anything that "really moves the Soul."
Archetypal qualities are values amplified by listening to metaphorical resonance and "the analogical richness of the image" uses a language of personal resonance. The stories with the most significance beyond personal experience have archetypal resonance. Unconscious interpersonal resonances lie at the heart of the soul. Repetition, like remembering, makes a resonance which transcends past, present, and future, presenting a timeless experience.
Hillman (1977) suggests we return to psychology “as an ongoing operation with the soul’s images, where the term archetypal connotes rather than denotes, gives importance rather than information, evokes rather than describes, and where by recognizing value it furthers inquiry into our images” (p. 84). This heart within our primordial body holds the sacred shape of a mandala, the "Soul" which is at the heart of the world.
A mandala is a differentiated pattern of polytheistic persons and places, and not a simple monotheistic circle, ring, or sphere -- an eye . Cultivating an "archetypal eye" requires thinking and feeling in all ways, through the emotions, the imagination, the aesthetic intuition, the moral sensibility, the relational capacity, the body: our whole being. There is no thing or place where the unconscious exists. Yet it permeates and animates all.
We don't have to stick with a singular interpretation of the unfathomable. Only the old "drill-sergeant Ego is called on to develop the raw and lazy inferiorities by marching the mandala round through all four functions." We realize that the relational network that is woven, is also psyche. We just have to bring ourselves to psyche, render lived experiences in images. We don't have to remember. They crawl up from the bottom and pull us down.
The significance of a mandala is a "calling" from the anima to a sacred circle of creativity. The mandala takes on the characteristics of "the womb of form," an alchemical vessel, an experiential surround with the gap of birth/death in the middle, a "warp" between "phases," breaths, or states of consciousness. The mandala is a type of anima imagery, or a doorway into the anima, whereas Jung's singular interpretation of mandala images was limited to an expression of the wholeness of the self archetype.
Hillman suggests, perhaps it is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined. The act of imagining is the act of soul-making; to contemplate the imaginal is literally to dream ourselves into being. Rather than a static, idealized wholeness, we spin, as in a vortex; sometimes fragments spin off. We experience many different powers within ourselves. Anima experience may morph into anima-related imagery. This churning of the soul is its wheel of life.
Hillman's rejection of a crucial distinction between structure and content has the effect of totally culturally relativizing the concept of the anima/us. (1985:13) There is no universal structure in Hillman's account whose transformations allow comparisons and deductions pertaining to its hidden nature. Hillman unravels our accustomed ways of thinking, as he did Jung's.
" I loved Jung's pearls but I never bought the whole necklace. I suppose I wanted to put them in my own way, until the day I realized that each strand becomes a suffocating choker too easily and you get trapped in the noose (Ananke) of my own system. I don't really have a thread. And why? Because psychology for me is to open the oysters and clean the pearls, that is to recover and bring to light and daily wear the life of the imagination, which can not redeem the tragedy, not to alleviate suffering, but it can enrich them and make them more tolerable, interesting and precious," said Hillman.
Archetypal psychology is about the imaginative life, soul -- not ego -- and healing. Insights don't come from reason or will, but “the urge to become what one is.” Something imaginative is needed. In ''The Pandaemonium of Images,' Hillman declares, "Imagination itself must be cared for since it may well be the source of our ailing." What does soul want? What is psyche trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individual process going?
Hillman said, “Troubles are calls from the gods.” Finding soul is not a discovery, but a deepening of experience. The way of the soul leads to the primordial life-sustaining element. The central theme is the transformation of psyche into life, “taking life as psyche, life as a psychological adventure lived for the sake of soul” (1972, p.5)
We can witness its creative imagination, its theophanic power of bringing the divine face into visibility. To Hillman, imagination was utterly presence. The eye of the heart that “sees” is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentation to an invisible core. In the presence of imagination itself, the spirit moves from the heart towards all.
"Not only is each person an image and this image is his invisible divinity presented, but each particular aspect of a person is a face, each face an image, this dream and this symptom, this behaviour and this desire, is also a distinct image, a tale condensed into a depiction, a visibility that needs no interpreted meaning, gives no certain feeling, a vortex that expands and so1idifies a cluster of multiplicities rushing through it....uninterpretable and unpredictable, a presentation, like an animal in its own display that is type and image at once and cannot go beyond itself, only deepen within itself; a presentation that sets limits to mind, keeps mind held within the image. As images are psychic reality and the source of every mental act, every meaning and feeling, so they are the dissolution of all mental acts, their end in image." (Hillman, "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique", Spring, 1980.)
Everything we are, our instincts, our experiences, our existence is imaginal. Imagination then created soul. He suggests that working with our dreams, visions, fantasies and moods gives us a new reality that the psyche creates every day. Even in its depths we can know the unconscious. He implored, "each particular throb of the heart be recognized as a thought of the heart."
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince
Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul. Psychological transformation is the process of soul-making in the journey of life. "Death is significant for soul because possibility (and hence imagination) derives from an existential recognition of one's finitude," so all potentials can never be realized.
Hillman did not claim to found a school of thought. Therapy as an aesthetic undertaking must both delight in and be shocked by what we meet in the psyche, beauty or ugliness, or we do not see the Gods at all. Plotinus defined it: “We possess beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order” (V, 8, 13).
Imaginative possibility is the way human nature recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. Soul remains ambiguous. He considered the interpersonal and transpersonal story of Eros and Psyche as the foundation 'myth of analysis,' the education of the feminine side of every human soul, and the ultimate meeting of human soul and the divine spirit. Love leads the way as a soul guide. We build awareness of the deep psyche into the field of consciousness.
A multiplicity of transcendent functions spirals through space simultaneously, through consciousness, imagination, soul, and an underworld where dreams occur. The intimate relation between the soul and love is a creative resonance. Beyond ego control, soul-making is a way to describe growing spiritual capacity, "an eventual reunion of love and soul blessed by archetypal powers." Soul-making is not a treatment or therapy but “an imaginative activity or an activity of the imaginal realm."
He hints that the ultimate realization of 'soul' demands relationship with the transpersonal, the Eros of Divine Spirit. Eros, or love, has a central role in the life of the psyche...to fall in love with the psyche is among the greatest blessings of life. Plato said, "love is the life of the psyche," that summons the beauties of the soul from their depths, and also the love that meets the ugliness and darkness.
Hillman's desire was to recover psyche through myth, image, and language -- re-ensoulment of the cosmos. Soul is his central trope. Our calling in life is inborn and our mission in life is to realize its imperatives, exploring our invisible selves and the possibilities of our scars not as symbols but as pieces of our consciousness. Soul-making can become a self-steering process through aesthetic reflexes.
In The Soul's Code (1996), Hillman's "acorn theory" describes a force shaping personality and character. Our unique individuality gives meaning and purpose to life -- our habits and mannerisms, loves and hates, predilections and passions, our irreducible essence. Hillman claims, "what must be recovered [is] a sense of personal calling, that there is a reason I am alive."
He starts in the processes of the imagination. His primary concern is for soul, the secret siren calling us into life. Hillman suggests that soul itself is an archetype. He considers archetypes “as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning” (1975, p. xix). Our teacher is life.
To study the soul, we go deep. "The logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough” (1979, p. 25). He echoed Campbell's (1991) metaphorical motifs of 'life as life' and 'life as death.'
Hillman suggests, "Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul." He writes, “Depth means death and demons and dirt and darkness and disorder and a lot of other industrial strength d words familiar to therapy…Therapy has to be sublime. Terror has to be included in its beauty” (1992).
He transformed Archetypal Psychology, the exploration of unending, mysterious images of inexhaustible depth, cultivating mythic imagination. As we emerge from each encounter, we are impressed with the living reality of the archetypes -- entities in the depths of the psyche that seem not only to be alive and enduring, but also marked by something approaching consciousness. The world alive is animated and divine -- ensouled with aesthetic imagination.
"Soul-making has as its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure," he said. "To love is to create in beauty, both in the body and in the soul", says Plato. Hillman cautions, it can only value if it is meant to be true to its daimon".
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams. The crises of cosmological, mythological and psychological disconnection from nature and from each other may drive us to places of darkness and suffering. Darkness as a human psychological component has been pushed to the chthonic hinterlands of the psyche.
Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," Thomas Moore wrote, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." Denial of darkness doesn't stop it. But there is great potential in that darkness to interact with creative energy. The darkness is the nature of the universe.
The vast phenomenology of soul, psychic archaeology, goes back and down into older history and deeper thought. Hillman realized "there is a trove of occult knowledge buried here." Hillman's approach to soul's inherent multiplicity is theological but not religious.
"In archetypal psychology, gods are imagined. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience, and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which soul participates (169)." His passion incites us to plumb the depths of our own soul.
Archetypal psychology takes the archetypes, as Gods and Goddesses, metaphorically, rather than literally. Cheetham (2015) says, these root metaphors remind us, "that there are lots of emotional atmospheres and styles of experience..."
The Mirror of Nature
Psyche is the mirror of nature. When we rouse to the presence of soul as animating principle, the experience of love prompts an awakening of re-mythologized consciousness to our unsuspected 'ancestral reciprocity' with the animate earth -- the somatic unconscious. We become organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that world is perceiving itself through us.
Hillman would say we are in psyche, rather than psyche is in us. He found insight by turning psychological assumptions on their heads, by reversing and deconstructing them as erroneous concepts. Others followed.
"The anima is not the magically attractive, seductive, bewitching woman; the anima is not most adequately described as a man’s feminine side. Rather the anima is soul, to which we women need to relate just as truly as do men. The anima is “what gives events the dimension of soul,” what attunes us to the imaginal significance of the experiences in which we participate." (Downing 1999, 66)
Emotion is the total pattern of the soul. Innate psychic aspects of emotions disclose soul's organic nature through time and trace back to their archetypal sources, the inherent nature of Reality. What is there — the data, the phenomenon, the experience, and the image -- speaks for itself.
We imagine the world as mirror and the heart as mirror. The act of contemplative gazing into this double mirror turns the poet into a visionary: the poet-lover. We become a “mirror of the invisible world,” of the mysteries that unfold in the reflexive intermediate space they have come to inhabit. The lover fully engages with the reality of the reflections they perceive in the all-encompassing mirror of the world and of the heart.
By gazing into these reflections, the lover enters the intermediate imaginal dimension, of sensuous realities, spiritualized entities, and spiritual realities that become embodied countenances -- presence. Meaning manifests as self-evident embodied forms that are perceived as translucent.
All reflections are alive. The revelatory status of absolutely everything, including the lover and the beloved, is thus manifested. All that lives is beheld in its subtle, rather than gross, identity, appearing as the image, the reflection of its hidden, yet revealed, counterpart. We learn how to behold life imaginatively, through the eyes of those who look from the depths of the Great Mystery.
We now know, just like the brain the gut sends and receives nerve impulses, records experiences, and respond to emotions. From Hillman's archetypal perspective, emotions are primary and irreducible, valuable, transhuman and ubiquitous. Forcing "unconsciousness" on us, "emotions are the theme of earthly life." "As much as they lead us into ourselves, they lead us away from ourselves and back to the Gods."
Alterations in the soul -- "autochthonous depressions, deepenings of grief, manic increases of energy, oceanic expansions of love, or flaring, all-consuming rages" -- increase its capacity, the "inner
space" of the subjective soul.
Emotions lead to a source that is "beyond human." Hillman distinguishes "between emotions signifying the world and offering information about it, and those that seem wholly interior—that is, those movements of the Heart or Heaven—neither sort of emotions is mine, subjective."
"To be in the grips of an emotion makes us instantly intelligible and commonly human—and beyond human, too." Therefore, his method sometimes "uses the expressive arts because their focus is mainly on emotion, rather than cognition, family systems, insight, recall, dream analysis, hypnosis, and so on."
The Passions of the Soul
Hillman's focus is "what actually goes on when a patient begins to dance, to choreograph or paint his or her state of soul, to speak aloud freely in a dramatic tirade or a poetic soliloquy, to sculpt it in clay or lay it out in a collage. And I want to ask about the "it" that is being presented, expressed, shown, or formed by means of these various arts."
"Clearly, the "it" is an emotion, an emotionally tinged state of soul. For even if it is said to be a trauma, a memory, a dream scene, or a present confusion and helplessness, what we like to call a "problem," with a lover, an employer, a parent—the emotion is the content that brings the person to therapy. Only when a"problem"—a relationship, a memory, a dream—becomes suffering, when we are affected by the problem, does it enter us and we enter therapy." http://www.pantheatre.com/pdf/2-MT09-JH.pdf
Hillman's archetypal psychology is an inquiry into the poetic, mythical, and divine logos of the soul. Psychological soul provides a transitional space, a liminal or in-between aspect that creates the creative space for entry of the divine into this world, decoupled from human will.
"Primary is the disordered imagination, its incapacity to encompass the past and its traumas. Restrictions of imagination appear as excessive emotion."
Imagination drove Hillman to "engage in art therapy neither directly for art, nor directly for the patient, nor directly for the emotion. ...Since art therapy activates imagination and allows it to materialize—that is, enter the world via the emotions ... therapy by means of the arts must take precedence over all other kinds." "Each gesture is made for the sake of the gesture and not for anything external to the gesture itself."
Entering the mysterious Labyrinth is a classic image of Descent. The ways of soul are labyrinthine, Hillman says. So is his method, following the meanderings and leaps of imagination rather than the rational grid of a plan. Hillman addresses the importance of the “unrest” of passion: “We hunger for that."
"Certainly, emotion is inside the skin, deep inside the hippocampus, the hormonal system,the animal body, residing in the core of our inmost being."
"A principle intention of an emotion is to connect our animal nature with the world in which it is embedded. Emotions respond immediately to the truth of things. They are the most alert form of attention. Disgust turns away from decay, fear warns of danger, desire recognizes beauty, and pity
responds to need. Unfortunately, therapy sometimes forgets this primary aspect of emotion."
Hillman contends, "that though they be felt deeply, and we suffer emotions physically and inwardly, this fact does not make them "ours." Rather, I believe that emotions are there to make us theirs. They want to possess us, rule us, win us over completely to their vision."
"...William Blake said, "Some good we may do when the man is in a passion, but no good when the passion is in the man." To have a passion in me is demonic; to be in a passion, in the world of the emotion and grasped by the way it signifies all things with a specific vision or insight, may move the psyche to a deeper and epiphanic connection with the world." (Chapters XI and XV).
''We would save the phenomena just as they are, untreated, uncured.'' If memory fixates on intense moments of discomfort and joy, over time memory and fantasy meld together. Blake called emotions "divine influxes," suggesting that "they are the way the Gods flow into the soul, moving it to a more-than-human condition of excitement and fury, of
sorrow and mourning, of folly and ecstatic desire."
"The divine influxes ...are more than feeling states, affective tones, and physical alterations. They are always, as well, imaginations... of behavior, imaginations of fantasy, imaginations of process and intention and desire."
So each emotional condition asks, "what does the emotion want?" In Hillman's view, the soul doesn't need to be straightened out but looked deeper into, ''seen through'' to the mythic, impersonal ground of its most intimate complaints. It is to the awareness of the Ground of Being, of “the more-than-human perceptual field,” that the Lover awakens by receptively imagining and not just actively fantasizing.
"Outside and inside, life and soul…we have to see the inner necessity of historical events out there, in the events themselves, where ‘inner’ no longer means private and owned by a self or a soul or an ego, where inner is not a literalized place inside a subject, but the subjectivity in events and that attitude which interiorizes those events, goes into them in search of psychological depths." (Healing, 24-25).
Reconfiguring Psyche
Journeys of descent are ways to seek out what the soul wants. Our impulses are being redirected. Soul stuck in "physical realities and needs to break down, fall apart, or be blackened by melancholic frustrations." (Re-visioning 90).
We must be willing shed the skin of the ordinary world in order to enter the darkness, to descend repeatedly into this inner realm of darkness. Stanton Marlon, in The Black Sun, says metaphoric death (symbolically, the black sun) is “at the heart of the alchemical experience.” Death is always present in life.
Descent mythology recognizes in this “falling apart” the substantial nature of imagination as well as the imaginal aspect within all natural substances (Revisioning 91). Descent is the way of psyche's own motion. We move from a head place to the place of our ground and matter. Psychic apprehension, the imaginal view takes over.
What is far less familiar to us is our ability to actually embrace this descent process and fully experience it. We bring our conscious awareness to the experience, to be present with ourselves here, breath into it, allow the heart to open and receive the wisdom waiting to reveal itself.
Concepts like ego, self and consciousness are left behind; soul, archetype and imagination are tended with intense passion. Hillman shifted Jung’s emphasis from the archetype to the archetypal image as absolutely primal since soul is image. Images are self-referential.
"We can experience only images arranging themselves in these archetypal patterns, which we imagine as underlying universal principles, or envision in personified forms as gods. They are the invisibles that forever defy our definition and can only be imagined as metaphors. They have emotional power to possess us and govern consciousness invisibly, offering us a coherent way of perceiving, experiencing and imagining." (Wojtkowski)
Hillman approached soul as a deliberately indefinite term that involves a way of looking at things, a deepening of perception, rather than as a particular entity. This sense of soul cannot be separated from the context in which it is experienced (1975, RVP). Soul-making and myth-making are archetypal. Mythopoesis is the creation of Myth by means of Imagination He argued that character is fate.
In The Dream and the Underworld, Hillman states, “Our familiar term depth psychology says this quite directly: to study the soul, we go deep. The logos of the soul, psychology, implies the act of traveling the soul’s labyrinth in which we can never go deep enough” (1979, p. 25).
Soul is an autonomous domain. Hillman calls for more depth in psychology. “Depth means death and demons and dirt and darkness and disorder and a lot of other industrial strength d words familiar to therapy… Therapy has to be sublime. Terror has to be included in its beauty” (1992).
He both both corroborated and went beyond Jung's notions and dogmas of depth psychology, the therapeutic context, and scientific worldview, fostering genius, passion, love, and poetic expression. Often unconscious myths inform our worldview. Our world is structured in mythical imagination. We understand the nature of any phenomenon within our worldview. Michael Meade calls on us to refresh our dominant worldview with one based on connection.
The living breathing worldview of the soul undermines and protects against the worldview of isolated objects devoid of spiritual meaning, devoid of all value besides what is projected upon them. Perceptions, choices and actions determined by the constraints of that worldview.
Hillman's perspective restructured psychological theory modeled on recognition of archetypal soul as the foundation of consciousness. Myth, poetics, and aesthetics are some of its expressions. So are symptoms, dreams, destiny, and depression. Meaning is the earthing of reality. M.L. von Franz considered the body “as a symbol of the personality with its individual limits."
Archetypal psychology reflects the ongoing operation of images in all areas of life and cultivates those phenomenological images. Archetypal soul longs for expression. We are admonished to "stick to the image." Image can consolidate in a vision represented in that image, in which “the entire world is reflected in a drop of water." Yet it still carries an infinity of other apprehensions.
Hillman insists, "One cannot mirror if one too easily flows; and one cannot mirror everything, but only what one can receive and to which one is solidly present within the limits of one’s own borders. Mirroring is not blank receptivity; it requires focusing.” (Alchemical Psychology)
Soul is our primary metaphor. Imagination is our organ of perception of soul. We see things through the perspective of soul, a world ensouled. This superhuman faculty forms images which go beyond reality. Plato stressed psychic forces as the source of creativity and ground of life and motion.
Hillman says, "...feeling is a via regia to the unconscious, not only in our personal lives, but to the larger archetypal dominants that make their impersonal claims upon us through feelings...feelings are not only personal; they reflect historical and universal phenomena. They are common and collective. A need that seems so personal may express a need that is common to our relationship, common to the family as a group, common to a group of society, and even common to the age." (Lectures on Jung's Typology).
Land of the ancestors, psyche is a landscape of symbols providing insights and beliefs that later informed myth. Plural psyche is an imaginal network. Archetypal technique is a development tool, applied after laying the basic narrative down. "Plots are myths...To be in a mythos is to be inescapably linked to divine powers." (Healing Fiction, p. 11)
First and foremost in depth psychology is the healing descent. The myth of the descent to the underworld gives rhythm, pattern, shape, and significance to depth psychology and our lives. Crisis and stress precipitate the descent. Hillman outlined the relation between Hades and eidola, those “ideas that form and shape life.”
The descent and ascent motif is a metaphor where ordinary awareness encounters the unconscious. This metaphor for enduring the dark moments of human life explores the psychological importance of engaging with the underworld journey through a myriad of archetypal styles of consciousness -- archetypal multiplicity of the descent and ascent journey.
It is not contradictory to have different perceptions of Reality since Reality is not exhaustive nor is it reducible to any one view. Reality is not reducible to merely scientific knowledge, but is available to more than one conception including that of archetypal psychology, myth, literature, art, philosophy, etc.
Mythology is a necessary process; the unconscious is an active agent. We develop symbolic narrative elements to satisfy our craving for meaning. Meaning is the innate image that arises from dialogue with the invisible world. Tending the image brings it alive with the slow fire of attention. We encounter the numinous in this creative, nonrational frame.
For example, the daimon is the 'voice of our fate," "the voice of our calling," our vocation, the potentials in our soul, the force of fate, an accompanying guide. The Daimon Psyche with the butterfly wings is love or desire without egoic motives, a liberation from all rationalistic one-sidedness.
For Hillman, a daimon is an ‘individualized soul-image’ (1996, p.10). The daimon is also ‘chtonic’, that is a spirit of the earth with dual qualities: creation and animation of the human, or evil deeds and ruthless destruction (Jung, 1953/1968, par.539).
The daimon, 'genius,' or 'angel' is the urge, passion, and motivation we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, to which we can passionately devote our life -- the moral dimension of honest psychological work. The daimon captures the irresistible attraction and danger of the unconscious.
“For the daimon surprises. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.”” “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Hillman)
Myths are archetypal narratives that pertain to the Imaginal world. We cannot disengage from mythologizing and philosophizing at the same time -- psychologizing, seeing through in the mind's eye. Memory is apt to become mytho-poetic, to exaggerate closeness of coincidence, or to add romantic details, etc.
This is soul-making, the act of noticing, tending, and actively creating with the act of reflecting upon -- to acquire a certain sense of awareness and understanding of what we created. This is a fluctuating process which drives humanity to richer experience.
Myth ensouls and stories repressed instinctual impulses. There is a subtle difference between engaging and actively participating in creating myths, and the philosophy of mythology. A new mythology is the ultimate form of artistic creation. Tropes pertain to mythic themes and variations as they appear in the personal, socio-cultural, and egoic sphere.
Both Jung and Hillman sought to retrieve our experience of the world as an `'ensouled' sphere encompassing within itself the pluralities of human and divine, matter and spirit forming and reforming in subtly interactive ways. Jung also thought beyond the clinic, seeking cosmogonic truth in psyche, an open field of reference through which we know the unconscious. Subjective impressions matter.
Hillman went through four major transformations, during which he emphasized different foundational notions or talking points:
1) his institutional life in Zurich as Director of Jung's school of thought,
2) his break from Zurich which gave birth to founding a Neoplatonic archetypal psychology and academic teaching,
3) his ecological period as co-founder of Dallas Institute of Humanities, publishing Spring Journals, and the men's movement, and
4) his incarnation as a celebrity psychologist with his popular works on culture, soul and character. His ideas and emphasis went through metamorphosis in each of these eras.
Hillman's notions of an unbound soul champion creativity, philosophical inquiry, uncertainty, and risk-taking. He had an epiphany in the late 1960s, returning to the Greek gods, to accept and work metaphorically with their plurality, polytheism, creative modes, and diseases, freed from the alternatives of inside/outside. Imaginal constellations play through myth, dream, and ordinary life. Sometimes psychic processes inform or dominate other disciplines.
His techniques encompassed phenomenology, the literary and creative arts, Neoplatonism, and ecological studies, as well as cultural excursions, urban planning and political activism. The lived world is not fixed or concrete but symbolic discourse and relationships, arising from the autonomy of the image.
Personifying is the heart’s mode of knowing, says Hillman. (RVP, 1975, p.15) By personifying soul we come into a closer relation to it. Soul is a vast cosmos in itself that intersects the physical universe. Without limits, it is unfathomable.
Hillman laments the separation of human consciousness and archetypal soul. Earth's imagination reflects the elemental creativity of the biosphere, a surreal passion of the mind, authentic and brutal. Our bodies, like those of all living beings, retain within themselves the environment of a past Earth. We coexist with today's bacteria and host in us vestiges of other bacteria, symbiotically included in our cells. In this way, the microcosm lives in us and we in it.
Soul forms the basis of all that exists. Self-arising images, bubbling into and out of awareness and manifestation, are limitless. For Hillman, it is human soul that ‘selects the image I live’ (1997, 45). Image itself is ‘the true iconoclast . . .which explodes [with plural] allegorical meanings, releasing startling new insights’ (Hillman 1989, 25).
He pushed open Jung's concept of a private, internal psyche. The world is psyche and the world is imaginal (Anima Mundi), extending to Cosmos. Hillman also considers anima as relevant to women as well as men. We cannot consider the world without an emotional gloss of our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that condition our behavior. We can respond to soul's invitation voluntarily or involuntarily.
We have continual fantasies about the world and our place in it. This is our worldview. That world is animated and can be metaphorically re-ensouled or enchanted. Psyche enlivens the cosmos and makes it coherent. Corbin considered it a concrete spiritual world of archetypal figures. Its language is one of myths, dreams, passion, and poetry.
Ficino suggested we draw this spirit into ourselves by means of the anima mundi, the vitally necessary function of imagination, which permeates everything. He thought, `"the world both lives and breathes, and it is possible for us to draw its spirit. ...`You must therefore learn how to bring this spirit into yourself."
Implicit patterns embodied in the images are concealed and revealed by the unconscious at the level of the psyche or soul, the plurality of diverse meanings and values embedded in life. Suspended forms and images are brought forward by imaginative awareness. Mythical language is symbolic and figurative, full of 'necessary monsters.'
Imagination dissolves our ordinary conceptual boundaries. Hillman calls psyche, `"a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself," that mediates events through a reflective moment. Soul-making differentiates this middle ground. (RVP)
"The close connection between the personified and anima-soul, is more than verbal, and personifying is a way of soul-making," Hillman declares. Psyche is objective and extends beyond the personal subjective, beyond collective humanity into animals, nature, and cosmos -- permeating the whole of creation and cosmic dimensions.
Such knowledge already exists at the soul level, and is actualized within the ‘imaginal method’ (Hillman 1989, 240), in the very reality of our practical experience. Things often fall apart, but sometimes they fall together in the probability field. Such transformative points can be life-changing leaps in self-awareness. Karen-Claire Voss (2005) suggests:
1) that Reality is inherently processual and dynamic; i.e.,fluid;
2) that Reality is multi-dimensional, multivalent, and also multi-leveled;
3) that Reality is subtle; it is not comprised of rigid categories;
4) that there is an ontological relationship between the self and the universe: and
5) therefore, to be human is necessarily to participate in Reality (a participation which is potentially active, conscious, intentional and creative).
Psychic Phenomena
Archetypal Psychology prioritizes soul and soul-making, yet is full of the dark devotion we reserve for our deepest obsessions and compulsions. Soul comes with the presence of death. Archetypal psychology claims pathological phenomena and chthonic imagery, the dark, cold side of nature, are inherent and crucial constituents of psychic life. Jean Cocteau said, “Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
We descend into the underworld to engage soul and find our essence beyond all ideologies. The chthonic earth exerts an unconscious modulation in subtle ways. The archetypal way is descent. Hillman says, “Death is a metaphor for an entire psychic change, a radical shift in perspective ….” Our individuation is heading toward death.
Pathologizing is a form of soul-making, engaging emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with maximizing emotional well being and wholeness. Hillman offers no description of ego formation, just relativization.
According to Hillman, pathologization is “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective”(Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 57)
Hillman argued that the soul craves the constant activity of “seeing through” … of taking something “as it is.” Working into ever deeper
layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers draw us in. From an archetypal perspective, human existence is mythic existence.
Soul is the bottomline dimension of death, darkness, and weakness. This is the deeper sense of meaningfulness — peripheral, inner, underworld,soul-perspective or night-perspective emerging as self-arising chthonic images.
The chthonic (underworld) dimension of the universe is the deep and authentic essence of all being, a pattern in the vision of symbolic images. Archaic chthonic deities circle the wheel of life, the primal forces of nature — death and fertility. The chthonic fertilizes the soil of the dark unconscious mind — the depth and darkness that anchor our being in primordial ground.
Archetypal Psychology is perhaps more philosophical than clinical. Hillman had a postmodern fondness for illusion, uncertainty, and distrust of absolute truth. Teleology is a narrow causal idea, so there is no goal for ego, nor draw from a teleological future.
Archetypal Psychology favors intuition, insight and imagination. Embodied images unveil the dimension of inner knowledge or gnosis that exceeds the factual knowledge of the external world but reaches toward the Imaginal world due to intuitive mode of perception. The richness of iterations allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
Repetition of mythic elements, recitations of life in the imaginal, is a feature of all fundamental drives, even when overwhelming or disheartening. We ignore or deny the traces of our own disintegration. Myth is always a narrative form. The archetype is an interpretive paradigm, one perspective of many, fetishizing dissociative states with morbid possibilities.
We play out those agonies as symbolic enactment, meaning, and transcendence. The mind provides metaphorical meaning for symbolic sequences and ritual dramas that embody the metaphor, which comes to the surface as everyday behavior.
Plural, but not Literal
Hillman claims, "We are composed of agonies, not polarities." He recognized the psychopathologies of a plural psyche. Pluralistic attempts at understanding foster imaginal networks, anti-hierarchichal pluralistic perspectives, and the animistic archetypal nature of the unconscious -- an ecological perspective, reflecting rhythm, poetry, and lyricism.
"Since my soul, my psychological constitution, differs from Freud’s and from Jung’s, so my psychology will be different from theirs. Each psychology is a confession, and the worth of a psychology for another person lies not in the places where he can identify with it because it satisfies his psychic needs, but where it provokes him to work out his own psychology in response."
Philosopher Henry Corbin called the Imaginal world the 'Mundus Imaginalis' or 'mundus archetypus'. The archetypal world of ideas represents a distinct order of reality, a world as real as the sensoty and intellectual world. The 'Imaginary and the Imaginal" are about the cognitive, analytic, and poetic use of the imagination.
It corresponds with a distinct mode of perception in contrast to the purely imaginary as the unreal or plainly utopian. Imagination, insight and intuition provide access to the Imaginal world, which finds its symbolic representation as the way of knowing by analogy.
We grope along in the darkness, grasping what goes on in our lives, and searching for new perspectives to contain or stave off intense emotions. If we recognize that we are ill, we can also recognize the psychic dysfunction in monomaniacal psychologies.
"Crucial in our move has been the insistence on the mythical polytheistic perspective. Psychic complexity requires all the gods; our totality can only be adequately contained by a Pantheon. ...the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from it's mountain, but polytheistic conscious wandering all over the place, in the vales and along the rivers, in the woods, the sky and under the earth." (James Hillman Re-Visioning Psychology, pg. 33)
The many dimensions of sickness in society prevent our healing in a toxic environment -- the broken promised land. We are embedded within it. Jiddu Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Suffering our tale is initiatic; it changes consciousness, linking awareness to presence, energy, and phenomena with no assignment of meaning, categories, or thoughts. The beauty of the soul is revealed in the aesthetic display of the world.
"The wisdom of storytelling contains the history of the Archetypal world -- it embraces times past, present and future. The human world is the common instrument of the gods. Poetry unites them as it does us." (Novalis)
The story of soul starts with beauty in the myth of Eros and Psyche, a living and self-existing being. This is the mystery of the felt-experience of suffering impossible love, enduring symbolic and psychological and erotic ordeals.
Yet Rilke cautioned, "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure. And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilates us. Every angel is terrifying." (1982, 151)
The angel we wrestle with, the daimon of our compulsions, brings the visions. Unexpected beauty is never forgotten. Poets ensure the survival of the angel by creating poems. Beauty makes us hold our breath, then release that dynamic tension on exhale with awe as we cross the liminal boundary.
Essence of Meaning
We are defined by our souls and their pluralistic creativity. Our transformative life connects us to living Cosmos. Myth is the connective tissue of psyche. Important personal transformation can be wrought in us by exposure to the radical thought of Dr. Hillman. His aim was not mapping, explaining, or developing psyche, but "to explore psychological thought and vision while staying close to the psyche’s native tongue."
Later, he identified himself as a Neo-Platonist, by adopting an alchemical ontology for his work on the imaginal. Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy agree the soul’s latent memories could be either in words or in images. He garnered the idea from Vico that the framework of a story, its nexus, is not episodes but free association. Jung noted that artists could be the unconscious or unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of their time.
At the archetypal level, the feminine principle of the World Soul is Psyche. Hillman also espouses a virtually predestined biographical drive governed by the Gods. He suggested location matters, 'psyche picks her geographies'. (Inter Views, 1983) For example, where else but Dublin could Hillman have become such a devotee and scholar of James Joyce, who then deeply influenced his writing style?
Philosophers said, “Myths are things that never happened but always are.” The animated psyche governs the imaginal narratives of our lives, our decisions and locations, and even picks out where we dwell. Whitman noted we "contain multitudes." They are not concretely but archetypally predictive of qualities that are present. Images are the essence of meaning.
Covert mythical themes weave the stories of our lives. Myth reveals the character of reality yet it is not of this realm. Myth must be uncovered. It is a primal active force in the world and the missing dimension in the dynamic interplay of politics. Mythical political talk masquerades as rational thought. Myth is a common unifying principle. Myth permeates our understanding of our past, present and potential.
Myth is a conceptual schemata embodying core metaphysical concepts and moral wisdom. Myths do cultural work. All societies live by myths. In myth-building any words or symbols can be modified from their original meanings to suit their new roles in a matrix of varied forms. Claude Levi-Strauss observed, nothing in today's society is more mythical than political ideology.
Participatory Vision
Hillman’s ideas have been channeled and gained traction in academia in many disciplines. His Archetypal Psychology is a phenomenological approach to psyche, "re-mythologized consciousness,” derived from real if invisible mythic figures.
A multitude of mythic figures and configurations are the preconditions of our imagination, the indeterminate underlying primordial reality. “To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real” (In the Words of Hillman). Archetypes respond to and are shaped by our actions as we are by theirs, through the creative instincts.
Hillman’s work reflects a polytheistic emphasis, more imaginal than analystical; he omitted appeals to science and empiricism. The theory base is “mytho-poetic” – a combination of anthropology, Jungian psychology and mythology (Meade, 1993).
Like Marshall McLuhan, Hillman's disequilibrium theory echoes the discontinuous nature of information of today. Both describe how we can
(A) Expand multi-sensuous perceptual process patterns of present ground into the future.
(B) Contract ground for conceptual ground rules of past sequentiality when causes preceded effects, logically.
(C) Retrieve non-visual environment of simultaneity where effects merge with causes, ecologically.
(D) Flip present into future, as all times and places now here, and effects precede causes by design
His interdisciplinary approach included architecture, ecology, literature, the arts, and contemporary events, viewing myth through a multidisciplinary lens. Soul and art are containers for mystery. Dreams are our dynamic bridge to the Underworld of multidimensional mystery.
He changed the concept of archetypes to “archetypal images,” that have inexhaustible meanings and implications. Images, as the multiplicity of psychic presence, speak for themselves without interpretation. He was an advocate for world soul (Anima Mundi) and the process of soul-making.
Hillman recovered a sense of psyche in the world at large. He was concerned with "the fact of human permeability, the ordinary, quotidian and ubiquitous fact of visionary, ideational, auditory, symptomatic, and personified incursions." Liminal thinking itself has spiritual foundations, but in a binary perspective, it moves away from its foundation, from its body.
Hillman welcomed the full range of emotions, tragic and otherwise, bridging our private inner self with the outside world, that help us live and die in a soulful manner. To be unconscious of affect only means our awareness of those impulses is absent, not the impulses, desires, fear, or feeling themselves.
The unconscious is a functional not substantive notion, or locale. Truly imaginative depth, the autonomous, unpredictable, spontaneity of uncertainty, is conceived in the theory of the sublime as dark, vast, boundless, awe-full, terror-arousing, etc.
Emotions can be traced back through the archetypal images and/or stories they are expressed through, which then act functionally as containers. Our journey of descent and renewal builds a container for internal relationship to something sacred, alive, and eternal. Life as story is a container for organizing events into meaningful experiences, expanding the body and the psyche into intimate relationship.
The alchemical vessel, both an open retort accepting the flow of archetypal affect from the world and a container "hermetically" sealed by the deity ensures the containment of the affect undergoing transformation. The unconscious libido is free to flow, yet stays contained in the equivalent of a magic circle.
"To let the depths rise without our systems of protections is what psychiatry calls psychosis: the images and voices and energies invading the emptied cities of reason which have been depersonified and demythologized and so have no containers to receive the divine influxes." (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, p. 224)
“For the soul’s multiplicities need adequate archetypal containers, or—like fallen angels in a maze—they wander in anarchy. Anarchy begins when we lose the archetype, when we become an-archetypal, having no imaginative figures to contain the absurd, monstrous, and intolerable aspects of our Protean natures and our fortunes.” (Ibid., p. 203.)
Basic stories are containers and givers of vitality. Myth, story, and imagery creates a metaphorical container for alchemical transformation to hold psychological and soul engagement. We are an alchemical vessel, the container for cooking raw psychic material. Hillman welcomed the full range of emotions, tragic and otherwise, bridging our private inner self with the outside world, that help us live and die in a soulful manner.
Slater notes in Quadrant, Summer 2012 that, "He was thus constantly
questioning rarified, abstracted principles, pulling them back to into the fragmenting and fictional character of the soul’s own ground. Moreover, as his Revisioning Psychology (1975) made clear, he wanted to revitalize psychological thought at a time when body, feeling, and experience had all but turned thinking into a dirty word. Indeed, nothing provoked him more than displays of lazy thought, vast generalizations, or cliché-ridden formulations."
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
“Is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon him and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more personal vocation?”
― C.G. Jung
"In Neoplatonic thought, soul could be spoken of as both my soul and world soul, and what was true of one was true of both. Thus, the universality of an archetypal image means also that the response to the image implies more than personal consequences, raising the soul itself beyond its egocentric confines and broadening the events of nature from discrete atomic particulars to aesthetic signatures bearing information for soul."
(Hillman, James. *Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account*. Dallas: Spring, 1983, pp. 11-12)
"Feels like we're in a slippery kind of dangerous time where our dreams can be fraught, murky. “Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . .There is a secret love hiding in each problem.” -James Hillman in A Blue Fire
We begin with an outline of Archetypal Psychology:
Psyche = Soul = Image = Butterfly
Imagination = Anima Mundi
Daimon = Genius = Angel
Soul-Making = Mythopoesis
Narrative = Storytelling = Metaphor
Archetypes = Gods & Goddesses
Archetype, Myth, & Dream Tending
"Personification is a psychologism ... All three terms - anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a "mode of thought" which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. These three items, by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of thought" it becomes an act we perform - conscious or unconscious - rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field ... Through these concepts - personification, anthropomorphism, animism - reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods." (Hillman, Revisioing Psychology, p. 12-13)
"...mythical figures... provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.” We are, "deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination." (Hillman)
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Archetypal Vision
The transformation of imagery reflects in creativity; transformation of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, values, attitudes and behavior. It reorganizes as repertoire expansion, an aesthetic infusion of depth and feeling, and repetition of core themes bringing back the archai. It gives birth to the primordially ancient in the new.
A voice calls from the underworld when least expected and we let it speak to us. Anima mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions, an archetypal way of seeing -- seeing through the world.
Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are. Our soul is the whole world, seeing what really is, the reality behind reality.
Hillman speaks in Healing Fiction how "'Know Thyself' is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act."
Because we are "animated" as animals from the soul of the World, alterations in the human psyche resonate with a change in the psyche of the world. We become elementary perceivers of the environment and instinctual soul. Psychic life emerges from embodied action in the world -- act and image.
Psyche is an image-maker, veiled in the reflection of images. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence. The phenomenology of soul includes tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize us as finite, bodily-existing positive facts.
Archetypal psychology turns our eyes and minds outward to the greater world. Emphasizing beauty over emotion, and appreciation over feeling, we reconstitute our proper place among the many things of the world. An imaginal approach opens a space for the soul of the work. Transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery.
Destructuring transformative processes dissolve, increasing the sense of flow. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source. Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe. The ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. A noetic field consists of all mutually interdependent facts and symbols. All are components of the ritual field of mythic sensibility.
The mythic field is the realm of the unconscious. The form of myth emerges as patterns from the field of the Collective Unconscious. Pattern is a language, using fields to describe dynamic relationships and energetics. Each pattern is a field. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it.
Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, thinking below the surface, stepping in to join with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. Such journeys are rites of passage.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth is a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information. It shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior.
Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field. Transcendence parallels the emergence of myth as new life experience. Jung described the transcendent function as a reconciliation of conscious and unconscious elements, remapping our boundaries. Metaphors are interpretations of reality.
Chaotic images contain the entire pandemonium of images, raw psychic material and emergent assemblage. They carry an echoing resonance -- a sense of fate, necessity, and limitation. “Self-organizing” processes produce emergence. Knowledge and experience create a feedback loop, an emergent, flexibly changing field.
Once emergent the field influences the lived experience. impacted by non-specific aspects of the ambience of the emergence field. Permutations in the field result from recognition of patterns of motivation and dream imagery. Emergent phenomena are variations of variations, a virtually infinite repertoire of imagery and novel explanations.
Metaphors function internally like mini-myths or personal fables, mythologizing perceptions, feelings, and existence into mythic enactments. Using “as-if ” fictions to transform reality into mythic consciousness links psyche and environment together. The path of the psyche is a bridge to the irrational, left in its recovery of meaning. Consequences are the effects of past states we inherit that continue to inform the present moment.
It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche. This is a way of knowing, direct personal encounter with the soul, a synthesis of therapeutic, mantic and creative arts that make the divine an intrinsic part of our being -- the aesthetic heart.
Jung said, "The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth."
We find our story as it shapes us through resonance. Our aesthetic vision is of an ensouled world in which the ordinary carries something of wonder and meaning. We may find it in nature, in the consulting room, in the cinema, or in the cards, if it doesn't find us first. Layering image on image amplifies the mystery.
Our search through errant necessity, like The Fool or Parcival, is for multidimensional relationship with the psyche, the understanding of total psychic involvement, patterns of unique character speciation, functional spirituality, and evocation of radical creativity. Range of movement is within liminal areas. The image works on us even without a conclusion or goal. Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create.
In The Power of Myth, Campbell states, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Imagination changes the situation of the psyche. The world gets to us through the imaginal function, sense perception, seeing, noticing, reacting -- an enlarged space where we can be more of ourselves. Myth is cosmic history but history is ordinary reality.
We are the intended audience, always primed for archetypal drama where the only 'truth' is what remains true to life. The archetype becomes an encounter that expresses in all aspects of life, more fundamental to life than any individual psyche.
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/arcane-cinema.html
We begin with an outline of Archetypal Psychology:
Psyche = Soul = Image = Butterfly
Imagination = Anima Mundi
Daimon = Genius = Angel
Soul-Making = Mythopoesis
Narrative = Storytelling = Metaphor
Archetypes = Gods & Goddesses
Archetype, Myth, & Dream Tending
"Personification is a psychologism ... All three terms - anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a "mode of thought" which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. These three items, by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of thought" it becomes an act we perform - conscious or unconscious - rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field ... Through these concepts - personification, anthropomorphism, animism - reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods." (Hillman, Revisioing Psychology, p. 12-13)
"...mythical figures... provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.” We are, "deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination." (Hillman)
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Archetypal Vision
The transformation of imagery reflects in creativity; transformation of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, values, attitudes and behavior. It reorganizes as repertoire expansion, an aesthetic infusion of depth and feeling, and repetition of core themes bringing back the archai. It gives birth to the primordially ancient in the new.
A voice calls from the underworld when least expected and we let it speak to us. Anima mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions, an archetypal way of seeing -- seeing through the world.
Nature, anima mundi, in this fashion exemplifies what we also are. Our soul is the whole world, seeing what really is, the reality behind reality.
Hillman speaks in Healing Fiction how "'Know Thyself' is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act."
Because we are "animated" as animals from the soul of the World, alterations in the human psyche resonate with a change in the psyche of the world. We become elementary perceivers of the environment and instinctual soul. Psychic life emerges from embodied action in the world -- act and image.
Psyche is an image-maker, veiled in the reflection of images. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence. The phenomenology of soul includes tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize us as finite, bodily-existing positive facts.
Archetypal psychology turns our eyes and minds outward to the greater world. Emphasizing beauty over emotion, and appreciation over feeling, we reconstitute our proper place among the many things of the world. An imaginal approach opens a space for the soul of the work. Transformation results from deepening within the flow of psychic imagery.
Destructuring transformative processes dissolve, increasing the sense of flow. Entering the turbulent flow of the stream of consciousness, we can ride its currents back to the Source. Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe. The ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. A noetic field consists of all mutually interdependent facts and symbols. All are components of the ritual field of mythic sensibility.
The mythic field is the realm of the unconscious. The form of myth emerges as patterns from the field of the Collective Unconscious. Pattern is a language, using fields to describe dynamic relationships and energetics. Each pattern is a field. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it.
Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, thinking below the surface, stepping in to join with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. Such journeys are rites of passage.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth is a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information. It shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior.
Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field. Transcendence parallels the emergence of myth as new life experience. Jung described the transcendent function as a reconciliation of conscious and unconscious elements, remapping our boundaries. Metaphors are interpretations of reality.
Chaotic images contain the entire pandemonium of images, raw psychic material and emergent assemblage. They carry an echoing resonance -- a sense of fate, necessity, and limitation. “Self-organizing” processes produce emergence. Knowledge and experience create a feedback loop, an emergent, flexibly changing field.
Once emergent the field influences the lived experience. impacted by non-specific aspects of the ambience of the emergence field. Permutations in the field result from recognition of patterns of motivation and dream imagery. Emergent phenomena are variations of variations, a virtually infinite repertoire of imagery and novel explanations.
Metaphors function internally like mini-myths or personal fables, mythologizing perceptions, feelings, and existence into mythic enactments. Using “as-if ” fictions to transform reality into mythic consciousness links psyche and environment together. The path of the psyche is a bridge to the irrational, left in its recovery of meaning. Consequences are the effects of past states we inherit that continue to inform the present moment.
It is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts as we are the living manifestation of psyche. This is a way of knowing, direct personal encounter with the soul, a synthesis of therapeutic, mantic and creative arts that make the divine an intrinsic part of our being -- the aesthetic heart.
Jung said, "The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth."
We find our story as it shapes us through resonance. Our aesthetic vision is of an ensouled world in which the ordinary carries something of wonder and meaning. We may find it in nature, in the consulting room, in the cinema, or in the cards, if it doesn't find us first. Layering image on image amplifies the mystery.
Our search through errant necessity, like The Fool or Parcival, is for multidimensional relationship with the psyche, the understanding of total psychic involvement, patterns of unique character speciation, functional spirituality, and evocation of radical creativity. Range of movement is within liminal areas. The image works on us even without a conclusion or goal. Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create.
In The Power of Myth, Campbell states, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Imagination changes the situation of the psyche. The world gets to us through the imaginal function, sense perception, seeing, noticing, reacting -- an enlarged space where we can be more of ourselves. Myth is cosmic history but history is ordinary reality.
We are the intended audience, always primed for archetypal drama where the only 'truth' is what remains true to life. The archetype becomes an encounter that expresses in all aspects of life, more fundamental to life than any individual psyche.
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/arcane-cinema.html
"Maybe the parts of Jung that I fell for were those places that had to do with the images, not with the concepts, the statements that struck me as revelatory, you know the absolute importance of fantasy, the voices, the emphasis on active imagination as therapy. But more than that it’s something . . . I guess it’s partly because of a skeptical disbelief in conceptual terms for psychic life. For example, I often say don’t use the word “ego.” I’ve never seen one. I’ve never seen an “ego.” I don’t know what we’re talking about." Hillman, James. Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book (pp. 7-8). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
"Neoplatonism abhorred outwardness, the literalistic and naturalistic fallacies. It sought to see through literal meanings into occult ones, searching for depth in the lost, the hidden, and the buried (texts, words, leftovers from antiquity). It delighted in surprising juxtapositions and reversals of ideas, for it regarded the soul as ever in movement, without definite positions, a borderline concept between spirit and matter. ... [I]t recognized the signal place of imagination in human consciousness, considering this to be the primary activity of the soul. Therefore any psychology that would have soul as its aim must speak imaginatively. It referred frequently to Greek and Roman mythical figures - not as allegories, but as modes of reflection." [Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology 198]
Ancient Greek philosophy had roots in the shamanic practices common to many cultures (e.g., Dodds, 1951, ch. 5; Butterworth, 1966, ch. 4,1970; Kingsley, 1994, 1995, ch. 15). The Greeks learned these techniques from the“Scythians” when they colonized the north shore of the Black Sea in the seventh century BCE and from the Thracians and Persian Magi, who also knew north-Asiatic shamanism (Hornblower & Spawforth, 1996, p. 1375; Kingsley, 1995, pp. 226–7).
Ancient Greek philosophy had roots in the shamanic practices common to many cultures (e.g., Dodds, 1951, ch. 5; Butterworth, 1966, ch. 4,1970; Kingsley, 1994, 1995, ch. 15). The Greeks learned these techniques from the“Scythians” when they colonized the north shore of the Black Sea in the seventh century BCE and from the Thracians and Persian Magi, who also knew north-Asiatic shamanism (Hornblower & Spawforth, 1996, p. 1375; Kingsley, 1995, pp. 226–7).
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering." ~ Agent Smith.
Hillman has undoubtedly contributed more than anyone in the post-Jungian camp to stressing our need to honour the Dionysian, or 'dis-integrating' dimension of therapy. Conversely, positive thinking - as a psychological theory - assumes that anything that's broken, or off-centre (eccentric!), or suffering, or in darkness, depression, neurosis, or symbolic death needs to be immediately fixed up, centred, unified, or brought into the light of health.
As Hillman notes, there is a soul-world of difference here between 'spiritual discipline' and therapy. As he puts it: 'Anyone who tends to dismiss pathology for growth, or anima confusions for ego strength and illumination, or who neglects the differentiation of multiplicity and variety for the sake of unity is engaged in spiritual discipline.'(2) Therapy, on the other hand, concerns itself with 'soul' which, as Hillman stresses, is inherently pathological, multiple, prone to wandering, death, depth and depression.
The re-connection with soul, then, is not equivalent to the re-enthroning of the monotheistic myth of psychic unity, but is rather on one level the reinstatement of soul in all its imaginal complexity and fragmentation, its meanings and meanderings; for if the psyche protects against splintering, it is also prone to splintering its protection.
Perhaps, in other words, we need to 're-vision' soul retrieval by viewing it not only as a reintegration of the personality, but also as an affirmation of polytheistic soul that is at the heart of the "I-Thou" of human and Cosmic life. If soul is both one and many, then the centripetal re-connection to multiple soul compensates the centrifugal re-collection of an original unity of soul.
As Hillman notes, there is a soul-world of difference here between 'spiritual discipline' and therapy. As he puts it: 'Anyone who tends to dismiss pathology for growth, or anima confusions for ego strength and illumination, or who neglects the differentiation of multiplicity and variety for the sake of unity is engaged in spiritual discipline.'(2) Therapy, on the other hand, concerns itself with 'soul' which, as Hillman stresses, is inherently pathological, multiple, prone to wandering, death, depth and depression.
The re-connection with soul, then, is not equivalent to the re-enthroning of the monotheistic myth of psychic unity, but is rather on one level the reinstatement of soul in all its imaginal complexity and fragmentation, its meanings and meanderings; for if the psyche protects against splintering, it is also prone to splintering its protection.
Perhaps, in other words, we need to 're-vision' soul retrieval by viewing it not only as a reintegration of the personality, but also as an affirmation of polytheistic soul that is at the heart of the "I-Thou" of human and Cosmic life. If soul is both one and many, then the centripetal re-connection to multiple soul compensates the centrifugal re-collection of an original unity of soul.
The importance of personifying rather than personalizing, on
pathologizing (i.e., deepening) rather than saving, on psychologizing or seeing
through non-literally, and dehumanizing rather than humanizing (i.e., ego-
fying). David Miller notes he pointed out the
, The 'Necessary Angel', says Wallace Stevens "is an interdependence of the imagination and reality," and "imagination and reality are inseparable."
"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."
-Henry Corbin
If we were speaking of scientific psychology we might say something like, "a panpsychic self-simulation model" can even explain the origin of an overarching panconsciousness at the foundational level of the simulations, which "self-actualizes itself in a strange loop via self-simulation."
This panconsciousness also has free will and its various nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize, while making syntax choices. The goal of this consciousness? To generate meaning or information."
But we are not speaking of science, but of Soul, of psyche. James Hillman bases the entirely of his psychology not on science but on the aesthetic and mythopoetic basis of the soul. This wild mind is an other-than-human world, with its own inhabitants and ecologies, beyond existential social realities. Myths continue to tell the ancient stories. Are we all self-symbolic, self-mythologizers?
In the 1970s, James Hillman revisioned Jungian psychology based on his own insights with colleagues and experiences as Director of Jung's institute. Jung himself said, "A model does not assert that something is so; it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation.” (Structure and Dynamics of Psyche, CW8, par. 362, 381)
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany can lead to an expansion of soul. Beauty is food for the soul.
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
We can never plumb our depths. Hillman concurs that imagination is not a mere faculty, but more akin to being and becoming, a process of deepening and re-visioning, ensoulment or soul-making, rather than any final destination.
We 'see through' myth as the maker of the psyche. Both dangerous and revelatory image arise in ordinary life from the objective psyche, the deep, dark aspects of soul. Psyche is the Theatre of the Mind and the Hall of Wisdom, a palace and labyrinth of imagination.
Archetypal psychology describes a new paradigm, a therapeutic psychology of the cultural psyche. Healing the individual of the hurt inside can no longer be enough. The culture itself needs healing, and this must also be part of a new paradigm of mind.
Our individual crises are embedded in social and economic crises — continuous challenges in global health, democracy, and psychological awareness. Soul's paradoxical nature is rooted in Renaissance Neoplatonism, reincorporating aspects of soul, spirit, and existential connection with the Earth and Cosmos.
"Soul becomes psyche through love and it is Eros that engenders the psyche [...] The creative is a result of love. It is marked by imagination and beauty and by the connection with tradition as a living force and with nature as a living body. This perception of instinct will insist on the importance of love: nothing can be created without love and love reveals the origin and principle of all living things, as in Orphic cosmogony." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis)
Archetypal Psychology models a different way of living in, participating in, and surviving in the world. It amplifies the relationship that we have with the Earth and the other-than-human world, beyond development and dysfunction.
The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked. Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct.
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." (James Hillman)
This is a soul to which Heraclitus attributes "limitless depth," a power larger than ourselves when we get out of the way and let it happen. We are called to the practice. Soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness. Archetypes are are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves.
Therapy becomes soul-making — a practice of healing, story-telling and redemption that enables us to make souls, to grieve for what has been lost and to tell stories of hope and acceptance for the future. How do we make soul in a crisis of spirit troubled by ecological, climatic, and social challenges like grief and emptiness?
Poetic imagination rises from the same intelligence that conveys information about the destiny of individuals and civilizations. It can sound very metaphysical but none of its content is taken literally, but only metaphorically, "as if". It is an artfully and heartfully lived life, but it is not ascensionist.
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
James Hillman (2006) observes, ideas about interconnections with the wider world of nature have been perhaps “repressed” but have still continued to exist throughout the history of Western thought:
"It is affirmed in differing ways in Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and in Jewish and Christian mystics; it appears splendidly in the Renaissance psychology of Marsilio Ficino, in Swedenborg; it is revered in Mariology, Sophianic devotion, in the Shekinah. We find notions of it in German and British Romantics and American Transcendentalists; in philosophers of various sorts of panpsychism from Leibniz through Pierce, Schiller, Whitehead.
Anima mundi reappears in further guises as ‘the collective unconscious’ in Jung, as physiognomic character in the Gestalt psychology of Koffka and Kohler, in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, of van den Berg, . . . and of course, ever and again in the great poets, specifically of this century in Yeats and Rilke, Williams and Stevens." (pp. 47-48)"
Differentiated Morphology
Psyche is a multimind from which arise an infinite variety of virtual experiences, sustained by mythical certainty and experiential knowledge, not truth. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse, accompanied by tremendous psychic energy.
Hillman, to avoid a veneration (and reification) of Jungian archetypes speaks of archetypal images, not of archetypes. Revisioning changes the “what” of an archetype into a “how,” into an activity experienced by the soul. “All images,” Hillman says, “can gain this archetypal sense,” penetrate the soul and work on us independently of our thinking, without our interpretation.
Archetypes are the impersonal nucleus within our complexes. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to outer awareness. The "multistate paradigm" of human nature extends toward a psychology and psychic resonance that is polytheistic, even pantheistic.
Bachalard says reverberation, "has a simple phenomenological nature in the domain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places us at the origin of the speaking being."
Raw poetic power arises resonantly within us as experience and deep memory. "But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. ...it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being."
Archetypal psychology, Hillman's co-created depth psychology, is concerned with fantasy, myth, image, and dreams, significant to soul and soul-making. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman describes the soul-making dynamics of Personifying, Pathologizing, Psychologizing, and Dehumanizing. He pointed out the importance of "personifying rather than personalizing, on pathologizing (i.e., deepening) rather than saving, on psychologizing or seeing through non-literally, and dehumanizing rather than humanizing (i.e., ego-fying)." (David Miller)
He moves the myth of the individual onward by moving us out of the heroic ego. As soul-guides, archetypal images lead us deeper into the heart of living nature. Our task, then, is to enter the darkness, to experience our soul as “filled completely with mortality,” to recognize, as Iamblichus puts it, our nothingness.
Hillman rooted archetypal psychology in the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. Psyche mediates the activation of archetypal Ideas in our lives. For Iamblichus, the soul’s essence undergoes a change in embodiment. The multiplicity of the soul’s activities suggests essence becomes fragmented into “essences of the soul.”
The Neoplatonism of archetypal psychology is polytheistic, reflecting more directly the thinking of Plotinus. "The question of polytheism is posed by the soul itself as soon as its perspective experiences the world as animated and its own nature as replete with changing diversity. That is, as soon as the soul is freed from ego domination, the question of polytheism arises." (Hillman, James. *Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account*. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 35)
To mediate between the immortality of the gods and the mortality of generated beings, the immortal soul had to become mortal, made subject to fate and suffering and that feeling of place.
As Iamblichus puts it: "… the soul is a mean, not only between the divided and the undivided, the remaining and the proceeding, but also between the ungenerated and the generated … Wherefore, that which is immortal in the soul is filled completely with mortality and no longer remains only immortal." (Simplicius, De Anima [DA] 89)
Iamblichus said by means of images "the eyes of the soul" clothe the gods in an interior space, though the gods themselves are incorporeal, invisible, and formless. He calls the descending archetypes “daimons”. Iamblichus and Hillman both emphasize the importance of our not knowing and not controlling the gods when they appear and for the same reason.
Iamblichus would tell us that our illnesses are not themselves the gods but indicate our failure to receive and contain the gods properly. Soul is also an acoustic environment, if we are just present for the physical experience of sounds flowing into our consciousness.
Daimons serve the processional impulse of the gods and give rise to laws of nature and psyche. The daimons aim to take root in reality and therefore tend to move downwards to invigorate the unconscious realm. We access them through images, behavior, and symptoms.
Soul-making is a poetic term for differentiating the reflective, instinctive, emotional middle ground of soul. How do we "make soul"? There is a reflective moment, and soul-making means differentiating and deepening this middle ground. It differentiates the multiple perspectives of our subjectivity in the objective psyche, the powers within its variety. Our internal multiplicity is expressed as various inner personalities.
What exactly is this soul that is being made and revealed by psyche? It is a psychological, rather than religious soul. The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of psyche or imagination. We keep that image alive in our heart.
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." (Hillman)
Jung's symbol system is dedicated to opening up promising and useful fields of inquiry. Hillman opted for a model and approach rooted in love of psyche ('psychology') and images, rather than static symbols and their amplification. Both are practice-informed symbolic representations that reflect intuitive connections. It isn't therapy, or a substitute for therapy. Myths resist being interpreted into practical life.
Since images are psyche, Hillman called imagination the act of soul-making or the crafting of images -- perception and de-literalization of the imaginal world through imagining and mythical appreciation. Psyche, as a dimension of consciousness, simply cannot be subject to analysis by the rational mind. Mythology embodies the critical moment; in fact, all the great moments of life are embodied in mythology.
Rooted in 'psychological faith', Hillman describes how we can slow down and deepen our connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world. 'Soul-making' includes imaginal, performative and experiential insights which can then be processed and appraised within scientific, psychological and metaphysical frameworks.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (RV)
Faith arising from the psyche is faith in the reality of the soul: "trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt." (RV) Soul-making emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations.
We embrace and prioritize our woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. "Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground." (RVP)
Psyche personifies "the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge" as distinct personalities.. Soul-making works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination, "disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands." (RV) The metaphorical death experience is also a mode of soul-making, a process of learning to accept and even come to find love in the inevitability of one's own mortality.
Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living, engaging intuitive intelligence. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. In the mundus imaginalis, an intermediate world between matter and spirit, spiritual intelligence becomes clothed in sense-perceptible images. They are experienced as vibrant, alive and even more “real” than ordinary reality.
Hillman suggests, "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment. I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
Hillman notes that this process of containing or soul-making can only occur when we emotionally open ourselves to our own wounds and afflictions. Our wounds, after all, parent our destinies and keep us in the body - in the world. They stop us from the temptation to escape upward along the vertical axis of "spirit" and keep us anchored instead in the World -- "Soul-making", with all its attendant yet necessary limitation and suffering.
"Essential to soul-making is psychology-making, shaping concepts and images that express the needs of the soul as they emerge in each of us" (p. Xviii RP).
“The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways: as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood; from focus upon the emotional pain of a wound – its causes, parameters, cures – to its imaginal depths; from displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm.” (Hillman, James. Senex & Puer, Spring Pub., 2005)
Psyche speaks in metaphors, analogues, and images. "Insight contained with the fantasy appear of itself, in its own ‘intrinsically intelligible ’speech’" (MA p.201). Our psyche is a 'container' holding such psychic energies and emotions until these same psychodynamic forces can be experienced consciously. Building the psychic vessel of containment is another way of soul-making.
Yet, Hillman's concluding remarks in Re-Visioning Psychology say: "...all that is written in the foregoing pages is confessed to with passionate conviction, to be defended as articles of faith, and at the same time disavowed, broken, and left behind. By holding to nothing, nothing holds back the movement of soul-making from its ongoing process" (229).
Daimonic Intelligence
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/58454
"A sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly affirmed by the ‘other’, termed god, angel, spirit, muse, daimon or alien, or it may be seen as an aspect of the human imagination or the ‘unconscious’ in a psychological sense. Such 'higher intelligence' is a “divine spark” or transcendent power in the human soul, sometimes described as the fount of intuitive insight and creative genius and sometimes as a guiding or protective power."
"This intelligent “other” is often considered to be an autonomous god, spirit, angel, muse or daimon, or alternatively understood as an aspect of the human imagination or “unconscious” in a Jungian sense. From the artist to the diviner, from the monk to the medium, a sense of communication with this other order of reality is commonly attested; this may take the form of an inner voice, a flash of intuition, a psychic or clairvoyant vision, “channelled” information. (Angela Voss)
The daimonic presence is a diversity of manifestations, presenting new insights into inspired creativity and human beings’ relationship with mysterious and numinous dimensions of reality. We are not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings.
Rather, evoking the daimon through the perspectives of history, literature, encounter and performance, and noticing how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. In its own time genius, objective psyche, yields answers and gives birth to imaginative yearning, to new symbols.
What could be more important to inquire about than the nature of humankind, our psyche, spirit, body, and the purpose of consciousness? If all the gods and goddesses are with us, what do they want of us? Hillman writes: “within the affliction is a complex, within the complex, an archetype, within the archetype, a god” (A Blue Fire p 146). He goes on to say, "Gods, as in Greek tragedy, force themselves symptomatically into awareness” (ibid p 147).
Plato said poetry was nearer to vital truth than history. Hillman claimed, "Verse comes naturally to those seized by what Plato called 'mania' or divine frenzy." Myths were the original explanations and they are still with us, although in new forms.
We still mythologize about our selves and bodies, about the arc of relationship, what is fair and what we think we deserve. Certain emotions come with certain life passages. We dream aloud and grieve if we lose that dream, from ambitions, to romantic ideals, to connecting with the transpersonal.
For example, in senescence we are called on to construct a new self as we did in adolescence, a role-less role with its own feelings, thoughts, will and physiology, from depression to vital aging. It gives voice to the injustice and surreality of ageism (belligerence, rage at the thwarting of possibilities, and dismissed anger).
The call from the depths may take the form of arresting dreams, visions, and compulsions; these are the results of the psyche’s intrinsic psychic dynamics. Their negative effect is an inclination to introversion, including retirement from the everyday world, depression, listlessness, moroseness, introversion, and a tendency to meditate, sleep, and be absent minded.
We are always becoming what we are, truly here, present, through the rhythms of our body, intensified most completely within the heart, we know by communion. Through art we know things that cannot be known in any other way, knowing what cannot be known through thinking alone. (Sardello, Heartfulness)
Without recognition and honoring of emotional experience, we often find the reverse of serenity, calm, and detachment from the world, buried in anger, depression, compulsions, and dream life. As counselors, the aged can embody the future.
Those who have achieved a vigorous senectitude may assume positions of leadership. Naturally, we also still fail and disintegrate. All the ugly, dark, unconscious, 'bad', taboos that has been denied and ignored and shut away in the dark basement gets vomited up to the surface.
Our worth is an image, a dialogue. "Helping to shape the future", or wisdom is the ability to see through false images to the big picture, its deep meaning and tell it true. Wisdom is not a developmental capacity, but signals the achievement of our possibilities, born of challenges, tragedy, passion and creative self-renewal of identity as re-engagement at any age.
Jung (1946) says, "No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life." "The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive." Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
Einstein told his daughter, "If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer," "...love is the quintessence of life."
We concoct intellectual myths that we embrace passionately perhaps to counterbalance personal emotional disappointments, and a whole supermarket of spiritual beliefs and technologies with various goals and levels of access to deep reality. They also carry less obvious secondary-gains. Modern myths are the strange attractors of our day causing us to “worship” or reify what the culture admires.
"Depression is still the Great Enemy. The personal energy spent in manic defenses against it, in stratagems to avoid and deny it, is greater than that which is used to combat other alleged psychopathological threats against society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdowns, addictions. [...]
"And yet, it is precisely through depression that we enter the depths, and in the depths we find the Soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul and dries out that too wet one. It gives refuge, boundaries, center, gravity, weight and humble impotence. The real revolution begins in the individual who knows how to be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through til it turns, nor theologizing it – but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants. Thus begins the revolution in behalf of the soul." (Hillman, On Depression)
Our way down is the way up of Psyche. We have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. It's a stream of innate meaning flowing from, through, and among us. We are more than the result of past causes. In Hillman's opinion, newborns are not blank slates, and they are not born whole and perfect — they are unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.
Moore in Care of the Soul says (p. 77): "Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory, and personal history abide." He quotes Bachelard's use of the word "home" for all really inhabited space.
We need to speak of embodiment not as buzzword, branded therapy practice, or empty cliche in our work with the psychophysical self, dreams, events, and memories. We need to know it outside of the therapeutic or quasi-spiritual context in the deeply lived reality -- purposeful meaningful living and the intimacy of each particular event. The heart perceives the face of intimacy as breathing portraits in naked time.
We develop an eye for the unseen, for Beauty. The soul possesses it and has an aesthetic nature. Aesthetic beauty is self-evident, automatically drawing our interest and attention. Divine self-revelation evokes our rapt fascination. Hillman said, "Today the hungry eye wants the beatific vision; we would see God's face, even if through chemical ecstasy." Plato called it, "the very sensibility of the cosmos."
American Master artist, Morris Graves echoed this: "I have mentioned my awareness (as an artist) of the Sky of the Mind...I read of Einstein's last equation based on his study of the musical interval from which he concluded that space and love are the same thing. I, in my nonintellectual way, have determined that beauty is all pervading and has no opposite. An even greater paradox of the universe is that the center is everywhere and the perimeter is nowhere."
We light up, captivated by desire, enthusiasm, and compulsive projections when we engage an image, person, or inner figure. Transcendent beauty -- the power of love and the wonders of natural environment -- lifts us and inspires us to heroic aspirations. Beauty pulls us toward it, toward life potential. Beauty is visual truth; simple truth needs no explanation.
We are enthralled, spellbound, captivated, riveted, gripped, mesmerized, enchanted, entranced, bewitched. Beauty is a profound visual lift. If we lose the rhythm and beauty of the world we naturally seek lesser substitutes. Sometimes we don't even know what we've lost.
Our aversion to self-knowledge is denial. We do not "split the archetype of the healed one and the wounded one." We stay right with our ambivalence, believing and doubting, feeling we've found and lost at the same time." This ambivalence is balance." Hilman calls "redemptive cooling grace... the first appearance ...of the archetypal effects of the anima."
"Precision about psychic life, whether in exercises and diet of the body, in
details of dreams and fantasies, in the elaboration of imagination into art, points to the way in which the drivenness of obsessive compulsion can be overcome from within by its own principle. Like cures like. Another way of transforming obsessive compulsion, not by letting go and taking it easy, but through the positive virtue that lies within the compulsiveness. Compulsion can be seen as precision miscarried, a ritualistic behavior gone astray which asks to be set precisely right."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked on the premise that no bodily function was without intrinsic significance and no psychological phenomena happen without being embodied. Noticing is sustained subtle attention. As we reinvent and expand our notions of embodiment, we resurrect soul, our psychophysical capacity for change and renewal, for heart as psychic center. Soul is our spiritual body.
"In our Western tradition we have come far in knowledge of the reality of the physical body, and are comparatively ignorant of the reality of the body of the imagination. We do not understand enough about the effects of the imaginal body upon our physiology, not only in psychosomatic symptoms, but in all illness and its treatment."
Suffering Belongs
"The symptoms occurring concomitant with psychic change are protective as pain is protective. They hold us down and within our slow evolutionary patterns of the body without whose fear and symptoms we might go up and out of the body altogether in some foolish liberation above all symptoms that would actually be suicide." Hillman discerns a psychological truth: "the greatest danger to our true calling, whatever it may be, is the one closest to it, the one which is the shadow of the substance."
Hillman compares spirit and prana, 'psychic energy', in his commentaries on Gopi Krishna: "Prana is both a super-intelligent cosmic life-energy and the subtle biological conductor in the body, that is, it is both a universal life-force and a physiological actuality. It is both immaterial and material, both independent of here-and-now yet inextricably interwoven with the life of the body. As an energy endowed with intelligence prana compares with our similar notion of spirit...", 'the animal spirits' or 'spirits of the soul'.
All psychic complexes are intrinsically embodied with or without perceptual projection. Theophany is the appearance of a god to a human in everyday experience. Hillman reminds us, "but my symptoms indicate my soul as well as my soul shows me through them." Psyche autonomously creates suffering, disease, morbidity, and disorder.
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire.
As does the body, our myth-making impulse transforms the past into memory. "Memory heals into imagination," Hillman says. It is precisely the wound that gives us the eyes to see. Story is "something lived in and lived through, a way in which the soul finds itself in life." (JH) We ourselves, our consciousness, our lives, our bodies, can all be quite unconscious. The Gods are the main route of access. Image is metaphor.
"Jung has shown that the ultimate development of the ego is its submission to, even immersion in, a field of wider psychic consciousness with many archetypal foci." "A true face-to-face encounter with the numinous shatters all previous religious ideas."
Not religious but psychological soul is the locus of all bodily, imaginal, and spiritual experience. The aesthetic and archetypal approach draws out the poetic and mythic qualities of psychology.
"Characteristic of verse is rhythm, the use of words for sound as well as sense, the symbolic cluster of meaning, brevity and intensity. Verse has a ritualistic aspect. It is language as revelation, as pure symbol; echoed in it is theprimitive throb of the dance, the ritual chant, and the nonsense of the child." gopi
Mind for Hillman is mythopoetic, without need to reduce it to scientific terms. The wider context is given by the archetypes of myth. Archetypes shape probability itself. Consciousness is a probabilistic outcome, which exists in a continuous interplay with the psychic field.
Only a soulless society sees the world as dead and attempts to literalize that vision. Hillman (2005) suggests, "we cease telling the world what it is and what it needs, how it should change, who would save it and from what, as we pause and begin to listen. We let the images before us tell their mythic imaginal tale, and we allow the world her voice." And we allow the same for ourselves:
"The cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness? How far can we build an inner society on the principle of love, allowing a place for everyone?" (p. 243)
Archetypal psychology is not about 'consciousness.' It is not developmental, integrative, salvific, dogmatic, nor prescriptive. It is concerned with the reanimation of and engagement with the phenomenological world (Anima Mundi), including the soul of things and daring to go into the unknown and dark areas of borderline phenomena or liminality.
The reverse of Logical Positivism, it doesn't seek to 'solve' anything, as much as 'dissolve to recoagulate', in alchemical fashion. It is a movement from "Know Thyself" to "Reveal Thyself." It allows the image to work on us, without a conclusion or goal.
Corbin differentiates spirit and soul, between a universal, representational, abstract knowledge and a “presential illumination which the soul, as a being of light, causes to shine upon its object. By making herself present to herself, the soul also makes the object present to her... "the truth of all objective knowledge is thus nothing more nor less than the awareness which the knowing subject has of itself”.
Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create. It has its own rhythms. In fact, it works better through falling apart, coming to pieces, separating rather than unifying, diversifying rather than integrating, multiplying instead of hierarchical-izing. Personifying assumes the existence of souls ~prior~ to our reflecting upon them. We, too, are imaginal being.
"The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, ‘buzzes,’ or more difficult to describe ‘energies’ in the body.
As the experience becomes more intense, it can acquire a visual component, as activity in the temporal lobes spills over to the occipital lobes. The Presence becomes a figure of some kind; an angel, a ghost, the spirit of a beloved dead friend or relative, a guru, and most importantly, God." (Murphy)
Finding these images in our hearts and dreams and culture returns abstract thoughts and dead matter to human shapes. This leads us to a mythopoetic world view. In this view, myths are not stories but personifications that draw one into contact with depth. The mythic consciousness is able to engage a world that is animated with soul. “where imagination reigns, personifying happens.” (Re-Visoning, 17)
Things as they are present with a foundational imaginal dimension. Neither controlling, dogmatic or methodological, AP recognizes the autonomy of psyche. Nothing of theory or practice needs to be forced on the unconscious. It draws out our narratives and perceptions.
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore says soul “…has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” He points out that when we discuss “the soul,” we are entering the realm of the sacred. Moore sees “the great malady” of our age as “loss of soul”—a sweeping topic for another time.
Jung suggested we do what the psyche wants us to do in the world, "where — for the time being at least — we are located, presumably for a certain purpose. The universe does not seem to exist for the purpose of our denying or escaping it." We can discover it in our own actions "where first it reappears under strange masks."
The archetypal approach is the alchemcial 'slow cooker' of psychologies. It is aesthetic, mythic and metaphorical. It isn't about cognitive, causal, or ontological explanations but about soul-tending, the "as if" quality of our lives and the purposive flow of psychic energy. It concerns trans-human consciousness outside the ego.
Archetypes are imagined as “structures in process” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 148). A mythopoetic worldview, soul-making contrasts with '''curing' and 'healing', being more about feeling experience than controlling it. "Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns."
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
And, "to have "story-awareness" is per se psychologically therapeutic. It is good for soul. ..Fantasy is a creative activity which is continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. When we examine these fantasies we discover that they reflect the great impersonal themes of mankind as represented in tragedy, epic, folktale, legend, and myth." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245875/pdf
Post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman pioneered a view of the soul as a perspective which sees by means of root cultural metaphors and their images, rather than as a substance or entity. The inner image is used (in the manner of a lens) to apprehend the world and its narratives. According to Hillman, the main question is no longer a matter for psychoanalysis (“What does this mean?”) but one of desire and acculturated response (“What does this move in my soul?).”
Dialogue and questions open the way for myriad possibilities. Immersing oneself and trusting the process opens a virtual world, a holographic domain that is multidimensional. It is capable of influencing us by changing our attitudes, which affects our psychophysical, hormonal, and energetic being. It isn't 'real' or 'unreal', but takes place in psychic reality -- that is, the realm of the psyche which is both physical and imaginal.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and image. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness.
We can change our relation of imagination to reality. We step into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung said, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." Hillman speaks of our daimon, genius, or angel as soul guide.
pathologizing (i.e., deepening) rather than saving, on psychologizing or seeing
through non-literally, and dehumanizing rather than humanizing (i.e., ego-
fying). David Miller notes he pointed out the
, The 'Necessary Angel', says Wallace Stevens "is an interdependence of the imagination and reality," and "imagination and reality are inseparable."
"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."
-Henry Corbin
If we were speaking of scientific psychology we might say something like, "a panpsychic self-simulation model" can even explain the origin of an overarching panconsciousness at the foundational level of the simulations, which "self-actualizes itself in a strange loop via self-simulation."
This panconsciousness also has free will and its various nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize, while making syntax choices. The goal of this consciousness? To generate meaning or information."
But we are not speaking of science, but of Soul, of psyche. James Hillman bases the entirely of his psychology not on science but on the aesthetic and mythopoetic basis of the soul. This wild mind is an other-than-human world, with its own inhabitants and ecologies, beyond existential social realities. Myths continue to tell the ancient stories. Are we all self-symbolic, self-mythologizers?
In the 1970s, James Hillman revisioned Jungian psychology based on his own insights with colleagues and experiences as Director of Jung's institute. Jung himself said, "A model does not assert that something is so; it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation.” (Structure and Dynamics of Psyche, CW8, par. 362, 381)
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany can lead to an expansion of soul. Beauty is food for the soul.
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
We can never plumb our depths. Hillman concurs that imagination is not a mere faculty, but more akin to being and becoming, a process of deepening and re-visioning, ensoulment or soul-making, rather than any final destination.
We 'see through' myth as the maker of the psyche. Both dangerous and revelatory image arise in ordinary life from the objective psyche, the deep, dark aspects of soul. Psyche is the Theatre of the Mind and the Hall of Wisdom, a palace and labyrinth of imagination.
Archetypal psychology describes a new paradigm, a therapeutic psychology of the cultural psyche. Healing the individual of the hurt inside can no longer be enough. The culture itself needs healing, and this must also be part of a new paradigm of mind.
Our individual crises are embedded in social and economic crises — continuous challenges in global health, democracy, and psychological awareness. Soul's paradoxical nature is rooted in Renaissance Neoplatonism, reincorporating aspects of soul, spirit, and existential connection with the Earth and Cosmos.
"Soul becomes psyche through love and it is Eros that engenders the psyche [...] The creative is a result of love. It is marked by imagination and beauty and by the connection with tradition as a living force and with nature as a living body. This perception of instinct will insist on the importance of love: nothing can be created without love and love reveals the origin and principle of all living things, as in Orphic cosmogony." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis)
Archetypal Psychology models a different way of living in, participating in, and surviving in the world. It amplifies the relationship that we have with the Earth and the other-than-human world, beyond development and dysfunction.
The desire for life and death are paradoxically yoked. Soul mediates and reconciles ordinary consciousness (life instinct) and unconsciousness (death instinct). Soul consciousness is the undifferentiated life/death instinct, identical to the function of intuition, the primal instinct. Soul is the archetype, intuition is the instinct.
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." (James Hillman)
This is a soul to which Heraclitus attributes "limitless depth," a power larger than ourselves when we get out of the way and let it happen. We are called to the practice. Soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness. Archetypes are are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves.
Therapy becomes soul-making — a practice of healing, story-telling and redemption that enables us to make souls, to grieve for what has been lost and to tell stories of hope and acceptance for the future. How do we make soul in a crisis of spirit troubled by ecological, climatic, and social challenges like grief and emptiness?
Poetic imagination rises from the same intelligence that conveys information about the destiny of individuals and civilizations. It can sound very metaphysical but none of its content is taken literally, but only metaphorically, "as if". It is an artfully and heartfully lived life, but it is not ascensionist.
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
James Hillman (2006) observes, ideas about interconnections with the wider world of nature have been perhaps “repressed” but have still continued to exist throughout the history of Western thought:
"It is affirmed in differing ways in Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and in Jewish and Christian mystics; it appears splendidly in the Renaissance psychology of Marsilio Ficino, in Swedenborg; it is revered in Mariology, Sophianic devotion, in the Shekinah. We find notions of it in German and British Romantics and American Transcendentalists; in philosophers of various sorts of panpsychism from Leibniz through Pierce, Schiller, Whitehead.
Anima mundi reappears in further guises as ‘the collective unconscious’ in Jung, as physiognomic character in the Gestalt psychology of Koffka and Kohler, in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, of van den Berg, . . . and of course, ever and again in the great poets, specifically of this century in Yeats and Rilke, Williams and Stevens." (pp. 47-48)"
Differentiated Morphology
Psyche is a multimind from which arise an infinite variety of virtual experiences, sustained by mythical certainty and experiential knowledge, not truth. The basis of the human psyche seems to be a collective of selves--a multimind in a multiverse, accompanied by tremendous psychic energy.
Hillman, to avoid a veneration (and reification) of Jungian archetypes speaks of archetypal images, not of archetypes. Revisioning changes the “what” of an archetype into a “how,” into an activity experienced by the soul. “All images,” Hillman says, “can gain this archetypal sense,” penetrate the soul and work on us independently of our thinking, without our interpretation.
Archetypes are the impersonal nucleus within our complexes. Independent and autonomous, they relate with one another mostly unknown to outer awareness. The "multistate paradigm" of human nature extends toward a psychology and psychic resonance that is polytheistic, even pantheistic.
Bachalard says reverberation, "has a simple phenomenological nature in the domain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places us at the origin of the speaking being."
Raw poetic power arises resonantly within us as experience and deep memory. "But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. ...it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being."
Archetypal psychology, Hillman's co-created depth psychology, is concerned with fantasy, myth, image, and dreams, significant to soul and soul-making. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman describes the soul-making dynamics of Personifying, Pathologizing, Psychologizing, and Dehumanizing. He pointed out the importance of "personifying rather than personalizing, on pathologizing (i.e., deepening) rather than saving, on psychologizing or seeing through non-literally, and dehumanizing rather than humanizing (i.e., ego-fying)." (David Miller)
He moves the myth of the individual onward by moving us out of the heroic ego. As soul-guides, archetypal images lead us deeper into the heart of living nature. Our task, then, is to enter the darkness, to experience our soul as “filled completely with mortality,” to recognize, as Iamblichus puts it, our nothingness.
Hillman rooted archetypal psychology in the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. Psyche mediates the activation of archetypal Ideas in our lives. For Iamblichus, the soul’s essence undergoes a change in embodiment. The multiplicity of the soul’s activities suggests essence becomes fragmented into “essences of the soul.”
The Neoplatonism of archetypal psychology is polytheistic, reflecting more directly the thinking of Plotinus. "The question of polytheism is posed by the soul itself as soon as its perspective experiences the world as animated and its own nature as replete with changing diversity. That is, as soon as the soul is freed from ego domination, the question of polytheism arises." (Hillman, James. *Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account*. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 35)
To mediate between the immortality of the gods and the mortality of generated beings, the immortal soul had to become mortal, made subject to fate and suffering and that feeling of place.
As Iamblichus puts it: "… the soul is a mean, not only between the divided and the undivided, the remaining and the proceeding, but also between the ungenerated and the generated … Wherefore, that which is immortal in the soul is filled completely with mortality and no longer remains only immortal." (Simplicius, De Anima [DA] 89)
Iamblichus said by means of images "the eyes of the soul" clothe the gods in an interior space, though the gods themselves are incorporeal, invisible, and formless. He calls the descending archetypes “daimons”. Iamblichus and Hillman both emphasize the importance of our not knowing and not controlling the gods when they appear and for the same reason.
Iamblichus would tell us that our illnesses are not themselves the gods but indicate our failure to receive and contain the gods properly. Soul is also an acoustic environment, if we are just present for the physical experience of sounds flowing into our consciousness.
Daimons serve the processional impulse of the gods and give rise to laws of nature and psyche. The daimons aim to take root in reality and therefore tend to move downwards to invigorate the unconscious realm. We access them through images, behavior, and symptoms.
Soul-making is a poetic term for differentiating the reflective, instinctive, emotional middle ground of soul. How do we "make soul"? There is a reflective moment, and soul-making means differentiating and deepening this middle ground. It differentiates the multiple perspectives of our subjectivity in the objective psyche, the powers within its variety. Our internal multiplicity is expressed as various inner personalities.
What exactly is this soul that is being made and revealed by psyche? It is a psychological, rather than religious soul. The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of psyche or imagination. We keep that image alive in our heart.
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." (Hillman)
Jung's symbol system is dedicated to opening up promising and useful fields of inquiry. Hillman opted for a model and approach rooted in love of psyche ('psychology') and images, rather than static symbols and their amplification. Both are practice-informed symbolic representations that reflect intuitive connections. It isn't therapy, or a substitute for therapy. Myths resist being interpreted into practical life.
Since images are psyche, Hillman called imagination the act of soul-making or the crafting of images -- perception and de-literalization of the imaginal world through imagining and mythical appreciation. Psyche, as a dimension of consciousness, simply cannot be subject to analysis by the rational mind. Mythology embodies the critical moment; in fact, all the great moments of life are embodied in mythology.
Rooted in 'psychological faith', Hillman describes how we can slow down and deepen our connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world. 'Soul-making' includes imaginal, performative and experiential insights which can then be processed and appraised within scientific, psychological and metaphysical frameworks.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (RV)
Faith arising from the psyche is faith in the reality of the soul: "trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt." (RV) Soul-making emphasizes being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations.
We embrace and prioritize our woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation. "Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground." (RVP)
Psyche personifies "the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge" as distinct personalities.. Soul-making works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination, "disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands." (RV) The metaphorical death experience is also a mode of soul-making, a process of learning to accept and even come to find love in the inevitability of one's own mortality.
Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living, engaging intuitive intelligence. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. In the mundus imaginalis, an intermediate world between matter and spirit, spiritual intelligence becomes clothed in sense-perceptible images. They are experienced as vibrant, alive and even more “real” than ordinary reality.
Hillman suggests, "With the return of the soul [to the world], the literal can lose its dominion.The imaginal has become real, for many it is the real. [...] It remains an alternative [to the crisis of our western consciousness], that is, the way of the South, encouraging images [...] and developing "temples and statues" for "portions and phases" and pathologization of the soul: the elaboration of "recepticles acconci" for the psyche in the psyche Then we can put the tumult of our fantasies into the broadest deposit of myths, and by giving them the myth as a center we can take them off the streets, where they merely tumble following the impulses of the moment. I speak of an uninterrupted attention to the imagination, from first story told to a child up to the last conversations of old age.We talk about the recovery of the lost psychic space to contain and the lost mirrors to reflect."
Hillman notes that this process of containing or soul-making can only occur when we emotionally open ourselves to our own wounds and afflictions. Our wounds, after all, parent our destinies and keep us in the body - in the world. They stop us from the temptation to escape upward along the vertical axis of "spirit" and keep us anchored instead in the World -- "Soul-making", with all its attendant yet necessary limitation and suffering.
"Essential to soul-making is psychology-making, shaping concepts and images that express the needs of the soul as they emerge in each of us" (p. Xviii RP).
“The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways: as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood; from focus upon the emotional pain of a wound – its causes, parameters, cures – to its imaginal depths; from displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm.” (Hillman, James. Senex & Puer, Spring Pub., 2005)
Psyche speaks in metaphors, analogues, and images. "Insight contained with the fantasy appear of itself, in its own ‘intrinsically intelligible ’speech’" (MA p.201). Our psyche is a 'container' holding such psychic energies and emotions until these same psychodynamic forces can be experienced consciously. Building the psychic vessel of containment is another way of soul-making.
Yet, Hillman's concluding remarks in Re-Visioning Psychology say: "...all that is written in the foregoing pages is confessed to with passionate conviction, to be defended as articles of faith, and at the same time disavowed, broken, and left behind. By holding to nothing, nothing holds back the movement of soul-making from its ongoing process" (229).
Daimonic Intelligence
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/58454
"A sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly affirmed by the ‘other’, termed god, angel, spirit, muse, daimon or alien, or it may be seen as an aspect of the human imagination or the ‘unconscious’ in a psychological sense. Such 'higher intelligence' is a “divine spark” or transcendent power in the human soul, sometimes described as the fount of intuitive insight and creative genius and sometimes as a guiding or protective power."
"This intelligent “other” is often considered to be an autonomous god, spirit, angel, muse or daimon, or alternatively understood as an aspect of the human imagination or “unconscious” in a Jungian sense. From the artist to the diviner, from the monk to the medium, a sense of communication with this other order of reality is commonly attested; this may take the form of an inner voice, a flash of intuition, a psychic or clairvoyant vision, “channelled” information. (Angela Voss)
The daimonic presence is a diversity of manifestations, presenting new insights into inspired creativity and human beings’ relationship with mysterious and numinous dimensions of reality. We are not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings.
Rather, evoking the daimon through the perspectives of history, literature, encounter and performance, and noticing how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. In its own time genius, objective psyche, yields answers and gives birth to imaginative yearning, to new symbols.
What could be more important to inquire about than the nature of humankind, our psyche, spirit, body, and the purpose of consciousness? If all the gods and goddesses are with us, what do they want of us? Hillman writes: “within the affliction is a complex, within the complex, an archetype, within the archetype, a god” (A Blue Fire p 146). He goes on to say, "Gods, as in Greek tragedy, force themselves symptomatically into awareness” (ibid p 147).
Plato said poetry was nearer to vital truth than history. Hillman claimed, "Verse comes naturally to those seized by what Plato called 'mania' or divine frenzy." Myths were the original explanations and they are still with us, although in new forms.
We still mythologize about our selves and bodies, about the arc of relationship, what is fair and what we think we deserve. Certain emotions come with certain life passages. We dream aloud and grieve if we lose that dream, from ambitions, to romantic ideals, to connecting with the transpersonal.
For example, in senescence we are called on to construct a new self as we did in adolescence, a role-less role with its own feelings, thoughts, will and physiology, from depression to vital aging. It gives voice to the injustice and surreality of ageism (belligerence, rage at the thwarting of possibilities, and dismissed anger).
The call from the depths may take the form of arresting dreams, visions, and compulsions; these are the results of the psyche’s intrinsic psychic dynamics. Their negative effect is an inclination to introversion, including retirement from the everyday world, depression, listlessness, moroseness, introversion, and a tendency to meditate, sleep, and be absent minded.
We are always becoming what we are, truly here, present, through the rhythms of our body, intensified most completely within the heart, we know by communion. Through art we know things that cannot be known in any other way, knowing what cannot be known through thinking alone. (Sardello, Heartfulness)
Without recognition and honoring of emotional experience, we often find the reverse of serenity, calm, and detachment from the world, buried in anger, depression, compulsions, and dream life. As counselors, the aged can embody the future.
Those who have achieved a vigorous senectitude may assume positions of leadership. Naturally, we also still fail and disintegrate. All the ugly, dark, unconscious, 'bad', taboos that has been denied and ignored and shut away in the dark basement gets vomited up to the surface.
Our worth is an image, a dialogue. "Helping to shape the future", or wisdom is the ability to see through false images to the big picture, its deep meaning and tell it true. Wisdom is not a developmental capacity, but signals the achievement of our possibilities, born of challenges, tragedy, passion and creative self-renewal of identity as re-engagement at any age.
Jung (1946) says, "No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life." "The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive." Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
Einstein told his daughter, "If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer," "...love is the quintessence of life."
We concoct intellectual myths that we embrace passionately perhaps to counterbalance personal emotional disappointments, and a whole supermarket of spiritual beliefs and technologies with various goals and levels of access to deep reality. They also carry less obvious secondary-gains. Modern myths are the strange attractors of our day causing us to “worship” or reify what the culture admires.
"Depression is still the Great Enemy. The personal energy spent in manic defenses against it, in stratagems to avoid and deny it, is greater than that which is used to combat other alleged psychopathological threats against society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdowns, addictions. [...]
"And yet, it is precisely through depression that we enter the depths, and in the depths we find the Soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul and dries out that too wet one. It gives refuge, boundaries, center, gravity, weight and humble impotence. The real revolution begins in the individual who knows how to be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through til it turns, nor theologizing it – but discovering the consciousness and depth it wants. Thus begins the revolution in behalf of the soul." (Hillman, On Depression)
Our way down is the way up of Psyche. We have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. It's a stream of innate meaning flowing from, through, and among us. We are more than the result of past causes. In Hillman's opinion, newborns are not blank slates, and they are not born whole and perfect — they are unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.
Moore in Care of the Soul says (p. 77): "Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory, and personal history abide." He quotes Bachelard's use of the word "home" for all really inhabited space.
We need to speak of embodiment not as buzzword, branded therapy practice, or empty cliche in our work with the psychophysical self, dreams, events, and memories. We need to know it outside of the therapeutic or quasi-spiritual context in the deeply lived reality -- purposeful meaningful living and the intimacy of each particular event. The heart perceives the face of intimacy as breathing portraits in naked time.
We develop an eye for the unseen, for Beauty. The soul possesses it and has an aesthetic nature. Aesthetic beauty is self-evident, automatically drawing our interest and attention. Divine self-revelation evokes our rapt fascination. Hillman said, "Today the hungry eye wants the beatific vision; we would see God's face, even if through chemical ecstasy." Plato called it, "the very sensibility of the cosmos."
American Master artist, Morris Graves echoed this: "I have mentioned my awareness (as an artist) of the Sky of the Mind...I read of Einstein's last equation based on his study of the musical interval from which he concluded that space and love are the same thing. I, in my nonintellectual way, have determined that beauty is all pervading and has no opposite. An even greater paradox of the universe is that the center is everywhere and the perimeter is nowhere."
We light up, captivated by desire, enthusiasm, and compulsive projections when we engage an image, person, or inner figure. Transcendent beauty -- the power of love and the wonders of natural environment -- lifts us and inspires us to heroic aspirations. Beauty pulls us toward it, toward life potential. Beauty is visual truth; simple truth needs no explanation.
We are enthralled, spellbound, captivated, riveted, gripped, mesmerized, enchanted, entranced, bewitched. Beauty is a profound visual lift. If we lose the rhythm and beauty of the world we naturally seek lesser substitutes. Sometimes we don't even know what we've lost.
Our aversion to self-knowledge is denial. We do not "split the archetype of the healed one and the wounded one." We stay right with our ambivalence, believing and doubting, feeling we've found and lost at the same time." This ambivalence is balance." Hilman calls "redemptive cooling grace... the first appearance ...of the archetypal effects of the anima."
"Precision about psychic life, whether in exercises and diet of the body, in
details of dreams and fantasies, in the elaboration of imagination into art, points to the way in which the drivenness of obsessive compulsion can be overcome from within by its own principle. Like cures like. Another way of transforming obsessive compulsion, not by letting go and taking it easy, but through the positive virtue that lies within the compulsiveness. Compulsion can be seen as precision miscarried, a ritualistic behavior gone astray which asks to be set precisely right."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked on the premise that no bodily function was without intrinsic significance and no psychological phenomena happen without being embodied. Noticing is sustained subtle attention. As we reinvent and expand our notions of embodiment, we resurrect soul, our psychophysical capacity for change and renewal, for heart as psychic center. Soul is our spiritual body.
"In our Western tradition we have come far in knowledge of the reality of the physical body, and are comparatively ignorant of the reality of the body of the imagination. We do not understand enough about the effects of the imaginal body upon our physiology, not only in psychosomatic symptoms, but in all illness and its treatment."
Suffering Belongs
"The symptoms occurring concomitant with psychic change are protective as pain is protective. They hold us down and within our slow evolutionary patterns of the body without whose fear and symptoms we might go up and out of the body altogether in some foolish liberation above all symptoms that would actually be suicide." Hillman discerns a psychological truth: "the greatest danger to our true calling, whatever it may be, is the one closest to it, the one which is the shadow of the substance."
Hillman compares spirit and prana, 'psychic energy', in his commentaries on Gopi Krishna: "Prana is both a super-intelligent cosmic life-energy and the subtle biological conductor in the body, that is, it is both a universal life-force and a physiological actuality. It is both immaterial and material, both independent of here-and-now yet inextricably interwoven with the life of the body. As an energy endowed with intelligence prana compares with our similar notion of spirit...", 'the animal spirits' or 'spirits of the soul'.
All psychic complexes are intrinsically embodied with or without perceptual projection. Theophany is the appearance of a god to a human in everyday experience. Hillman reminds us, "but my symptoms indicate my soul as well as my soul shows me through them." Psyche autonomously creates suffering, disease, morbidity, and disorder.
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire.
As does the body, our myth-making impulse transforms the past into memory. "Memory heals into imagination," Hillman says. It is precisely the wound that gives us the eyes to see. Story is "something lived in and lived through, a way in which the soul finds itself in life." (JH) We ourselves, our consciousness, our lives, our bodies, can all be quite unconscious. The Gods are the main route of access. Image is metaphor.
"Jung has shown that the ultimate development of the ego is its submission to, even immersion in, a field of wider psychic consciousness with many archetypal foci." "A true face-to-face encounter with the numinous shatters all previous religious ideas."
Not religious but psychological soul is the locus of all bodily, imaginal, and spiritual experience. The aesthetic and archetypal approach draws out the poetic and mythic qualities of psychology.
"Characteristic of verse is rhythm, the use of words for sound as well as sense, the symbolic cluster of meaning, brevity and intensity. Verse has a ritualistic aspect. It is language as revelation, as pure symbol; echoed in it is theprimitive throb of the dance, the ritual chant, and the nonsense of the child." gopi
Mind for Hillman is mythopoetic, without need to reduce it to scientific terms. The wider context is given by the archetypes of myth. Archetypes shape probability itself. Consciousness is a probabilistic outcome, which exists in a continuous interplay with the psychic field.
Only a soulless society sees the world as dead and attempts to literalize that vision. Hillman (2005) suggests, "we cease telling the world what it is and what it needs, how it should change, who would save it and from what, as we pause and begin to listen. We let the images before us tell their mythic imaginal tale, and we allow the world her voice." And we allow the same for ourselves:
"The cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness? How far can we build an inner society on the principle of love, allowing a place for everyone?" (p. 243)
Archetypal psychology is not about 'consciousness.' It is not developmental, integrative, salvific, dogmatic, nor prescriptive. It is concerned with the reanimation of and engagement with the phenomenological world (Anima Mundi), including the soul of things and daring to go into the unknown and dark areas of borderline phenomena or liminality.
The reverse of Logical Positivism, it doesn't seek to 'solve' anything, as much as 'dissolve to recoagulate', in alchemical fashion. It is a movement from "Know Thyself" to "Reveal Thyself." It allows the image to work on us, without a conclusion or goal.
Corbin differentiates spirit and soul, between a universal, representational, abstract knowledge and a “presential illumination which the soul, as a being of light, causes to shine upon its object. By making herself present to herself, the soul also makes the object present to her... "the truth of all objective knowledge is thus nothing more nor less than the awareness which the knowing subject has of itself”.
Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create. It has its own rhythms. In fact, it works better through falling apart, coming to pieces, separating rather than unifying, diversifying rather than integrating, multiplying instead of hierarchical-izing. Personifying assumes the existence of souls ~prior~ to our reflecting upon them. We, too, are imaginal being.
"The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, ‘buzzes,’ or more difficult to describe ‘energies’ in the body.
As the experience becomes more intense, it can acquire a visual component, as activity in the temporal lobes spills over to the occipital lobes. The Presence becomes a figure of some kind; an angel, a ghost, the spirit of a beloved dead friend or relative, a guru, and most importantly, God." (Murphy)
Finding these images in our hearts and dreams and culture returns abstract thoughts and dead matter to human shapes. This leads us to a mythopoetic world view. In this view, myths are not stories but personifications that draw one into contact with depth. The mythic consciousness is able to engage a world that is animated with soul. “where imagination reigns, personifying happens.” (Re-Visoning, 17)
Things as they are present with a foundational imaginal dimension. Neither controlling, dogmatic or methodological, AP recognizes the autonomy of psyche. Nothing of theory or practice needs to be forced on the unconscious. It draws out our narratives and perceptions.
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore says soul “…has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” He points out that when we discuss “the soul,” we are entering the realm of the sacred. Moore sees “the great malady” of our age as “loss of soul”—a sweeping topic for another time.
Jung suggested we do what the psyche wants us to do in the world, "where — for the time being at least — we are located, presumably for a certain purpose. The universe does not seem to exist for the purpose of our denying or escaping it." We can discover it in our own actions "where first it reappears under strange masks."
The archetypal approach is the alchemcial 'slow cooker' of psychologies. It is aesthetic, mythic and metaphorical. It isn't about cognitive, causal, or ontological explanations but about soul-tending, the "as if" quality of our lives and the purposive flow of psychic energy. It concerns trans-human consciousness outside the ego.
Archetypes are imagined as “structures in process” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 148). A mythopoetic worldview, soul-making contrasts with '''curing' and 'healing', being more about feeling experience than controlling it. "Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns."
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
And, "to have "story-awareness" is per se psychologically therapeutic. It is good for soul. ..Fantasy is a creative activity which is continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. When we examine these fantasies we discover that they reflect the great impersonal themes of mankind as represented in tragedy, epic, folktale, legend, and myth." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245875/pdf
Post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman pioneered a view of the soul as a perspective which sees by means of root cultural metaphors and their images, rather than as a substance or entity. The inner image is used (in the manner of a lens) to apprehend the world and its narratives. According to Hillman, the main question is no longer a matter for psychoanalysis (“What does this mean?”) but one of desire and acculturated response (“What does this move in my soul?).”
Dialogue and questions open the way for myriad possibilities. Immersing oneself and trusting the process opens a virtual world, a holographic domain that is multidimensional. It is capable of influencing us by changing our attitudes, which affects our psychophysical, hormonal, and energetic being. It isn't 'real' or 'unreal', but takes place in psychic reality -- that is, the realm of the psyche which is both physical and imaginal.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and image. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness.
We can change our relation of imagination to reality. We step into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung said, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." Hillman speaks of our daimon, genius, or angel as soul guide.
"The claim that it is a faculty has been precisely what has deceived us most about imagination. We have considered it one function among others; whereas it may be essentially different from thinking, willing, believing, etc. Rather than an independent operation or place, it is more likely an operation that works within the others as a place which is found only through the others — (is it their ground?)." (Hillman, J. (1979), "Image-sense," Spring 1979, p. 133)
Since images are psyche, Hillman has called imagination the act of soul-making or the crafting of images -- perception and de-literalization of the imaginal world through imagining and mythical appreciation. Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas.
Plato said poetry was nearer to vital truth than history. Myths were the original explanations and they are still with us, albeit in new forms. We still mythologize about our selves and bodies, about the arc of relationship and what is fair and what we think we deserve, we dream and grieve if we lose that dream.
We concoct intellectual myths that we embrace passionately perhaps to counterbalance personal emotional disappointments, and a whole supermarket of spiritual beliefs and technologies with various goals and levels of access to deep reality. They also carry less obvious secondary-gains. Modern myths are the strange attractors of our day causing us to “worship” or reify what the culture admires.
Our way down is the way up of Psyche. We have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. It's a stream of innate meaning flowing from, through, and among us. We are more than the result of past causes. In Hillman's opinion, newborns are not blank slates, and they are not born whole and perfect — they are unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.
Moore in Care of the Soul says (p. 77): "Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory, and personal history abide." He quotes Bachelard's use of the word "home" for all really inhabited space.
We need to speak of embodiment not as buzzword, branded therapy practice, or empty cliche in our work with the psychophysical self, dreams, events, and memories. We need to know it outside of the therapeutic or quasi-spiritual context in the deeply lived reality -- purposeful meaningful living and the intimacy of each particular event. The heart perceives the face of intimacy, breathing portraits in naked time.
We develop an eye for the unseen, for Beauty. The soul possesses it and has an aesthetic nature. Aesthetic beauty is self-evident, automatically drawing our interest and attention. Divine self-revelation evokes our rapt fascination. Plato called it, "the very sensibility of the cosmos."
American Master artist, Morris Graves echoed this: "I have mentioned my awareness (as an artist) of the Sky of the Mind...I read of Einstein's last equation based on his study of the musical interval from which he concluded that space and love are the same thing. I, in my nonintellectual way, have determined that beauty is all pervading and has no opposite. An even greater paradox of the universe is that the center is everywhere and the perimeter is nowhere."
We light up, captivated by desire, enthusiasm, and compulsive projections when we engage an image, person, or inner figure. Transcendent beauty -- the power of love and the wonders of natural environment -- lifts us and inspires us to heroic aspirations. Beauty pulls us toward it, toward life potential. Beauty is visual truth; simple truth needs no explanation.
We are enthralled, spellbound, captivated, riveted, gripped, mesmerized, enchanted, entranced, bewitched. Beauty is a profound visual lift. If we lose the rhythm and beauty of the world we naturally seek lesser substitutes. Sometimes we don't even know what we've lost. Our aversion to self-knowledge is denial.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked on the premise that no bodily function was without intrinsic significance and no psychological phenomena happen without being embodied. Noticing is sustained subtle attention. As we reinvent and expand our notions of embodiment, we resurrect soul, our psychophysical capacity for change and renewal, for heart as psychic center. Soul is our spiritual body.
All psychic complexes are intrinsically embodied with or without perceptual projection. Theophany is the appearance of a god to a human in everyday experience. Hillman reminds us, "but my symptoms indicate my soul as well as my soul shows me through them." Psyche autonomously creates suffering, disease, morbidity, and disorder.
"In psychological practice, the white phase refers to that period where a new feminine principle seems to dominate consciousness. There is more fantasy, the dreams are more vivid, there is less purposeful worldly action, there is more slowness, gentleness, even cool remoteness. The long period of intense suffering, depression, and worry (the nigredo) seems to slip away into a world of moonlight where everything seems redeemed and it is enough to have a sweet simple smile of peace and wisdom. One is more receptive, impressionable, sensitive." (JH, Gopi Krishna)
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire. Rather than letting ego integrate the luminous other world, we let the luminous other world integrate us.
As does the body, our myth-making impulse transforms the past into memory. "Memory heals into imagination," Hillman says. It is precisely the wound that gives us the eyes to see. Story is "something lived in and lived through, a way in which the soul finds itself in life." (JH) We ourselves, our consciousness, our lives, our bodies, can all be quite unconscious. The Gods are the main route of access. Image is metaphor.
Not religious but psychological soul is the locus of all bodily, imaginal, and spiritual experience. The aesthetic and archetypal approach draws out the poetic and mythic qualities of psychology. Mind for Hillman is mythopoetic, without need to reduce it to scientific terms. The wider context is given by the archetypes of myth.
Only a soulless society sees the world as dead and attempts to literalize that vision. Hillman (2005) suggests, "we cease telling the world what it is and what it needs, how it should change, who would save it and from what, as we pause and begin to listen. We let the images before us tell their mythic imaginal tale, and we allow the world her voice." And we allow the same for ourselves:
"The cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness? How far can we build an inner society on the principle of love, allowing a place for everyone?" (p. 243)
Archetypal psychology is not about 'consciousness.' It is not developmental, integrative, salvific, dogmatic, nor prescriptive but concerned with the reanimation of and engagement with the phenomenological world (Anima Mundi).
The reverse of Logical Positivism, it doesn't seek to 'solve' anything, as much as 'dissolve to recoagulate', in alchemical fashion. It is a movement from "Know Thyself" to "Reveal Thyself." It allows the image to work on us, without a conclusion or goal.
Corbin differentiates spirit and soul, between a universal, representational, abstract knowledge and a “presential illumination which the soul, as a being of light, causes to shine upon its object. By making herself present to herself, the soul also makes the object present to her... "the truth of all objective knowledge is thus nothing more nor less than the awareness which the knowing subject has of itself”.
Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create. In fact, it works better through falling apart, coming to pieces, separating rather than unifying, diversifying rather than integrating, multiplying instead of hierarchical-izing. Personifying assumes the existence of souls ~prior~ to our reflecting upon them. We, too, are imaginal being.
"The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, ‘buzzes,’ or more difficult to describe ‘energies’ in the body.
As the experience becomes more intense, it can acquire a visual component, as activity in the temporal lobes spills over to the occipital lobes. The Presence becomes a figure of some kind; an angel, a ghost, the spirit of a beloved dead friend or relative, a guru, and most importantly, God." (Murphy)
Finding these images in our hearts and dreams and culture returns abstract thoughts and dead matter to human shapes. This leads us to a mythopoetic world view. In this view, myths are not stories but personifications that draw one into contact with depth. The mythic consciousness is able to engage a world that is animated with soul. “where imagination reigns, personifying happens.” (Re-Visoning, 17)
Things as they are present with a foundational imaginal dimension. Neither controlling, dogmatic or methodological, AP recognizes the autonomy of psyche. Nothing of theory or practice needs to be forced on the unconscious. It draws out our narratives and perceptions.
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore says soul “…has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” He points out that when we discuss “the soul,” we are entering the realm of the sacred. Moore sees “the great malady” of our age as “loss of soul”—a sweeping topic for another time.
Jung suggested we do what the psyche wants us to do in the world, "where — for the time being at least — we are located, presumably for a certain purpose. The universe does not seem to exist for the purpose of our denying or escaping it." We can discover it in our own actions "where first it reappears under strange masks."
The archetypal approach is the alchemcial 'slow cooker' of psychologies. It is aesthetic, mythic and metaphorical. It isn't about cognitive, causal, or ontological explanations but about soul-tending, the "as if" quality of our lives and the purposive flow of psychic energy. It concerns trans-human consciousness outside the ego.
Archetypes are imagined as “structures in process” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 148). A mythopoetic worldview, soul-making contrasts with '''curing' and 'healing', being more about feeling experience than controlling it. "Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns."
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
And, "to have "story-awareness" is per se psychologically therapeutic. It is good for soul. ..Fantasy is a creative activity which is
continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. When we examine these fantasies we discover that they reflect the great impersonal themes of mankind as represented in tragedy, epic, folktale, legend, and myth." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245875/pdf
Post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman pioneered a view of the soul as a perspective which sees by means of root cultural metaphors and their images, rather than as a substance or entity. The inner image is used (in the manner of a lens) to apprehend the world and its narratives. According to Hillman, the main question is no longer a matter for psychoanalysis (“What does this mean?”) but one of desire and acculturated response (“What does this move in my soul?).”
Dialogue and questions open the way for myriad possibilities. Immersing oneself and trusting the process opens a virtual world, a holographic domain that is multidimensional. It is capable of influencing us by changing our attitudes, which affects our psychophysical, hormonal, and energetic being. It isn't 'real' or 'unreal', but takes place in psychic reality -- that is, the realm of the psyche which is both physical and imaginal.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and image. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness.
We can change our relation of imagination to reality. We step into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung said, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." Hillman speaks of our daimon, genius, or angel as soul guide.
The 'Necessary Angel', says Wallace Stevens "is an interdependence of the imagination and reality," and "imagination and reality are inseparable." Mary Watkins says, "Imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature. Dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think. Operating "inwardly" or "outwardly," psyche is an exquisitely dialogical process. In both Jungian and archetypal work the bridging of conscious and unconscious occurs through dialogue..."
There is no final moment in which our return to our self takes place. We can suspend any hope to heal in sick society. What look like our personal problems are universal. Psychology is ultimately mythology. If we follow our symptoms we find a myth in the mess. What kind of society nurtures the soul? One that embraces and engages ensoulment in the world at large.
Today's materialist monoculture is making us sick, according to Hillman, who stopped treating people. Instead, he treated ideas. Why? Because the ideas underpinning America's refusal to grow up and our addiction to the New are diseases endemic to western culture, he believes.
Hillman was equally unsparing of today's reigning myth that we can engineer our way into a golden future. We are in a delusional state, he believes, mistakenly content to believe we are separate from and superior to nature. Our current foundational ideas put us at great risk, according to Hillman, who warns us against what the Greeks called hubris -- a terrible kind of pride which comes before a catastrophic fall.
But Hillman is more than a critic, he is a doctor. First he diagnoses the sick ideas. Then he offers us ways to reduce the pains inflicted by our monoculture, premised as it is on materialist economics, religious fundamentalism and mechanistic science. Challenge the system. Start with your own character.
If ideas are the breath of words, they breath together with Psyche. A therapy of ideas, tries to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently. "The whole world is sick….and you can’t put this right by having a good therapeutic dialogue or finding deeper meanings. It’s not about meaning anymore; it’s about survival." (Chalquist)
Soul-making is an on-going commitment that we make, and society cannot do it for us. We can call it the Body of God or Body of Life. It is the process of working with this paradox that brings the soul into full realization. For psyche is the union of the finite & infinite, temporal & eternal, body & soul. And our immanence is the full realization of this paradox.
Hillman wrote that Western culture as it developed had over-valued the realm of spirit. Belonging to this vertical dimension were abstract "spirit experiences" such as visions, ecstasy, detachment and transcendence, as well as logic and the future. Soul, or psyche, on the other hand, wrote Hillman, was forged in the hollows of earthly existence. Sadness and depression, the mortal, the pull of memory and the drag of the past, sleep and dreams and the iconography of images and archetypes all belonged to the horizontal dimension of soul. (Peay, 2012)
'Psychology' is composed of psyche and logos. It is an interaction between anima and psychological intellect. The logos, or spirit principle, gives speech to psyche. Psychology is the speech of the soul, which combines both lunar and solar components -- animal, mythical, and cultural, all things with a second sense, ambiguously literal and metaphorical.
If we approach soul phenomenologically rather than literally, we come to hear inside that it is about ourselves. Hillman’s notion of psyche is metaphor as the foundation for his archetypal psychology. He proposes an ontological view of metaphor that locates psyche beyond language and mind to places in the world.
"We are not by nature psychological. Psychology must be gained for it is not given, and without psychological education we do not understand ourselves and we make our daimons suffer. This suggests that a reason for psychotherapy of whatever school and for whatever complaint is to gain psychology--a logos of soul that is at the same moment a therapeia of soul. We need to gain the intelligent response that makes the soul intelligible, a craft and order that understands it, a knowledgeable deftness that cares for its wants in speech. And if logos is its therapy, because it articulates the psyche's wants, then one answer to what the soul wants is psychology." (Hillman, Healing Fictions. p. 94, 1983)
Imagination has much to do with reality. It shapes the way we see our reality. Psyche creates reality everyday. Poetry moves the imagination. Mythos is the 'plot,' artistically delayed step by step, leading us to know our inner selves. Hillman restored psychology to its fictions. Objective psyche awakens to the fantasies of its projections, seeing the eye it is seen with, imagination and soul.
All consciousness depends upon fantasy images. All we know about the world, about the mind, the body, about anything whatsoever . . . [including] the nature of the divine, comes through images and is organized by fantasies into one pattern or another. . . . Because these patterns are archetypal, we are always in one or another archetypal configuration, one or another fantasy, including the fantasy of soul . . . . 'The 'collective unconscious,' which embraces the archetypes, means our unconsciousness of the collective fantasy that is dominating our viewpoints, ideas, behaviors, by means of the archetypes.Let me continue for just a moment with Jung . . . who says, 'Every psychic process is an image and an imagining.' The only knowledge we have that is immediate and direct is knowledge of these psychic images." [PV, 118]
In Jungian psychology "soul" has an objective or collective aspect. Jung used the phrase objective psyche, suggesting that when we look into the soul, we are looking at something with its own terrain, Archetypal psychology 'sees through' Objectivity as a poetic genre.
Marcus Quintaes says, "One of the main objectives of Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is to carry Jung's work and thoughts beyond inner circles and clinical institutes, in order to approach and dialogue with the main intellectual streams of our culture." ("Hillman Re-Visioning Hillman: Polemics and Paranoia," in Stanton Marlan (ed.), Archetypal Psychologies, 2012)
“Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible." (AP)
As a critique of scientific psychology, archetypal psychology focuses on the image, not brain function, as the appropriate measure of what it means to be psychological. Both Robert Romanyshyn (2001) Whereas Romanyshyn views the psychological as a metaphorical reality that takes place in worldly contexts, Hillman locates the psychological in the image itself, extending the Jungian maxim “stick to the image” to include any and all images, not just those that reflect the archetypes.
The spirit mode of fantasy is characteristically antagonistic to the notion that fantasy is more fundamental and goes on all the time. The image of engulfment arises as much as penetration. Spirit is the genre of theology, metaphysics, and science, all of which are blatantly riddled with fantasy, myth, and imagination. Yet, unlike soul, spirit likes to take its fantasies literally, even when clearly improbable. Science is not an exact science.
Science shows, paradoxically, that your brain on imagination is a lot like reality. Imagination changes perception of reality. Visual information taken in by the eyes when watching a video flows directly to the occipital lobe and is then sent "up" to the parietal lobe, "top-down" processing from a higher-order region to what most consider a lower-order region.
A network of specialized areas that collaborate as in most mental processes. During imagination, there is an increase in the flow of information from the parietal lobe of the brain down to the occipital lobe. Studies reveal an increased top-down signal flow during mental imagery as compared to visual perception. Conclusion: Optimizing information flow In both directions and between all brain regions is key to creativity and cognitive function. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201411/imagination-and-reality-flow-conversely-through-your-brain
The modern molecular biologist does not speak of religion but investigates the empirical basis of consciousness and the numinosum as states of psychobiological arousal that turn on gene expression and brain plasticity - the growth and transformations of neural networks throughout our lifetime (Cohen-Cory, 2002).
The first aim of science is the description of our world. Science seeks a system of categories which will capture the essential aspects of the entitles under study. The second aim of science is the explanation of the origin of tile entities. Science seeks to know the causes of the entities under study. The third aim of science is the prediction of the future. Science searches for accurate methods of predicting future events and structures of interest. The fourth aim of science is a general understanding.
Soul's place is the middle ground between body and spirit, between concrete sensation and abstract intellect. Psyche-anima-soul has its own logos, distinct from that of matter and spirit, though the distinction is fluid. We imagine the imaginal differently in psychology. religion, and spirituality.
Archetypal psychology is a metaphorical approach. The basic structures of the psyche are archetypes or 'gods', and their natural language is the metaphorical discourse of myth. If myths are the most fundamental patterns of human existence, the basic mode of access is mythological and imaginal. Knowledge, strength, and inspiration come from a cosmic core.
Hillman adapted Henry Corbin's notion of mundus imaginalis, an ontological location for archetypes transcendent to the realm of the senses, in their value if not their appearance. "Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality."
Archetypal psychology recognizes that the soul needs a vital relationship to the gods. The soul thrives when it acknowledges a divine factor in any human endeavor. It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination.
"Beauty may not be the primary concern of a literalistic, achieving attitude toward life, but when soul is placed in the center, beauty takes on absolute importance. To the soul, beauty is not accidental or peripheral.
Neoplatonic tradition would say that the human soul longs for union with its matrix, the world soul. A vital, sensitive aesthetic sense is the means by which the human soul finds that reunion, that intimacy with the world. When society splits its relationships to the world into functioning on the one hand and entertainment on the other, soulful work and pleasure are lost.
"Admittedly, beauty and aesthetics, like everything else, cast a broad, dark shadow. Hillman writes about certain aspects of the shadow of aestheticism. It can have a pure preciousness and shallowness. It can glorify the beautiful to the extent that it represses the hardness and sharpness of life. "In spite of these dangers, the aesthetic life is particularly important in our time because it is so overlooked and undervalued.
The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical,” which is the usual identity for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b). It was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics.
Hillman was critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g.,
biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have
adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. His main criticisms
include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal. They are
psychologies without psyche, without soul. All ideologies are mythology.
Hillman states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
Hillman attempted to restore psyche to what he believes to be “its proper place” in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, dreams, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders.
Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images, fantasies, and dreams. The main value is going beyond what you know and what you don't know that you don't know.
Mythic metaphors elude literalism; they dramatically present themselves as impossible truths. They have the ability to transform concrete particulars into universals, and to present abstract universals as concrete actions. They are ways not only of speaking, perceiving, and feeling, but of existing.
We may experience mythical consciousness by finding Gods in our concrete lives. They are found by entering myths, since that is where they are. We may participate with them by recognizing our concrete existence as metaphors, or mythic enactments.
However, Hillman is very deliberate in stating that: "myths resist being interpreted into practical life. They are not allegories of applied psychology, solutions to personal problems. This is the old moralistic fallacy, now become the therapeutic fallacy, telling us which step to take and what to do next, where the hero went wrong and had to pay the consequences, as if this practical guidance were what was meant by 'living one's myth'."
"Living one's myth doesn't simply mean living one myth. It means that one lives myth; it means mythical living...to try to use a myth practically keeps us still in the pattern of the heroic ego, learning how to do his deeds correctly. Myths do not tell us how. They simply give the invisible background which starts us imagining, questioning, going deeper."
Myths do not carry one to a central meaning, or the center of meaning. "To enter myth we must personify, to personify carries us into myth." Personifying is an effect of the anima archetype. Libido (psychic energy or prana, life force) can only be apprehended in a definite form.
Image does not have to be experienced with the physical eyes, or heard with the physical ears via a poetry recitation or a piece of music. Hillman believes “such notions of “visibility” tend to literalize images as distinct events presented to the senses” (Hillman 125).
He then paraphrases American philosopher, Edward S. Casey: “an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees” (ibid.). So, image as soul means the manner in which we see. "An image is given by the imagining perspective, and can only be perceived by an act of imagining" (RVP).
Since images are psyche, Hillman has called imagination the act of soul-making or the crafting of images -- perception and de-literalization of the imaginal world through imagining and mythical appreciation. Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas.
Plato said poetry was nearer to vital truth than history. Myths were the original explanations and they are still with us, albeit in new forms. We still mythologize about our selves and bodies, about the arc of relationship and what is fair and what we think we deserve, we dream and grieve if we lose that dream.
We concoct intellectual myths that we embrace passionately perhaps to counterbalance personal emotional disappointments, and a whole supermarket of spiritual beliefs and technologies with various goals and levels of access to deep reality. They also carry less obvious secondary-gains. Modern myths are the strange attractors of our day causing us to “worship” or reify what the culture admires.
Our way down is the way up of Psyche. We have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. It's a stream of innate meaning flowing from, through, and among us. We are more than the result of past causes. In Hillman's opinion, newborns are not blank slates, and they are not born whole and perfect — they are unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.
Moore in Care of the Soul says (p. 77): "Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory, and personal history abide." He quotes Bachelard's use of the word "home" for all really inhabited space.
We need to speak of embodiment not as buzzword, branded therapy practice, or empty cliche in our work with the psychophysical self, dreams, events, and memories. We need to know it outside of the therapeutic or quasi-spiritual context in the deeply lived reality -- purposeful meaningful living and the intimacy of each particular event. The heart perceives the face of intimacy, breathing portraits in naked time.
We develop an eye for the unseen, for Beauty. The soul possesses it and has an aesthetic nature. Aesthetic beauty is self-evident, automatically drawing our interest and attention. Divine self-revelation evokes our rapt fascination. Plato called it, "the very sensibility of the cosmos."
American Master artist, Morris Graves echoed this: "I have mentioned my awareness (as an artist) of the Sky of the Mind...I read of Einstein's last equation based on his study of the musical interval from which he concluded that space and love are the same thing. I, in my nonintellectual way, have determined that beauty is all pervading and has no opposite. An even greater paradox of the universe is that the center is everywhere and the perimeter is nowhere."
We light up, captivated by desire, enthusiasm, and compulsive projections when we engage an image, person, or inner figure. Transcendent beauty -- the power of love and the wonders of natural environment -- lifts us and inspires us to heroic aspirations. Beauty pulls us toward it, toward life potential. Beauty is visual truth; simple truth needs no explanation.
We are enthralled, spellbound, captivated, riveted, gripped, mesmerized, enchanted, entranced, bewitched. Beauty is a profound visual lift. If we lose the rhythm and beauty of the world we naturally seek lesser substitutes. Sometimes we don't even know what we've lost. Our aversion to self-knowledge is denial.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked on the premise that no bodily function was without intrinsic significance and no psychological phenomena happen without being embodied. Noticing is sustained subtle attention. As we reinvent and expand our notions of embodiment, we resurrect soul, our psychophysical capacity for change and renewal, for heart as psychic center. Soul is our spiritual body.
All psychic complexes are intrinsically embodied with or without perceptual projection. Theophany is the appearance of a god to a human in everyday experience. Hillman reminds us, "but my symptoms indicate my soul as well as my soul shows me through them." Psyche autonomously creates suffering, disease, morbidity, and disorder.
"In psychological practice, the white phase refers to that period where a new feminine principle seems to dominate consciousness. There is more fantasy, the dreams are more vivid, there is less purposeful worldly action, there is more slowness, gentleness, even cool remoteness. The long period of intense suffering, depression, and worry (the nigredo) seems to slip away into a world of moonlight where everything seems redeemed and it is enough to have a sweet simple smile of peace and wisdom. One is more receptive, impressionable, sensitive." (JH, Gopi Krishna)
The unconscious expresses itself in the emergent mythopoetic function, a glimpse into the transcendent dimension. Libido, the generalized life instinct, is spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth, by intention, thought, and desire. Rather than letting ego integrate the luminous other world, we let the luminous other world integrate us.
As does the body, our myth-making impulse transforms the past into memory. "Memory heals into imagination," Hillman says. It is precisely the wound that gives us the eyes to see. Story is "something lived in and lived through, a way in which the soul finds itself in life." (JH) We ourselves, our consciousness, our lives, our bodies, can all be quite unconscious. The Gods are the main route of access. Image is metaphor.
Not religious but psychological soul is the locus of all bodily, imaginal, and spiritual experience. The aesthetic and archetypal approach draws out the poetic and mythic qualities of psychology. Mind for Hillman is mythopoetic, without need to reduce it to scientific terms. The wider context is given by the archetypes of myth.
Only a soulless society sees the world as dead and attempts to literalize that vision. Hillman (2005) suggests, "we cease telling the world what it is and what it needs, how it should change, who would save it and from what, as we pause and begin to listen. We let the images before us tell their mythic imaginal tale, and we allow the world her voice." And we allow the same for ourselves:
"The cure of the shadow is a problem of love. How far can our love extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness and sickness? How far can we build an inner society on the principle of love, allowing a place for everyone?" (p. 243)
Archetypal psychology is not about 'consciousness.' It is not developmental, integrative, salvific, dogmatic, nor prescriptive but concerned with the reanimation of and engagement with the phenomenological world (Anima Mundi).
The reverse of Logical Positivism, it doesn't seek to 'solve' anything, as much as 'dissolve to recoagulate', in alchemical fashion. It is a movement from "Know Thyself" to "Reveal Thyself." It allows the image to work on us, without a conclusion or goal.
Corbin differentiates spirit and soul, between a universal, representational, abstract knowledge and a “presential illumination which the soul, as a being of light, causes to shine upon its object. By making herself present to herself, the soul also makes the object present to her... "the truth of all objective knowledge is thus nothing more nor less than the awareness which the knowing subject has of itself”.
Imagination doesn’t have to achieve or commit to create. In fact, it works better through falling apart, coming to pieces, separating rather than unifying, diversifying rather than integrating, multiplying instead of hierarchical-izing. Personifying assumes the existence of souls ~prior~ to our reflecting upon them. We, too, are imaginal being.
"The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, ‘buzzes,’ or more difficult to describe ‘energies’ in the body.
As the experience becomes more intense, it can acquire a visual component, as activity in the temporal lobes spills over to the occipital lobes. The Presence becomes a figure of some kind; an angel, a ghost, the spirit of a beloved dead friend or relative, a guru, and most importantly, God." (Murphy)
Finding these images in our hearts and dreams and culture returns abstract thoughts and dead matter to human shapes. This leads us to a mythopoetic world view. In this view, myths are not stories but personifications that draw one into contact with depth. The mythic consciousness is able to engage a world that is animated with soul. “where imagination reigns, personifying happens.” (Re-Visoning, 17)
Things as they are present with a foundational imaginal dimension. Neither controlling, dogmatic or methodological, AP recognizes the autonomy of psyche. Nothing of theory or practice needs to be forced on the unconscious. It draws out our narratives and perceptions.
In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore says soul “…has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance.” He points out that when we discuss “the soul,” we are entering the realm of the sacred. Moore sees “the great malady” of our age as “loss of soul”—a sweeping topic for another time.
Jung suggested we do what the psyche wants us to do in the world, "where — for the time being at least — we are located, presumably for a certain purpose. The universe does not seem to exist for the purpose of our denying or escaping it." We can discover it in our own actions "where first it reappears under strange masks."
The archetypal approach is the alchemcial 'slow cooker' of psychologies. It is aesthetic, mythic and metaphorical. It isn't about cognitive, causal, or ontological explanations but about soul-tending, the "as if" quality of our lives and the purposive flow of psychic energy. It concerns trans-human consciousness outside the ego.
Archetypes are imagined as “structures in process” (Re-Visioning Psychology, 148). A mythopoetic worldview, soul-making contrasts with '''curing' and 'healing', being more about feeling experience than controlling it. "Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns."
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
And, "to have "story-awareness" is per se psychologically therapeutic. It is good for soul. ..Fantasy is a creative activity which is
continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. When we examine these fantasies we discover that they reflect the great impersonal themes of mankind as represented in tragedy, epic, folktale, legend, and myth." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/245875/pdf
Post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman pioneered a view of the soul as a perspective which sees by means of root cultural metaphors and their images, rather than as a substance or entity. The inner image is used (in the manner of a lens) to apprehend the world and its narratives. According to Hillman, the main question is no longer a matter for psychoanalysis (“What does this mean?”) but one of desire and acculturated response (“What does this move in my soul?).”
Dialogue and questions open the way for myriad possibilities. Immersing oneself and trusting the process opens a virtual world, a holographic domain that is multidimensional. It is capable of influencing us by changing our attitudes, which affects our psychophysical, hormonal, and energetic being. It isn't 'real' or 'unreal', but takes place in psychic reality -- that is, the realm of the psyche which is both physical and imaginal.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and image. The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness.
We can change our relation of imagination to reality. We step into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung said, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." Hillman speaks of our daimon, genius, or angel as soul guide.
The 'Necessary Angel', says Wallace Stevens "is an interdependence of the imagination and reality," and "imagination and reality are inseparable." Mary Watkins says, "Imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature. Dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think. Operating "inwardly" or "outwardly," psyche is an exquisitely dialogical process. In both Jungian and archetypal work the bridging of conscious and unconscious occurs through dialogue..."
There is no final moment in which our return to our self takes place. We can suspend any hope to heal in sick society. What look like our personal problems are universal. Psychology is ultimately mythology. If we follow our symptoms we find a myth in the mess. What kind of society nurtures the soul? One that embraces and engages ensoulment in the world at large.
Today's materialist monoculture is making us sick, according to Hillman, who stopped treating people. Instead, he treated ideas. Why? Because the ideas underpinning America's refusal to grow up and our addiction to the New are diseases endemic to western culture, he believes.
Hillman was equally unsparing of today's reigning myth that we can engineer our way into a golden future. We are in a delusional state, he believes, mistakenly content to believe we are separate from and superior to nature. Our current foundational ideas put us at great risk, according to Hillman, who warns us against what the Greeks called hubris -- a terrible kind of pride which comes before a catastrophic fall.
But Hillman is more than a critic, he is a doctor. First he diagnoses the sick ideas. Then he offers us ways to reduce the pains inflicted by our monoculture, premised as it is on materialist economics, religious fundamentalism and mechanistic science. Challenge the system. Start with your own character.
If ideas are the breath of words, they breath together with Psyche. A therapy of ideas, tries to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently. "The whole world is sick….and you can’t put this right by having a good therapeutic dialogue or finding deeper meanings. It’s not about meaning anymore; it’s about survival." (Chalquist)
Soul-making is an on-going commitment that we make, and society cannot do it for us. We can call it the Body of God or Body of Life. It is the process of working with this paradox that brings the soul into full realization. For psyche is the union of the finite & infinite, temporal & eternal, body & soul. And our immanence is the full realization of this paradox.
Hillman wrote that Western culture as it developed had over-valued the realm of spirit. Belonging to this vertical dimension were abstract "spirit experiences" such as visions, ecstasy, detachment and transcendence, as well as logic and the future. Soul, or psyche, on the other hand, wrote Hillman, was forged in the hollows of earthly existence. Sadness and depression, the mortal, the pull of memory and the drag of the past, sleep and dreams and the iconography of images and archetypes all belonged to the horizontal dimension of soul. (Peay, 2012)
'Psychology' is composed of psyche and logos. It is an interaction between anima and psychological intellect. The logos, or spirit principle, gives speech to psyche. Psychology is the speech of the soul, which combines both lunar and solar components -- animal, mythical, and cultural, all things with a second sense, ambiguously literal and metaphorical.
If we approach soul phenomenologically rather than literally, we come to hear inside that it is about ourselves. Hillman’s notion of psyche is metaphor as the foundation for his archetypal psychology. He proposes an ontological view of metaphor that locates psyche beyond language and mind to places in the world.
"We are not by nature psychological. Psychology must be gained for it is not given, and without psychological education we do not understand ourselves and we make our daimons suffer. This suggests that a reason for psychotherapy of whatever school and for whatever complaint is to gain psychology--a logos of soul that is at the same moment a therapeia of soul. We need to gain the intelligent response that makes the soul intelligible, a craft and order that understands it, a knowledgeable deftness that cares for its wants in speech. And if logos is its therapy, because it articulates the psyche's wants, then one answer to what the soul wants is psychology." (Hillman, Healing Fictions. p. 94, 1983)
Imagination has much to do with reality. It shapes the way we see our reality. Psyche creates reality everyday. Poetry moves the imagination. Mythos is the 'plot,' artistically delayed step by step, leading us to know our inner selves. Hillman restored psychology to its fictions. Objective psyche awakens to the fantasies of its projections, seeing the eye it is seen with, imagination and soul.
All consciousness depends upon fantasy images. All we know about the world, about the mind, the body, about anything whatsoever . . . [including] the nature of the divine, comes through images and is organized by fantasies into one pattern or another. . . . Because these patterns are archetypal, we are always in one or another archetypal configuration, one or another fantasy, including the fantasy of soul . . . . 'The 'collective unconscious,' which embraces the archetypes, means our unconsciousness of the collective fantasy that is dominating our viewpoints, ideas, behaviors, by means of the archetypes.Let me continue for just a moment with Jung . . . who says, 'Every psychic process is an image and an imagining.' The only knowledge we have that is immediate and direct is knowledge of these psychic images." [PV, 118]
In Jungian psychology "soul" has an objective or collective aspect. Jung used the phrase objective psyche, suggesting that when we look into the soul, we are looking at something with its own terrain, Archetypal psychology 'sees through' Objectivity as a poetic genre.
Marcus Quintaes says, "One of the main objectives of Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is to carry Jung's work and thoughts beyond inner circles and clinical institutes, in order to approach and dialogue with the main intellectual streams of our culture." ("Hillman Re-Visioning Hillman: Polemics and Paranoia," in Stanton Marlan (ed.), Archetypal Psychologies, 2012)
“Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible." (AP)
As a critique of scientific psychology, archetypal psychology focuses on the image, not brain function, as the appropriate measure of what it means to be psychological. Both Robert Romanyshyn (2001) Whereas Romanyshyn views the psychological as a metaphorical reality that takes place in worldly contexts, Hillman locates the psychological in the image itself, extending the Jungian maxim “stick to the image” to include any and all images, not just those that reflect the archetypes.
The spirit mode of fantasy is characteristically antagonistic to the notion that fantasy is more fundamental and goes on all the time. The image of engulfment arises as much as penetration. Spirit is the genre of theology, metaphysics, and science, all of which are blatantly riddled with fantasy, myth, and imagination. Yet, unlike soul, spirit likes to take its fantasies literally, even when clearly improbable. Science is not an exact science.
Science shows, paradoxically, that your brain on imagination is a lot like reality. Imagination changes perception of reality. Visual information taken in by the eyes when watching a video flows directly to the occipital lobe and is then sent "up" to the parietal lobe, "top-down" processing from a higher-order region to what most consider a lower-order region.
A network of specialized areas that collaborate as in most mental processes. During imagination, there is an increase in the flow of information from the parietal lobe of the brain down to the occipital lobe. Studies reveal an increased top-down signal flow during mental imagery as compared to visual perception. Conclusion: Optimizing information flow In both directions and between all brain regions is key to creativity and cognitive function. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201411/imagination-and-reality-flow-conversely-through-your-brain
The modern molecular biologist does not speak of religion but investigates the empirical basis of consciousness and the numinosum as states of psychobiological arousal that turn on gene expression and brain plasticity - the growth and transformations of neural networks throughout our lifetime (Cohen-Cory, 2002).
The first aim of science is the description of our world. Science seeks a system of categories which will capture the essential aspects of the entitles under study. The second aim of science is the explanation of the origin of tile entities. Science seeks to know the causes of the entities under study. The third aim of science is the prediction of the future. Science searches for accurate methods of predicting future events and structures of interest. The fourth aim of science is a general understanding.
Soul's place is the middle ground between body and spirit, between concrete sensation and abstract intellect. Psyche-anima-soul has its own logos, distinct from that of matter and spirit, though the distinction is fluid. We imagine the imaginal differently in psychology. religion, and spirituality.
Archetypal psychology is a metaphorical approach. The basic structures of the psyche are archetypes or 'gods', and their natural language is the metaphorical discourse of myth. If myths are the most fundamental patterns of human existence, the basic mode of access is mythological and imaginal. Knowledge, strength, and inspiration come from a cosmic core.
Hillman adapted Henry Corbin's notion of mundus imaginalis, an ontological location for archetypes transcendent to the realm of the senses, in their value if not their appearance. "Their value lies in their theophanic nature and in their virtuality or potentiality."
Archetypal psychology recognizes that the soul needs a vital relationship to the gods. The soul thrives when it acknowledges a divine factor in any human endeavor. It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination.
"Beauty may not be the primary concern of a literalistic, achieving attitude toward life, but when soul is placed in the center, beauty takes on absolute importance. To the soul, beauty is not accidental or peripheral.
Neoplatonic tradition would say that the human soul longs for union with its matrix, the world soul. A vital, sensitive aesthetic sense is the means by which the human soul finds that reunion, that intimacy with the world. When society splits its relationships to the world into functioning on the one hand and entertainment on the other, soulful work and pleasure are lost.
"Admittedly, beauty and aesthetics, like everything else, cast a broad, dark shadow. Hillman writes about certain aspects of the shadow of aestheticism. It can have a pure preciousness and shallowness. It can glorify the beautiful to the extent that it represses the hardness and sharpness of life. "In spite of these dangers, the aesthetic life is particularly important in our time because it is so overlooked and undervalued.
The term “archetypal,” in contrast to “analytical,” which is the usual identity for Jung’s psychology, was preferred not only because it reflected “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b). It was preferred more importantly because “archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics.
Hillman was critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g.,
biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have
adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. His main criticisms
include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal. They are
psychologies without psyche, without soul. All ideologies are mythology.
Hillman states that "We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images. Myth offers the same kind of world. It too, is polycentric, with innumerable personifications in imaginal space. Just as dream images are not mere words in disguise...so the ancient personifications of myths are not concepts in disguise."
He states further that these "soul events are not parts of any system. They are independent of the tandems in which they are placed, inasmuch as there is an independent primacy of the imaginal that creates its fantasies automatically, ceaselessly, and spontaneously. Myth-making is not compensatory to anything else."
Hillman attempted to restore psyche to what he believes to be “its proper place” in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, dreams, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders.
Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images, fantasies, and dreams. The main value is going beyond what you know and what you don't know that you don't know.
Mythic metaphors elude literalism; they dramatically present themselves as impossible truths. They have the ability to transform concrete particulars into universals, and to present abstract universals as concrete actions. They are ways not only of speaking, perceiving, and feeling, but of existing.
We may experience mythical consciousness by finding Gods in our concrete lives. They are found by entering myths, since that is where they are. We may participate with them by recognizing our concrete existence as metaphors, or mythic enactments.
However, Hillman is very deliberate in stating that: "myths resist being interpreted into practical life. They are not allegories of applied psychology, solutions to personal problems. This is the old moralistic fallacy, now become the therapeutic fallacy, telling us which step to take and what to do next, where the hero went wrong and had to pay the consequences, as if this practical guidance were what was meant by 'living one's myth'."
"Living one's myth doesn't simply mean living one myth. It means that one lives myth; it means mythical living...to try to use a myth practically keeps us still in the pattern of the heroic ego, learning how to do his deeds correctly. Myths do not tell us how. They simply give the invisible background which starts us imagining, questioning, going deeper."
Myths do not carry one to a central meaning, or the center of meaning. "To enter myth we must personify, to personify carries us into myth." Personifying is an effect of the anima archetype. Libido (psychic energy or prana, life force) can only be apprehended in a definite form.
Image does not have to be experienced with the physical eyes, or heard with the physical ears via a poetry recitation or a piece of music. Hillman believes “such notions of “visibility” tend to literalize images as distinct events presented to the senses” (Hillman 125).
He then paraphrases American philosopher, Edward S. Casey: “an image is not what one sees, but the way in which one sees” (ibid.). So, image as soul means the manner in which we see. "An image is given by the imagining perspective, and can only be perceived by an act of imagining" (RVP).
DREAM ON
Hillman did not believe that dreams are simply random residue
from waking life, nor did he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung.
Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman rejected traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis for soul-guided natural dreamwork. His approach was phenomenological rather than analytical. His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick to the image.”
This method stresses keeping to the image as presented rather than analyzing symbols. This method, while usable by anyone, is being applied by those who are thoroughly acquainted with symbols and their meaning in an attempt to recapture to unknown element.
The dream image expresses this if the symbols are not dissected from their "specific context, mood, and scene." An image presents symbols with their particularity and peculiarness intact. Dream presents a variety of images which are all intra-related. Time and sequence are distorted in dream. Hillman prefers to view dream images with all parts as co-relative and co-temporaneous.
Hillma does not advocate changing or controlling the psyche. This is, in fact, neither possible nor desirable. He asserts that to enter dream is to enter the underworld, Hades' realm. Psychic images are metaphorical. All underworld figures are shades or shadow souls. There is no reason for them to conform to the constraints of the ego's dayworld.
Soul is the background of dream-work. Underworld is psyche. This relates, therefore, to a metaphorical perception of death. Dreams present us with that different reality, in which pathology and distortion are inherent aspects. We needn't control them, but rather acknowledge their value and depth.
This approach to the dream is a sort of metaphorical word-play. The elements of the dream are chanted or interwoven. Repeat the dream while playfully rearranging the sequence of events. Remain alert to analogies which form themselves during this word play. Ruminate on any puns which may occur. As the play unfolds, deeper significance emerges as a resonance. By allowing the dream to speak for itself, interpretations appear indirectly.
This is a method of communicating with the psyche which is in harmony with its inherent structure. In alchemy, it is known as an iteratio of the prima materia. Its value is evident, according to Hillman. "We do not want to prejudice the phenomenal experience of their unknowness and our unconsciousness by knowing in advance that they are messages, dramas, compensations, prospective indications, transcendent function. We want to get at the image without the defense of symbols."
He argues against the “nature and nurture” only explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul, is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration, and achievement. He also argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth.
"We want to get at the image without the defense of symbols."
The archetypal content in an image unfolds during participation with it.
We have found that an archetypal quality emerges through a) precise portrayal of the image (including any confusion or vagueness presented with the image); b) sticking to the image while hearing it metaphorically; c) discovering the necessity within the image (the fact that all the symbols an images presented are required in this context); d) experiencing the unfathomable analogical richness of the image.
In this context, 'archetypal' is seen as a function of making. The adjective may be applied to any image (6) upon which the operations are performed.
This means that no single image is inherently more meaningful than another. Value may be extracted from them all. This coincides with the alchemical conception of the Opus as work. Here the Opus is carried by the dreamwork technique. Archetypal psychology contends that the value of dreams has little application to practical affairs.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman postulates that:
"Dream's value and emotion is in relation with soul and how life is lived in relation with soul. When we move the soul insights of the dream into life for problem-solving and people-relating, we rob the dream and impoverish the soul. The more we get out of a dream for human affairs the more we prevent its psychological work, what it is doing and building night after night, interiorly, away from life in a nonhuman world."
The dream is already valuable without having any literalizations or personalistic interpretations tacked on to it. Hillman ends his "Inquiry Into Image" by stating that the final meaning of a dream cannot be found, no matter how it seems to "click."
"Analogizing is like my fantasy of Zen, where the dream is the teacher. Each time you say what the image means, you get your face slapped. The dream becomes a Koan when we approach it by means of analogy. If you can literalize a meaning, "interpret" a dream, you are off the track, lost your Koan. (For the dream is the thing, not what it means.) Then you must be slapped to bring you back to the image. A good dream analysis is one in which one gets more and more slaps, more and more analogies, the dream exposing your entire unconscious, the basic matters of your psychic life."
He rejects the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, where parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns. While acknowledging the importance of external factors in the blossoming of the seed, he argues against attributing all of human individuality, character and achievement to these factors. He suggests reconnection with the third factor, soul, in discovering
our individual nature, and in determining who we are and our life’s calling.
By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend toward the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street."
(James Hillman)
“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. (RVP, p.50)
Deep processes that came from the unconscious that we have no other way of knowing: "...our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22)
In Healing Fiction, Hillman considers self-understanding an imaginative act in which “each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself...” (Healing Fiction, p. 80). "From the imagistic viewpoint, self-understanding is indeterminable because it is not in time to begin with. Know Thyself is revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous, like a painting, a lyric poem; biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act...Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself. So, Know Thyself terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it." (Healing Fiction, 60-62, 78-80)
Berry, Patricia, "An Approach to the Dream", Spring 1974, Spring Publications.
Berry, Patricia, "Defense and Telos in Dreams", Spring 1978, Spring Publications.
Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, Harper and Row, 1975.
Hillman, James, Dream and the Underworld, Harper and Row, 1979.
Hillman, James, "An Inquiry Into Image", Spring 1977, Spring Publications.
Hillman did not believe that dreams are simply random residue
from waking life, nor did he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung.
Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman rejected traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis for soul-guided natural dreamwork. His approach was phenomenological rather than analytical. His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick to the image.”
This method stresses keeping to the image as presented rather than analyzing symbols. This method, while usable by anyone, is being applied by those who are thoroughly acquainted with symbols and their meaning in an attempt to recapture to unknown element.
The dream image expresses this if the symbols are not dissected from their "specific context, mood, and scene." An image presents symbols with their particularity and peculiarness intact. Dream presents a variety of images which are all intra-related. Time and sequence are distorted in dream. Hillman prefers to view dream images with all parts as co-relative and co-temporaneous.
Hillma does not advocate changing or controlling the psyche. This is, in fact, neither possible nor desirable. He asserts that to enter dream is to enter the underworld, Hades' realm. Psychic images are metaphorical. All underworld figures are shades or shadow souls. There is no reason for them to conform to the constraints of the ego's dayworld.
Soul is the background of dream-work. Underworld is psyche. This relates, therefore, to a metaphorical perception of death. Dreams present us with that different reality, in which pathology and distortion are inherent aspects. We needn't control them, but rather acknowledge their value and depth.
This approach to the dream is a sort of metaphorical word-play. The elements of the dream are chanted or interwoven. Repeat the dream while playfully rearranging the sequence of events. Remain alert to analogies which form themselves during this word play. Ruminate on any puns which may occur. As the play unfolds, deeper significance emerges as a resonance. By allowing the dream to speak for itself, interpretations appear indirectly.
This is a method of communicating with the psyche which is in harmony with its inherent structure. In alchemy, it is known as an iteratio of the prima materia. Its value is evident, according to Hillman. "We do not want to prejudice the phenomenal experience of their unknowness and our unconsciousness by knowing in advance that they are messages, dramas, compensations, prospective indications, transcendent function. We want to get at the image without the defense of symbols."
He argues against the “nature and nurture” only explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul, is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration, and achievement. He also argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth.
"We want to get at the image without the defense of symbols."
The archetypal content in an image unfolds during participation with it.
We have found that an archetypal quality emerges through a) precise portrayal of the image (including any confusion or vagueness presented with the image); b) sticking to the image while hearing it metaphorically; c) discovering the necessity within the image (the fact that all the symbols an images presented are required in this context); d) experiencing the unfathomable analogical richness of the image.
In this context, 'archetypal' is seen as a function of making. The adjective may be applied to any image (6) upon which the operations are performed.
This means that no single image is inherently more meaningful than another. Value may be extracted from them all. This coincides with the alchemical conception of the Opus as work. Here the Opus is carried by the dreamwork technique. Archetypal psychology contends that the value of dreams has little application to practical affairs.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman postulates that:
"Dream's value and emotion is in relation with soul and how life is lived in relation with soul. When we move the soul insights of the dream into life for problem-solving and people-relating, we rob the dream and impoverish the soul. The more we get out of a dream for human affairs the more we prevent its psychological work, what it is doing and building night after night, interiorly, away from life in a nonhuman world."
The dream is already valuable without having any literalizations or personalistic interpretations tacked on to it. Hillman ends his "Inquiry Into Image" by stating that the final meaning of a dream cannot be found, no matter how it seems to "click."
"Analogizing is like my fantasy of Zen, where the dream is the teacher. Each time you say what the image means, you get your face slapped. The dream becomes a Koan when we approach it by means of analogy. If you can literalize a meaning, "interpret" a dream, you are off the track, lost your Koan. (For the dream is the thing, not what it means.) Then you must be slapped to bring you back to the image. A good dream analysis is one in which one gets more and more slaps, more and more analogies, the dream exposing your entire unconscious, the basic matters of your psychic life."
He rejects the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, where parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns. While acknowledging the importance of external factors in the blossoming of the seed, he argues against attributing all of human individuality, character and achievement to these factors. He suggests reconnection with the third factor, soul, in discovering
our individual nature, and in determining who we are and our life’s calling.
By traditional definition, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend toward the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street."
(James Hillman)
“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. (RVP, p.50)
Deep processes that came from the unconscious that we have no other way of knowing: "...our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22)
In Healing Fiction, Hillman considers self-understanding an imaginative act in which “each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself...” (Healing Fiction, p. 80). "From the imagistic viewpoint, self-understanding is indeterminable because it is not in time to begin with. Know Thyself is revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous, like a painting, a lyric poem; biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act...Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself. So, Know Thyself terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it." (Healing Fiction, 60-62, 78-80)
Berry, Patricia, "An Approach to the Dream", Spring 1974, Spring Publications.
Berry, Patricia, "Defense and Telos in Dreams", Spring 1978, Spring Publications.
Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, Harper and Row, 1975.
Hillman, James, Dream and the Underworld, Harper and Row, 1979.
Hillman, James, "An Inquiry Into Image", Spring 1977, Spring Publications.
The theory and practice of archetypal psychology is set forth by some of its pioneering theoreticians and practitioners. James Hillman’s RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY and THE SOUL'S CODE are classic; essays include “Archetypal Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” “Peaks and Vales,” “Image-Sense,” etc.
Hillman, James. (1993) The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications,
Archetypal Authors
Thomas Moore, Wolfgang Giegerich, Patricia Berry, Mary Watkins, Ginette Paris, Edward Casey, Tom Cheetham, Henry Corbin, Richard Tarnas, Robert Sardello, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, James Hollis, Christine Downing, Glen Slater, Safron Rossi, David Miller, Robert Bosnak, John Gouldthorpe, etc.
Other writers include those in SPRING JOURNAL, A Journal of Archetype and Culture, each annual is based on a specific theme, contains many relevant articles. Spring Journal and Books focuses on the areas of psychology, mythology, philosophy, culture, and religion. Authors:
http://www.springjournalandbooks.com/cgi-bin/ecommerce/ac/agora.cgi?cartlink=authors.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=mkQhBQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=,adonis+sufism+and+surrealism&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyvtHvyOLoAhUHpJ4KHYyuB_kQuwUwAHoECAcQBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=sD_aVE9CCdsC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=,alchemical+blue,+hillman&source=bl&ots=klt0u-OIsa&sig=ACfU3U3ybtYVLJihY98Bfx90xoDDmu0blQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj25oLz9u3oAhXjFjQIHdZwCLY4ChDoATAEegQICxAu#v=onepage&q=%2Calchemical%20blue%2C%20hillman&f=false
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/spring14-poetics-of-soul.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=XCslDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=,%E2%80%9CThe+wounds+that+give+me+eyes+to+see+with%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=uZFDKkupyZ&sig=ACfU3U1xSOsS39wrtznQsFpuptLSPxbIXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixq8vb6IHpAhWUuZ4KHbldDocQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2C%E2%80%9CThe%20wounds%20that%20give%20me%20eyes%20to%20see%20with%E2%80%9D&f=false Meaning and Concept of Forgiveness
Hillman, James. (1993) The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications,
Archetypal Authors
Thomas Moore, Wolfgang Giegerich, Patricia Berry, Mary Watkins, Ginette Paris, Edward Casey, Tom Cheetham, Henry Corbin, Richard Tarnas, Robert Sardello, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, James Hollis, Christine Downing, Glen Slater, Safron Rossi, David Miller, Robert Bosnak, John Gouldthorpe, etc.
Other writers include those in SPRING JOURNAL, A Journal of Archetype and Culture, each annual is based on a specific theme, contains many relevant articles. Spring Journal and Books focuses on the areas of psychology, mythology, philosophy, culture, and religion. Authors:
http://www.springjournalandbooks.com/cgi-bin/ecommerce/ac/agora.cgi?cartlink=authors.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=mkQhBQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=,adonis+sufism+and+surrealism&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyvtHvyOLoAhUHpJ4KHYyuB_kQuwUwAHoECAcQBw#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=sD_aVE9CCdsC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=,alchemical+blue,+hillman&source=bl&ots=klt0u-OIsa&sig=ACfU3U3ybtYVLJihY98Bfx90xoDDmu0blQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj25oLz9u3oAhXjFjQIHdZwCLY4ChDoATAEegQICxAu#v=onepage&q=%2Calchemical%20blue%2C%20hillman&f=false
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/spring14-poetics-of-soul.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=XCslDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=,%E2%80%9CThe+wounds+that+give+me+eyes+to+see+with%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=uZFDKkupyZ&sig=ACfU3U1xSOsS39wrtznQsFpuptLSPxbIXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixq8vb6IHpAhWUuZ4KHbldDocQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%2C%E2%80%9CThe%20wounds%20that%20give%20me%20eyes%20to%20see%20with%E2%80%9D&f=false Meaning and Concept of Forgiveness
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Hillman, J. (2004). Archetypal psychology. 3rd amended & revised edition.Putnam, CT: Spring Publ.
Hillman, J. (1996). The soul’s code: On character and calling. New York: Warner Books.
Hillman, J. & Ventura, M. (1993). We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy - and the world’s getting worse. New York: HarperCollins.
Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publ.
Hillman, J. & Moore, T. (ed.) (1989). A blue fire: Selected writings. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1975). Loose ends: Primary papers in archetypal psychology. Dallas: Springhill Publications.
Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology.Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the soul. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J., Pierson, J., & Miller, A. (2010). Instructor’s Manual for James Hillman on Archetypal Psychotherapy. Mill Valley, CA: Psychotherapy.net, LLC.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul. New York: Harper Collins
Hillman, J. (2004). Archetypal psychology. 3rd amended & revised edition.Putnam, CT: Spring Publ.
Hillman, J. (1996). The soul’s code: On character and calling. New York: Warner Books.
Hillman, J. & Ventura, M. (1993). We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy - and the world’s getting worse. New York: HarperCollins.
Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publ.
Hillman, J. & Moore, T. (ed.) (1989). A blue fire: Selected writings. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1979). The dream and the underworld. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J. (1975). Loose ends: Primary papers in archetypal psychology. Dallas: Springhill Publications.
Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology.Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the soul. New York: Harper & Row.
Hillman, J., Pierson, J., & Miller, A. (2010). Instructor’s Manual for James Hillman on Archetypal Psychotherapy. Mill Valley, CA: Psychotherapy.net, LLC.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul. New York: Harper Collins
It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.
James Hillman
We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.
James Hillman
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
James Hillman
Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
James Hillman
The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
James Hillman
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
James Hillman
James Hillman
We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.
James Hillman
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
James Hillman
Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
James Hillman
The moment the angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one.
James Hillman
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
James Hillman
Archetypal Psychology
Imagination, Mythopoetics, Liminality, Numinosity, Image, World Soul,
Psyche, Psychologizing, Seeing Through, Personifying, Pathologizing, Soul-Making, Metaphor, Polytheism, Alchemical Psychology, Archetypes, Dreams, Imaginal Realities, Psychic Phenomena, Beauty, Pathos, Daemon,
Depth, Psychic Reality, The Nonrational, The Feminine, Anima Mundi, Aesthetics, Narrative, Gods & Goddesses, Calling, Healing Fictions, Character, Fluid Subjectivities, Cultural Psychology, Cultural Wounding
James Hillman, a genius in the field of psychology, is largely unknown to the general public. Only one of his many books, The Soul’s Code (1997), is widely known, and only because Oprah featured it. Hillman’s long time friend and editor, Thomas Moore, wrote a tribute and summary of his life after his death in October, 2011. Moore said, “Jame’s books and essays, in my view, represent the best and most original thought of our times. I expect that it will take many decades before he is truly discovered and appreciated.”
Hillman was, for a time, director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, founded “Archetypal Psychology,” an extension of Jung’s thought, centered on the poetic, imaginal basis of psyche or sou. “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.” Hillman often spoke of “seeing through” the literal statements of individuals or groups, to discover the imaginal underpinnings.
Hillman was, for a time, director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, founded “Archetypal Psychology,” an extension of Jung’s thought, centered on the poetic, imaginal basis of psyche or sou. “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.” Hillman often spoke of “seeing through” the literal statements of individuals or groups, to discover the imaginal underpinnings.
"We stumble into the world we make possible as we lumber forward, with no or little insight or foreknowledge. ...This ultimate, an unknowable unfolding, slips its foundational moorings and floats free."
--Stuart Kauffman, *A World Beyond Physics*
“Gods are real. And these gods are everywhere, in all aspects of existence, all aspects of human life.” -James HiLLMAN
ANGELS & DAIMONS
Synopsis
Archetypal psychology is the third rail of post-Jungian thought along with Classical and Developmental Psychology. We are trying to reconcile the drive toward integrative wholeness while recognizing the necessity of fragmentation, falling apart. James Hillman created a new image of the psyche that amalgamates poetics, mythos and archetypal psychology -- an extended dimension of experience -- a participatory worldview.
Hillman suggests "a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the processes of imagination” (BF). Hillman places himself in a western lineage going back from Jung, “through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus and Plato to Heraclitus”. James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to characterize and distinguish Spirit and Soul.
"Meaning and reality are fully present in the phenomena not because they hide a deeper or numinous sense requiring special or esoteric knowledge, but because they exist, always and necessarily, in a web of relationships without end. Images are always in the plural. (67)
What we experience as our individuality (my emotions, my temperament, my mannerisms) is no more or less than a collage of mythical images. The ‘I’ as the experiencer is also in the myth; it is not single and unique, but many, a flux of vicissitudes, an archetypal illusion of self-identity; it is samsaric and imaginal. The first metaphor of human existence is that “we are not real.” (72)
It would seem that from the standpoint of archetypal psychology, the religious process of spiritualization can be imaged as a kind of Second Fall – as the abandonment (forgetfulness) of the middle position which is also the place of the soul; an inexorable moving away from the world of imagination which...is neither exclusively physical and material nor purely spiritual and abstract. I may add that one could also detect in this process – without using magnifying lenses – an uncanny alliance between religion and scientific-technological ideology. Religion no longer deals with man’s fall, but participates in it with its own private hosannas and in excelsis. (91)"
Roberts Avens, Imagination is Reality. Spring Publications: Dallas, 1980/88.
"The puer offers direct connection with the spirit. Break this vertical connection and it falls with broken wings. When it falls we lose the urgent burning purpose...if persuaded into the temporal world by the negative senex [consider Kamaswami], within or without, the puer loses connection with its own aspect of meaning and becomes the negative puer. Then, it goes dead, and there is passivity, withdrawal, and even physical death." (JH “Senex”26-27) If we draw the puer personality down from detachment in spirit and into the twists and turns of human relationship, we come to reflect on our uniqueness and limitations (Hillman, “Peaks” 66).
Hillman's critical revisioning demythologized Jung. He extended Jung’s understandings of archetype into an ‘archetypal perspective’ for the 21st Century. Cultivating an awareness of where and how archetypal patterns appear in life and work provides a means by which we may join individual calling with the larger meanings of human existence. Suppression of life force creates compression in the psychic system and is experienced as anxiety. Hillman stated that anxiety is caused by what has been
repressed.
Hillman suggests that instead of primarily making archetypes conscious, the imagination can be used as a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious minds, and that by imaginally entering the metaphor of the archetype, an individual performs a fantasy in which their soul is deepened. For example, he speaks of digital addiction as Hermetic intoxication.
Hillman described soul-making as a process by which life and work deepens into meaning -- the confluence of archetypal and mythic ways of knowing. An archetypal perspective - a way of seeing the world that allows us to perceive the influence of archetypal patterns.
These timeless, universal forms, expressed in culturally variant and continually renewed ways, both guide and shape our sense of deeper purpose. He was always mindful—to put it mildly—of death, and the importance of facing closure, of using it to focus the construction of the soul.
Hillman rejected the ideal of a “unified personality” which he felt glorifies the “heroic ego,” which he long had viewed as a culprit in our social and environmental troubles. He argued for “polytheistic psychology” that recognizes the psyche as composed of a dynamic group of autonomous inner personalities. Rather than assign psychological labels to these archetypes and complexes, Hillman made use of the Greek myths and stories to clarify these inner “persons.” Jung had said, “there are gods in our symptoms,” and Hillman made much of that statement.
“Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11: 889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees.” Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account
For Hillman, "Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny." He makes a clear distinction that Jung's method is not for "spiritual discipline, artistic creativity, premature escapism or transcendence of the worldly, moral philosophy, mystical vision or union, personal betterment, or magical effect."
The soul is profoundly other with its own integrity. Ficino claimed three powers to soul's essence: the powers of life, understanding, and desiring. It frees consciousness of science, turning events into experience of images. We know by means of vision those things we cannot see. Only the image actually presented embodies meaning. Metaphorical insight emerges from hearing while seeing.
Favoring soul over ego, the aim he claims is to avoid "the disease of literalism." Psychic consciousness is a dialogue, a conversation rooted in love of soul and its inherent beauty. Its aim differs from art because it is not product-oriented but ouroboric self-understanding, unfolding story without end.
Psychology isn’t really to be thought of as a science of detection but as a liberator of imagination, so that one can enjoy all the things that happen, or at least find place for them. The archetypal approach is
an approach that attempts to give value to everything that happens.
It says what happens somewhere makes sense, somewhere has a
substructure of meaning.
Hillman states that archetypal psychology tries to disturb some belief systems such as the belief that the earlier something happens in one’s life, the more power it has. He said, “I think...the ‘ology’ of psychology has been a persistent attempt to eradicate...all that riches that soul carried previously of love, death, beauty, liveliness of things.”
"So psychology isn’t really to be thought of as a science
of detection but as a liberator of imagination, so that one can enjoy
all the things that happen, or at least find place for them." Sometimes the psyche upsets us in orderfor us to go further with our lives and our thoughts. Rather than a technique-based approach, it is a non-systematized “way of being.” It’s working with what’s already there and trying to re-work it.
It shifts the focus from “What do I want?” to “What does it want?” It can tell us something about our life, can tell me something about life in general. In tge archetypal perspective we begin to realize there’s a purpose in a disturbance.
Imagination embodies the power of transformation. It may be accessed through obvious imagery, such as dreams, vision, and other sensory analogs, or viewed directly in symptoms, behavior patterns, emotional patterns, mental concepts, and spiritual beliefs. It is an imagistic move to see the archetypal in an image.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman differs from the traditional analytical viewpoint by stating:
"Dreams are important to the Soul--not for the message the ego takes from them, not for the recovered memories or the revelations; what does seem to matter to the soul is the nightly encounter with a plurality of shades in an underworld...the freeing of the soul from its identity with the ego and the waking state...What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is--the nature of psychic reality; not I, but we...not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place."
From the viewpoint of narrative, self understanding is that healing fiction which individuates a life into death. But from the imaginal view self-understanding takes place in the timeless; it never was in time so is interminable, revelatory, nonlinear, and discontinuous.
Image is Soul
This is psychology rooted not in science but in aesthetics and imagination. By taking everything as poetry, Hillman frees consciousness from its thin hard crust of literalism to reveal the depth of experience. The soul, he says, turns events into experience. But it is image that is experienced, not literalism.
The imaginal process is our primary experience and it permeates and conditions all facets of human life. Image must be treated phenomenologically rather than interpreted. During experiential psychotherapy, the sensory-motor cortex system is influenced through imagination. Psyche affects substance at the most fundamental level, through chaotic neural activity.
Soul is not in us; we are in soul. Being-in-soul requires being in a body too, but this body is built of soul stuff; it is a "breath body." Fantasy images are this stuff, this "subtle body." The key to the entire psychological opus...is body-building via imagination. This body building is a creative act of fantasy. Within it, the many do not become one but become psychic material.
The world is ensouled as is the world of our actual experience. It emphasizes the uniqueness of an individual’s character, 'genius', or 'angel.' It bears on such questions as, 'Why can't we see what is there to be seen?,' and 'how do we remember what we know?'
Archetypal psychology is a relational approach. Eccentricity, not centering, is the basic idea. Psychic presence itself can supersede and inform the therapeutic dyad. Hillman's theory supports 'falling apart' in the alchemical sense of 'Solve et Coagula.'
Hillman also recognized the experiential value in the dynamic vitality of usually submerged unconscious archetypal aspects, not necessarily to ‘raise them to conscious’ habitation but to explore the dynamics of their own field of influence within the depth levels. Each archetypal mode or energy complex has Its own nature and can be an ally or strength — or an impediment if repressed.
Hillman is a self-described “renegade psychologist” and is both a social critic and revisionist of depth psychology. Hillman defines individuation as the imagination "to live one's oddity" (1983: 161) but not as a goal with benchmarks and milestones, since it is unique and co-temporaneous. Hillman rejected the idea of individuation as to workmanlike, too human. He felt we should embark on what he called "soul making".
Psychological faith is realizing psyche is not out to get you. AP is a radical departure viewing therapy as myth. Creative ideas (logos) populate us like living beings, psychically active right now in the world. Our uncertainty itself can be our guide through the labyrinth of on-going open inquiry. It follows Vico’s notion of work as imaginative ingenuity.
Sometimes we have to dig our own passages through archaic material to mine psychological ore and to find the living waters of that underground stream that may elude us. How do we actually perceive our dynamic experience in motion -- a moving shape-shifting target?
Soul Practices
Offshoots of Archetypal Psychology and 'soul-making' practices -- rich modes of imagination and metaphor -- include 1) Archetypal alchemy, which embodies the archetypal healing process in the crucible, retort, and still.
Alchemy searches for treasure beneath the surfaces of things. The unconscious is chaos, the prima materia of the Great Work. The alchemical vessel is a space that performs the function of transformation. It is both an imaginal space and a physical space. Distillation brings out the creative in us.
Thomas Moore writes, “It takes a special frame of mind, a particular archetypal viewpoint…to enter the alchemical massa confusa." Without a proper vessel, none of the processes of alchemy can be accomplished. There must be a container in order to differentiate the various substances from the massa confusa. Ginette Paris says alchemical finesse is developing an "awareness of what substance is needed, when (timing), and with what force (intensity)."
She speaks of alchemy in the process of psychic maturation. Combining archetypal modes or ‘guises’ normally happens unconsciously, but as an “alchemical” practice, we can choose consciously to enlist and combine specific archetypal elements in order to facilitate a specific objective.
2) Archetypal astrology, the connection between the changing positions of the planets in the solar system and archetypal patterns in human experience. Astrology is an area of thought that, like alchemy and Gnosticism, of tremendous interest to Jung himself. The basic assumption is that the inner world of the psyche and the outer, external cosmos are deeply connected and related in an inner-outer, psyche-cosmos correspondence,
Psychic experience is more like primordial or 'first sight,' perception with a clear imaginal aspect, than second sight, which tries to connect dream or waking impressions with the literal world.
Rather than ascensionist achievement, transpersonal spiritual or integrative theories, emphasis is on descent and the chthonic realm, over metaphysical or trancendental idealism or escapism to heights. The ascending position moves consciousness from the world to the transcendental world, while the descending moves consciousness towards a greater connection with other people, nature and the dynamic ground.
Descenders argue that “transformation is to be sought through greater connection to the world of nature, to other people, the body, the feminine, or the dynamic ground” (Daniels, 2005, p. 27) We recover lost or 'split off' aspects of ourselves, somehow jettisoned in the process of coming into being.
Real imagination constitutes culture as acts of psyche. It is not regressive because it always occurs in the moment - now. Mythic reflection focuses on the resonance among myths. It takes us into the mythic imagination.
Fantasy is direct expression of the psyche. It doesn't lead to a goal, healing, or salvation. Archetypal alchemy is not a goal-seeking path of salvation but expression of a background of psychological moods, not developmental stages. Alchemy opens up richness of soul.
Soul is not the meaning or interpretation of life, but the imagination of life, not crystallized symbolism but living images that continuously flow forth. An archetypal approach is the sort of thing that once you see it (notice) you can't unsee it, like Magic Eye pictures, or fractal reiterations of archetypal events. The imaginal core spins on inexorably as we go about ordinary life...whether we pay attention, engage it, express it, or not -- it still in-forms us.
Soul is not centering but eccentricity without excessiveness. It deepens our experience of life through our struggles and difficulties -- death, disease, fate, destruction, corruption, pollution, lying cheating, fatedness, cunning. There is a symptomatolgy that allows us to 'see through' cultural imagination.
We are creatures of longing. Pothos is the unfulfilled yearning for the beyond -- the reflection, desire, longing, and unconscious memory of the gods and goddesses. Hillman suggests restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning are daimonic feelings.
In “Pothos: the Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus,” Loose Ends, Hillman describes pothos as “the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit,” that is “the longing towards the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible.” The soul serves in the temple of beauty, a stimulus to the deepening of soul's experience.
Archetypal psychology locates psyche through the de-literalization of reality, invoking a metaphorical viewing of life through our mythology. It relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Archetypal alchemy ebodies the archetypal healing process.
Psyche is constantly sending us images. Jung suggested that the more limited our field of consciousness is "the more numerous the psychic contents which meet [us] as quasi-external apparitions, either in the form of spirits, or as magical potencies projected upon living people (magicians, witches, etc.). . . where this happens, even trees and stones talk." (Jung, CW7:295)
Archetypal psychology highlights our affinity for animation, personifications, or archetypes. Archetypal figures in myths influence our lives. A ‘plurality of archetypes’ constitute our psyche. Our unconscious expresses itself through primordial images and mythological motifs or, symbolic images and those from ancient myths.
Recovering the Soul
"Only a few souls will and have been called to muster the courage to explore such a region that stretches both horizontally across the landscape of history and downward mythically to the depths of pathology and afflictions. Grand courage must be part of one’s cargo in order to witness fully, without flinching, the soul’s enormous motions. In one of his memorable insights, James affirms that “the soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions” (71). Few have understood both the voice as well as the value of our infections and wounds as has
he." (Slattery, Poetics of Soul)
Our mortality, complications, and failures are the very things that spur us beyond shock (overwhelming stress), trauma (physical or moral injury or damage), and obsession (stuckness; fixation). Shock dissociates us from self and disconnects us from objects and others in the world. We are seized and plummet downward into a dark, isolated, and silent place.
In distress, explosions of imagery propel us toward symbolic and imaginary places, bombarding us with hyper-activated material. Disintegration is a breakdown between structural stability and life instinct. We react to formlessness or chaos with terror and amazement, provoking fantasies and myths of our own death and those of others.
For example, if our own relationship with the world crumbles, we fantasize about the eschatological 'end of the world,' a projection of global external catastrophe that mirrors our helplessness that exceeds our capacity. We are bathed in epistemological metaphors with archetypal and healing cores, if we but listen to their voices.
Where we minimize, rationalize, or cleave to the positive and light only, we need to acknowledge our dark unspiritual impulses and intentions, our grandiosity, and our dualistic polarized thinking. Hillman names "our endemic national disease: the addiction to innocence, to not knowing life's darkness, and not wanting to know, either." But, down in the morass, in the mud and rocks and blood and carnage is where the treasure lies concealed.
We are guided by galvanizing self-discovery: intuition, transformational experiences, tacit knowledge, and educational philosophy based on sound research, personal experience and reflection. When we cannot guide ourselves toward breakthrough, something 'other' arises within us. Getting thoughts down or expressive arts moves emotions out.
Relaxation of repression allows the upward thrust of the traumatic fixation to rise into consciousness. The more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined to the concepts we are capable of forming. When language falters we dive into silence, speechless and unknowing in that radiant darkness beyond intellect.
"[T]he focal point of consciousness of the observer is the bridge that connects the ultimate being of the void to the becomings of the world. The nature of life in the world can then be understood as about becoming, while the ultimate nature of death can be understood as the final transition from becoming and the differentiation of consciousness to nondifferentiation and ultimate being. This premise also tells us that death is the end of an illusion. The illusion that ultimately comes to an end is not only the illusion of life in the world, but also the illusion of separation." (James Kowall)
Archetypal Dimensions
From his earliest books, The Myth of Analysis, Re-Visioning Psychology, and The Dream and the Underworld to later work like The Soul's Code, Hillman sought “a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness” (Hillman, quoted in Carey 2011).
Archetypal psychology has criticized the main schools of psychological thought (such as behaviorism, humanism, or cognitive psychology). It accuses them of reductionism by adopting the philosophy/praxis of the natural sciences and being “psychologies with no psyche”.
For Hillman, the psyche manifests itself through imagination and metaphors: “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny (…) It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.”
We speak symbolically of “gods” to refer to the “plurality of archetypes“. Archetypal psychology bases its therapeutic proposal on the exploration of images rather than on their explanation. It talks about being aware and attentive to these images until they’re as clear as they can be and contemplating them carefully until our observation creates a meaning.
This is the context of Hillman's therapeutic process called “the creation of the soul.” “Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.” (Hillman)
Poetry in Motion
In his powerful series of lectures on the feeling function, Hillman (1971) claimed that this function “has lain like a buried continent in the collective psyche” (p. 113). Both Hillman and Jung himself seem to suggest that poetry may be a means to excavate the remains of a function long ago lost from society, to re-birth it—a way of tending to what has been unattended to, to bring the feeling function back out into the world in a meaningful way.
It is essential to understand that each of the four functions (sensing, intuiting, thinking, and feeling) is a function of consciousness, and an “individual adapts and orients himself chiefly by means of his most differentiated function” (Jung, 1971, para. 556).
However, all of us contain aspects of all four functions, and much of our path of individuation is seeking balance and wholeness within the psyche, which includes an integration of the various psychological types. The functions “belong to the development of the conscious personality, forming part of the ego, its consistency, its habits, unity and memory, its characteristic way of performing” (Hillman, 1971, p. 113).
It is easy, as Hillman suggested, to confuse feeling contents (emotions, anger, love, etc.) with the feeling function. The feeling function is the part of us that relates, makes judgments, connects, denies, etc. It can feel, appreciate and relate to things that aren’t only feelings; it can relate to thoughts, intuitions, etc. The feelings, however, are the contents, themselves. “One can have feelings without being able to do much with them, without being able to function feelingly” (Hillman, 1971, p. 105). Feeling is a values-based approach. “It determines what something is worth. Feeling is aware of the impact of its choices” (Haas & Hunziker, 2006, p. 21).
In his book, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman (1975) stated that, “The push of progress has left corpses in its wake” (p. 11). This push, itself, seems to be void of the feeling function, void of “the impact of its choices,” with devastation all around us. One of these corpses, I would claim, is pregnant language—language that relates us to the depths within and the world around us, language that carries life, pregnant with human potential for feeling and relating to ourselves, to our environment, and to the other. Concrete and particular single-meaning terms are valued." San Miniato al Monte, Firenze
Words have lost their magic. “We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people” (Hillman, 1975, p. 9). Words as angels. And no one works more with these angels than a poet.
Jung wrote about the poet’s ability, through the creative impulse and a symbolic sensibility, to access deeper layers of existence. There is something that “seizes” us in creativity, that builds a bridge to connect us to a deep pool that all of mankind shares.
Creativity for Jung often meant diving into the collective psyche and having a primordial experience. To understand a creative work, he suggested, we must relate to it and allow it to shape us as it shaped the artist:
"Then we also understand the nature of his primordial experience. He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate his feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole." (Jung, 1966, para. 161)
Archetypal psychology moves between a phenomenology that returns us to the lived experience of an event and an imaginal mythology that
seeks primarily through afflictions the movement of the soul to a fuller awareness of itself. It rejects all attempts to interpret or understand neuroses, or other expression of the unconscious, like dreams.
The image should be confronted and experienced simply as it is; any attempt to do otherwise kills it. A part of this was his passionate advocacy of the importance of art for it's own sake. Hillman felt that the importance of art was in its value as art; as something which moved the soul.
Hillman writes about dreams and yet refuses to make meaning of them; rather, he encourages us to stay with the image. For Hillman, ‘the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogues, in images, that’s its primary language’ (Lament of the Dead p.81). We move away from heroic curing of illness to an intense focus on (honoring) symptoms. Psychologizing is “to revert its vision to poetic principles and polymorphic Gods... of ensouling the nonhuman” (ix).
He resisted the ‘over-spiritualization’ of the psyche (up and out). He advocated a ‘third path’ between reductionism and idealism, theology and science, from which he challenged scientific and medical models of psychology, especially psychopathology.
The experience of the raw unconscious underworld is overwhelming yet the descent must be made. The soul is within, below, buried deep in self as within earth itself. This is the archetypal sleep world of Hades, Hypnos, and Thanatos. The Plutonic is a grave energy. Here death is meant as a metaphor, not as the literal, physical event.
Archetypal psychology requires an image with which to work. The term soul-making is a metaphor. The word 'metaphor' combines two Greek words - Meta - above and Phero - to carry. It is an image or phrase that carries us above the literal sensory realm into the realm of invisible imagination.
Like myth, metaphor enlists the truth of imagination over the truth of literalism. The “dayworld” notions that are put to sleep or that die include, Hillman tells us in another context, “naïve realism, naturalism and literal understanding.”
This means the death of the notion that things appear to the soul in the same way that they appear in everyday contexts, that soul understands things in the same way that our egos do. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies.
In A Blue Fire and Healing Fiction, James Hillman has much to say about the overweening ego and its Faustian pursuit of manic psychic growth. When applied as a sort of prescription, he considers it to be self-aggrandizement, a hubris with a relentless drive to be shunned and avoided for a more soulful, fundamentally imagistic poetic approach.
He cautions that the maxim originally meant, "Know that you are but human, not divine." If we take a person, even ourselves, as a god and venerate them, then all possibility of illumination vanishes. Eliminating belief and conditioning ideologies opens us to images as they present themselves phenomenologically.
The “dayworld” notions that are put to sleep or that die include, “naïve realism, naturalism and literal understanding.” This means the death of the notion that things appear to the soul in the same way that they appear in everyday contexts, that soul understands things in the same way that our egos do.
Hillman's archetypal psychology de-emphasizes identity and deliteralizes the ego. It focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archetypes, the "deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves in the world" (1975, p. xix).
To reach soul, says Hillman (D&U), we must put aside the “shoulds” and “have-tos” of our everyday life, which is imaged as the dayworld or the upperworld. The dreamworld is the realm of Hades. We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemical inquiry.
We must not hide, but rather be open to all aspects of being. In sublime relaxation, shadow issues can emerge, some even hidden by our nondual language and cliches. All is grist for death’s mill. In archetypal psychology, soul remains close to death -- disease, disorder, collapse. We die to the literal and concrete world of the senses for the sake of soul.
Hillman wanted to free the psyche from unconscious assumptions about soul. He often decried the modern world's lack of soul, drawing upon medieval, classical, antique, and renaissance sources with whose insights soul might be re-invigorated. While the modern world is characterized by rampant materialism/literalism, there is, it seems, an undercurrent of soul in popular culture and counter cultures.
Our primry rhetoric is myth, understood as metaphor. We recognize events against their mythic background. Archetypal psychology engages the deepest needs of our souls: what is it soul requires? Soul makes meaning possible and transforms events into experiences. Hillman makes ancient myth and alchemy relevant today and encourages the stirring of the soul, not numbing, tuning out, or transcending the world.
Hillman (1975) wrote that archetypal psychology is a psychology of perspective (p. xvi) and it encourages a special sort of vision—a metaphorical, mythic vision that generates universal meaning and insight. This sort of I-sight opens “the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection” (Hillman, RVP, 2013, p. 28).
It leads us to that mode of perception “which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic and metaphorical” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvi). Myths are the I-sight of the archetypal perspective, “they open” (Hillman, 2013, p. 28) vistas of imaginative meaning, just as the lens of a camera opens to allow more possibilities in the total composition.
Soul-making involves simple aesthetic satisfaction and delights in images. Instead of the Jungian focus on moral and spiritual development that produces individuation, Hillman argues that linking amplification of fantasy images with inner iconography produces an aesthetic satisfaction that, in and of itself, is a soul-making process.
Hillman, along with his followers, claims to have "shifted the focus of Jung's psychology from individuation to 'soul-making.''' How do we "make soul"? What exactly is this soul that is being made? Archetypal psychologists prefer to elaborate on the soul's manifestations rather than on what it is. Soul has to do with ambiguity, multiplicity, genuineness, and depth.
"That's why it's "archetypal" psychology. I am talking about action, a movement, a process -- not about a set of fixed principles. The origins matter nothing to me." Hillman insists on using the “as-if ”prefix to remind us that the certainty of every idea, every belief, every concept, everything that is immediately present to us in constituting our world, is metaphorical in nature (RV, p. 157). By “sticking to the image” through metaphorical analogy.
Archetypal psychology, emphasizes the poetic basis of mind, and the revelation of soul through the cultivation of the imagination. From a practical clinical standpoint, the aim of archetypal psychology is “the development of a sense of soul…and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
According to Hillman, it is the rapturous beholding of beauty in manifest images, or the aesthetic response of the heart, that is essential to archetypal psychology. Beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi. These images form the basis of our consciousness.
The faith that the images presented to us are “genuinely created” (Hillman, 1992, p.5) and true theophanic beings distinguishes the aesthetic response from mere feeling. Such soul-making happens in the taking in of an object, thereby activating its imagination “so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul.”
"Imagining offers freedom from the magic of certitude, by recognizing that beliefs begin in images and are always images too, images that have lost their wings and fallen into truths. The angelic aspect of human being is the unbounded imagination." (Hillman, Philosophical Intimations)
In this way, the things of the world are saved by the anima mundi, “by their own souls and our simple gasping at this imaginal loveliness.” In such an aesthetic response to the world lies its very salvation. Here we see the inherent ethical expression of archetypal psychology as the care of the very soul of the world.
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." Hillman)
Soul is a root metaphor, the universal background awareness. Psyche is prolific in creating order and disorder, suffering, illness and imagining life through those distorted and tortured perspectives. Soul is less like a religious concept than an idea about the nature of the imagination: "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," Hillman asserts.
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
Our quest for 'self-knowledge' is the yearning for 'soul' and the healing power of nature. Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.” (Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World)
Soul-making and imagination aren't equivalent. In metaphor, things get tangled up. All soul-making is imagining or the crafting of images, yet not all imagining is soul-making. Imagination does not always have to be used in the service of the soul or for soul-making purposes.
"...Only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
We can therefore turn to our aesthetic reflex as our guide in soul-making. We contain multitudes: Walt Whitman's poem Song of Myself, 51, features the lines, "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes."
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
"According to this point of view, a person with a very rich fantasy life may be very poor in actual value of psychological experience, and it would not be amiss to say that he has a poor or weak soul; conversely, a rich and deep soul may lead a very poor fantasy life. Alternatively, a person who has led a most active outer life and has had great success and much adventure need not necessarily be considered as psychologically rich in corresponding values: the quality and depth of his soul life may not have kept up with his outer activities." (Christou, Logos of the Soul)
A Radical Vision
The objective psyche and soul are interchangeable for Hillman. We bring more soul into life through everything present in consciousness, elaborated representationally by self-consciousness (spirit). The fundamental activity of soul is imagining into a wider reality.
He warned of the shadow and inflationary dangers of absolute monotheism. "Whenever the importance of experience is determined only by intensity, by absoluteness, by ecstatic Godlikeness or God-nearness and is self-validating, there is a risk of possession by an archetypal person and a manic inflation." RVP
soul-making, in this secular sense, can be seen as a natural consequence of differentiating and assimilating previously unconscious contents
Soul-making is about our deepest possible connection with soul, with other human and non-human beings and with the world, without hierarchical, elitist ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ thinking that takes us away from the Earth.
We enable imaginal encounters, "giving each God [and Goddess] its due over that proportion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy which calls for an archetypal background.." "The pagan Gods and Goddesses [are] restored to the psychological domain." These figures began to speak autonomously with the elegance of the mytho-poetic language of Archetypal Psychology.
Hillman observed "striking likenesses between the main themes of Neoplatonism and archetypal psychology.” Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), as founding head of the Platonic Academy, translated many Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, as well as the Hermetica, and explained theurgical practices in his Three Books on Life.. Hillman observed, “Ficino was writing, not philosophy as has always been supposed, but an archetypal
psychology.”
This revisioning drew on a vast philosophical and Neo-platonic literary tradition from ancient Greece (Plato, Plotinus, Heraclitus) through the Italian Renaissance (Bruno, Vico, Ficino) and the Romantic poets (Blake, Keats, Shelley) to Corbin's imaginal world.
“An unpredictable “luck of the draw” plays its part in who we are. In Plato this random cause was named Ananke; the formidable goddess of necessity, she defied reason and, in Plato’s myth, governed the lots our souls selected. (Hillman/SC/139)” For Hillman, the daimon is the gift of Ananke, the goddess of Necessity (p.208).
The meaning of life and the essence of our daimon become what they are as Necessity arises. The daimon surprises, and what it brings forth ranges from a minor disruption of our plans to a major shift in our life circumstances. We cannot know ahead of time, and that is what life is made of.
The notion that a daimon accompanies us in life as a “carrier of our destiny” has a long and rich history. Heraclitus, prior to Plato, stated that “a man’s daimon is his fate”, a sort of force or indwelling law which determines the course of our life.
Hillman used the daimon, the “voice of vocation”, genius, muse, or angel to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, to which we can passionately devote our life. If we choose to ignore the call, we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours:
Gods are personifications of natural forces or psychological archetypes. Hillman borrows Plotinus’ definition of beautiful and ugly: “We possess beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order” (V.8.13).
Influenced by the French Islamist and Sufi Henry Corbin, the poetics of Gaston Bachelard and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hillman argued that reality is a construct of the imagination—the stuff of myths, dreams, fantasies, multiplicity, and images.
Hillman embraced the hermetic notion of the anima mundi, world soul. The “phenomenally manifest” is real. "It is through Corbin’s idea that knowledge of an object is gained through the imagination that “the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative” (Hillman, 1983, p. 15).
Anima, as the archetype of psychic consciousness makes us aware of our areas of unconsciousness. Soul, in its relationship with spirit constantly invades the day-world consciousness with images, fears, moods, and mystery. It is elusive, paradoxical, and ambiguous. This mode of perception is conscious of its unconsciousness and can recognize the potential latent in the unknown aspect. It could be characterized as "illumined lunacy."
Alchemical psychology uses metaphors derived from ancient alchemy to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. Hillman’s work on alchemy is an important part of his overall vision and has its origins in the work of Carl Jung.
Re-visioning psychology means recovering and tending a vision of soul, a non-developmental move toward the dynamism of psyche itself, miltivalent and uncentered soul. Psyche is a unique and particular nonrational frame of reference.
Hillman's key notions include “Personifying or Imaging Things”; “Pathologizing or Falling Apart”; “Psychologizing or Seeing Through”; and “Dehumanizing or Soul-making.” Archetypes acquire meaning through psychologizing, "soul's reflection of its nature, structure, and purpose."
Psychologizing involves seeing behind and through things, rather than polarizing, literalizing, or creating fixed and final heroic end points. Psychologizing returns the symptomatic and multiple gods to the palaces of human hearts. These hearts are no longer centered in the individual body but in the cosmos, Humanity is no longer in search of soul; soul is in search of humanity.
Jung’s fundamental idea that the symptom leads us forward toward soul is taken up very seriously. According to Hillman, “any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides…in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception” (1975, p. 70). In fact it is our pathology, our wounds, that provide the “Gods’ main route of access” to soul (1975, p. 186).
The irrational denotes the depth of depth psychology, amplified by pathologizing. Myths are intrinsic conceptual forms that help us in "the transformation of consciousness;" -- “… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22).
Archetypal psychology criticizes the current dominant cultural themes that emphasize cold technological efficiency, an empirical and positivistic scientific view of reality, economics, and fundamentalist and dogmatic ideologies that literalize the events and objects in our lives.
Hillman warned that "Literalism is sickness," that "nothing is literal, all is metaphor" for the psychologist. He envisioned the soul as the stage of an "eternal mythological experience," that transports aeons of human history to our present.
Mythopoetic Understanding
He proposed an “archetypal” or “imaginal” psychology and polytheistic imagination that would restore the mythopoetic psyche or soul to a psychological discipline that he believed was diminished by scientific and medical models.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences. The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. The internal/external metaphor is foundational.
Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Influenced by the French Islamist and Sufi Henry Corbin, the poetics of Gaston Bachelard and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hillman argued that reality is a construct of the imagination—the stuff of myths, dreams, fantasies, multiplicity, and images.
If dreams are anything, they are liminal. A liminal space is a blurry boundary zone between two established and clear spatial areas, and a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between two segments of time. Liminality collapses categories. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. It is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
Most cultures have special rituals, customs, or markers to indicate the transitional nature of such liminal spaces or liminal times. Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities.
Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions. We learn to see and embrace these moments, knowing that a birth of some sort is about to happen, but as with birth there may be discomfort and waiting. This is the time between birth and death, life passages, the time between wounding and healing. Liminality means learning to live with tension and pain and even the boredom of waiting -- contentment in tension.
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous or transpersonal phenomenon. Liminal spaces are where the boundaries become thin, as described in "second sight" -- edgy places, in the sense of forefront, excitable, and provocative. Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Liminality is ambiguous, sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. Liminal time is the moment when something changes from one state to another. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity.”
Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity, that abyss. Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible.
Henry Corbin speaks of the heart as a sacred organ of perception in Sufi thought. The heart is an organ of theophanic perception.” That is, “of the perception through which the encounter between Heaven and Earth” [takes place]; A “mid-zone.”
The heart is the sacred organ of perception which allows us to perceive the middle world between heaven and earth. This mid-zone is the liminal, the borderlands, where the eternal meets the temporal, the finite meets the infinite, freedom meets necessity.
With this view in mind we can understand the sacred nature of the archetypal unconscious: an immanent, liminal space filled with archetypal representation which connect and interweaves the eternal and the temporal.
Hllman pays attention to language, aesthetics, and the nonlinear phases of the alchemical opus. Hillman’s powerfully evocative literary device—the “Hillman pivot” (Rowland 2017, 150)—to lead readers to discover new points of view and, in the end, create soul. His notion was that 'Every Proposition in Psychology May Be Inverted with Advantage.'
One of the greatest mysteries, Hillman believed, is the question of character and destiny. We seek common ground between poetics and psyche and memory's role in establishing authentic fictions that offer our life stories a coherence they would not have without its presence. Archetypal encounter finds its expression in all aspects of life. It is recognized as prior to and more fundamental to life than any individual psyche.
Hillman says, the underworld is the psyche, the shadowy "between," the liminal, elusive. An experience of it radically alters our experience of life. He calls the dead "the gravitational force of the psyche." We require descent into the world that is under the world. "In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead."
Another tenant of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is the interpretative method he called “seeing through.” But what do we see through to? The “as-if” quality of our lives is a central concern of a psychology that rests on reversion as one of its strongest tenets. The wounded nature of our narratives as a locus for mythmaking. (Slatterey) Feelings are more than merely personal because they belong to imaginal reality.
James Hillman revisioned the notion of the unconscious, the mystique of the nonrational, and nonsensory perception. Hillman's vision reinstates soul at the heart of psychology and identifies the process of psychologizing with soul-making. In archetypal psychology, the image is primary. The image doesn’t (primarily) represent something else.
We find the connection between this psyche/soul and the world, and a place for soul in this world. Just noticing is not enough, some encountering is needed. “…it is not enough to evoke soul and sing its praises. The job of psychology is to offer a way and find a place for soul within its own field. For this we need basic psychological ideas. “ (Re-Visioning, ix)
Archetypal Psychology models the unconscious mind as the source of healing and wholeness in the individual. It is as much or more of a non-clincal pursuit as a clinical one, applying to all areas of inquiry.
The main tenets of archetypal psychology include the primary concept of archetype, its area of interest as the image, and its vehicle as mythology that opens and grounds a world view of pluralism and polytheism. Re-visioning of the concept of the soul as psyche is foundational.
Psyche contains our raw undigested psychological material, containing the regressive needs of the soul. Soul includes life, death, divinity, love, meaning, depth and intensity -- a way of being and perceiving. Love is one of the forms that works on us.
“Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.” (Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare)
Such soul-making happens in the taking in of an object, thereby activating its imagination “so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul.” Soul-making does not 'deal with' deep problems but lets them become deeper, rather than chasing spiritual ultimates. We can stop
looking “up” for god and concepts of “ascension.”
Instead we journey through the underworld to find gods, angels, and the super celestial “within matter.” Soul cannot be harnessed or disciplined or unified at the level of archetypes or complexes. The metaphysics of spirituality can actually lead to a neglect of soul.
Archetypal Psychology directly engages the intelligences in the unconscious, that which overwhelms us. Paradoxically, the world is a scene of impossible mythic action, the suspension of certainties. Hillman advised that our own harmony with our deep self requires a journey through the interior, recognizing our purpose (character; daemon, genius), and harmonizing with the environmental world.
We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive.
"The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness." (Jung, CW 11, Para 6)
The numinous category includes psychoid, instinctual, and archetypal phenomena. Such epiphanies, and pleasant or unpleasant perceptions include gut feelings, visions, tastes, smells, vibrations, buzzing, tingles, sensations of falling or rising, etc. The emotional component comes from the right temporal region, while the explanatory narrative arises in the left hemisphere. (Persinger; Murphy)
These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them. Hillman describes a calling to descent into psychological darkness with no specific metaphysical objective. Psyche stands alone as having value and purpose apart from any metaphysical system.
Psyche is a container for the process of soul-making, the one word most associated with Hillman's archetypal psychology. The anima is that energy which inspires or motivates one to reflect upon, to deepen, contain, and connect with the soul within, others, and the surroundings.
We emphasize being over doing and the present moment over future aspirations; embrace and prioritize woundedness, humanity, and limitations over a quest for perfection, transcendence, and transformation.
Soul-making occurs every time we look more closely, more feelingly at the individuals peopling our lives and the ideas, afflictions, and ever-present prospect of death which together give day-to-day life substance. Hillman notes that containing or soul-making only occurs when we emotionally open ourselves to our own wounds and afflictions:
“Building the psychic vessel of containment, which is another way of speaking of soul-making, seems to require bleeding and leaking as its precondition. Why else go through that work unless we are driven by the despair of our unstoppered condition? The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways: as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood; from focus upon the emotional pain of a wound – its causes, parameters, cures – to its imaginal depths; from displacement of the womb onto women and ‘femininity’ to its locus in one’s own bodily rhythm.” (Senex & Puer)
“For the soul’s multiplicities need adequate archetypal containers, or—like fallen angels in a maze—they wander in anarchy. Anarchy begins when we lose the archetype, when we become an-archetypal, having no imaginative figures to contain the absurd, monstrous, and intolerable aspects of our Protean natures and our fortunes. In Proteus and Fortuna everything has a place: no shape or position is inherently inferior, moral or immoral, for the where turns and the soul’s ambiguity means that vice and virtue can no more be separated from each other than the eagle and the lamb.”—Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 203.
There are autonomous, self-organizing processes which lead to dynamic experiences of emergence...archetypal containers for our for differentiating our fragmentation. We simultaneously open to the vastness of Spirit and the beauty and depth of soul.
“Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego anima, animus. shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the fundamental fantasies that animate all life." (Moore, in Hillman, 1989)
Ibn 'Arabi described absolute imagination as a dark mist, universal presence, and comprehensive order that accepts images and representations of "beings that do not yet exist." All potentialities appear in the dark mist.
Within the imaginal landscape myths are created with their living archetypal figures of the soul. Psyche has a dual urge, aim, a desire: part base instinct and part spiritual instinct. Psyche and matter are two aspects of creativity, embodied in all actual things. It is an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious.
An emotionally toned and embodied awareness of the psyche is no longer one-sided in its approach, but found in the meaningfulness of the experience in the specific context in which it is embedded. That provides valuable information about relations to emergent phenomena -- the dynamic interplay of multiple trans-human subjectivities.
"When we talk about the appearance of archetypes as people in dreams or in imaginative spaces, then the ~persons~ of archetypes emerge, the phantasmagoria, the mythical figures, the daimones, and gods. When discussed in terms of symptoms and affect, they are discussed as the styles of suffering (paranoid, borderline, phobic). When discussed as ideas, they express the intellectual psyche. That is, they express themselves as ideas important to soul. “ A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas.” (Re-Visioning, 103) Each perspective comes with a whole pantheon of deities, sub-deities, nymphs, wrights, angels, demons, symbols, landscapes, plants, activities and modes of behavior."
"For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human."
(Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.)
Who Do We Turn To
Archetypes are core tropes. Tropes translate emotions into images. All tropes use recognizable visuals, language, and sounds to easily convey ideas. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way", derived from the verb τρέπειν (trepein), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change"...twists and turns in pathways through the major metaphors of the Epoch.
A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech, metaphors. A "trope" is a "figure of speech." In storytelling, a trope is a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand.
Tropism indicates an action done without cognitive thought. Tropism is a form of metaphorical orientation toward or away from a stimulus. "Tropism" has a proper, yet non-scientific, meaning as an innate tendency, natural inclination, or propensity to act in a certain manner towards a certain stimulus.
A tropism is a 'turning' movement in response to an environmental stimulus. In tropisms, this response is dependent on the direction of the stimulus. For example, we shift from a chronic, rotting, infectious pain to a pain of mourning. "Shadow...is not washed away and gone, but becomes transparent enough for anyone to see." (Hillman, 1981a, p. 34)
Tropisms occur in three sequential steps. First, there is a sensation to a stimulus. Next, signal transduction occurs. And finally, the directional response occurs. It may come through trauma or calling. Analogously, we 'turn to' the archetype, responding to its draw.
Archetypal psychology aligns with the contemporary turn in many disciplines to revalue the subjective, relational, and intersubjective aspects of reality. It distinguishes between concepts and images. We are moved more by images than concepts.
The feminine paradigm includes reclamation of the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of bodily human with animal passions and instinctual nature, and to ‘matter’ in general -- “archetypal consciousness of the body.” In attending to psyche's voice we attend to her pathos or "suffering," Love's spiritual portion is the longing toward the unattainable, the ungraspable, that which cannot be fulfilled.
We can explore this Romantic nature philosophy as the visionary or imaginal dimension of the psyche. Something seemingly dead is also still alive. Images are concealed in emotions. The brain, in many ways, doesn't distinguish real from imaginary. Unconscious fantasies always exist and they are pressing for consciousness. Both the personal and the collective psyche, organizing images and experiences into previously unimagined
forms.
Memory shows that imaginary events can also be confused with actual events. We are also able to concentrate on the memory content that is currently the most important. The human brain can select relevant objects from a flood of information and edit out what is irrelevant.
Jungians have “elaborated implications of the mind’s connectedness: the nature of its quintessentially unboundaried character.” Interior vision is apparent only to the mind, but the mind can embrace such direct experience as 'real' intrapsychic events that don't seem imaginary or fictitious but can be regarded as valid. Dreamlike experiences may include images, beings, scenery, events, and nonverbal ineffable truth.
Intellectual vision includes access to ideas, metaphysical beings, comprehensions, sense of presence, inspirations, and phenomena. They are core elements of this distinctive approach to the psyche. Experiences of a psychic nature correspond to the reality of the cosmos. Collapse of such correspondence leads to identity.
Order and complexity can emerge at the edge of chaos. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is emergence. This complexity can extend into multiple layers, as in a series of nested emergent phenomena of the evolving network. The telos of such collective organization may be gleaned via awareness of emergent phenomena in a mind attuned to intuiting larger gestalts. (Cambray)
"Aspects of the assembled higher-order or superordinate structures appear in the mind as images. When these symbols are accessed by consciousness and experienced affectively, they often coincide with a sense of deeper purpose or function, though their fullness can barely be intuited, if perceived at all." (Cambray)
Psyche shows clear traces of its biological history, closely connected with the instinctual base. Hillman says, the repressed "returns in the psychopathologies of instinct.”
" Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind-that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard. "
Fantasy holds the potential to express both instinctual urges. The soul exits somewhere between the eternal and temporal, between the infinite and finite, and thus can be considered the mediatrix to the unknown. Let her be near and breath is yours.
MYTHOPOESIS
Critical of reductionist, materialist, and even “Jungian” approaches to depth psychology, Hillman called for an imaginal, symptomatic, ideational, and multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche, a multidimensional depth, including themes of emotionality, eros, the body and embraces these “feminine” qualities.
To Hillman (1983), “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions; it is a theater.” Human beings already made the first step by believing in Gods, in those preternatural entities that personified universal attributes, forces, and values such as the night, justice, time, and the seas. They allowed us to conceive the cosmos as a theater where those forces gave meaning to reality and life itself.
Hillman has brought the Jungian symbolic process closer to the phenomenology of the soul as it emerges through images and as an image. [Archetypal psychology is] “a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image” (ibid.). Images are a via regia to the soul. Images are self-referential. They do not require validation by reference to external events; mythopoeic imagination is the only ground they need. (Wojtkowski)
https://aras.org/sites/default/files/docs/00051Wojtkowski.pdf
Psyche is an intermediate world between the known and the Unknown. between existence and Nothingness, meaning and embodiments . The foundational idea is direct engagement with the poetic basis of mind. When we interpret poetically, as opposed to literally, we see through the physical reality or ‘fact’ that is presented. Using imagination grasps a more meaningful reality given by soul. Hillman elaborates:
"One characteristic of psychological truth . . . [is] it follows the way of the psychological mind, that twisting which allows the soul to make its fantasy images. Psychological truth is therefore a twisted truth, what the Renaissance called twofold truth. Psychological beauty is twisted beauty, where, as Plotinus and the Art of Memory recognized, the ugly has more immediate and memorable effect on the soul than does the harmonious (Whitehead sees discord as essential to the richer forms of beauty)."
Looking at the events of life metaphorically or mythologically imbues life with a poetic beauty and an imagined meaning, which archetypal psychology calls a truer meaning given by soul.
“it was the kind of moon
that I would want to
send back to my ancestors
and gift to my descendants
so they know that I too,
have been bruised...by beauty.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence
Imagination invokes a metaphor that lies beyond literal ‘reality’ and a new, equally valid and ‘real’ experience of life rich with significance arises. The poetic basis of mind, the power of the language of images, can be seen as the shift away from the literal to the metaphorical, “how does this matter?”
Hillman says the old metaphysics". . . usually allows soul a place no bigger than a pineal gland, reducing soul to subjectivism and feelings, to an epiphenomenon of material nature, an invisible form of a living body, keeping it only human, or according it permanent value only by positing a home for it in the afterworld."
If the soul, realm of imagination, binds together physical and spiritual, if the body is exiled, the soul is lost. Loss of soul is loss of meaning, loss of the sacramental dimension. Soul experiences pathos and suffering through imagination, passion, fantasy and reflection.
Meister Eckhart claimed, "There is no such thing as a spiritual journey. If there were a spiritual journey, it would be only a quarter inch long, though many miles deep. You do not have to go away outside yourself to come into real conversation with your soul and with the mysteries of the spiritual world. The eternal is at home --within you."
Psyche conjoins the relative worlds of the spiritual and physical. It expresses in the form of living images suggesting a plenum of nuance. Each image is intersubjective, only one component of broader polyvalent metaphors. They are embedded in larger and more comprehensive metaphors with many different significances.
'Imagery' itself is a polyvalent term. Meaning is determined by the context of their use. Symbolism is evocative, even confused, allusive and sometimes elusive, so open to a range of metaphors, interpretations, and literalisms. Staying with the image as given, we avoid getting bogged down in concepts, interpretations, and elaborations, even thought such metaphysics are also informed by psyche.
Polyvalent symbols have more than one meaning, evoked associations, and moods. They provide a polyvalent matrix for the fluid, ambiguous, idiosyncratic and personal. What lies behind; what is the level of existence behind this consciousness of the sacred life force?
Soul is an engulfing interactive dimension of experiencing life and ourselves, including isolated or juxtaposed fragments of imagery. It evokes depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance while clarifying ethical core values that inform and shape who we are.
Archetypal Process
Narrations, visions, and voices unfold story without end. The only need to be true for ourselves. They uncoil contours from the core of our personal myth, our soul and source. Rilke said, "My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing." We are elaborate fictions (twistings, distortions, woundedness, idealizations) that shape and are shaped by the numinous presence of our unfolding plot complexity.
The transpersonal soul is untethered to ordinary personality. Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Hillman said, ” . . . dying is an integral part of the rebirth fantasy.” When things fall apart, they open new meaning. Experience of ego obliteration is not mediated by the human self, but by the metaphysical Reality itself—the human ego is simply the recipient of obliteration. Soul-making is ultimately accomplished by the archetypal gods behind the myths which work in and on the human personality.
The move from form to the idea behind form, from the limited personal ego is the impersonal lucid ego as an expression of psyche, as infinite possibility given by soul. We must consider the way we see an image, mythic sensibility. Image is a way of seeing. The voice of soul is within our patterned behavior.
Hillman tells us, for centuries we've identified interiority with experience. "This vision not only kills things, with regard to them as death, but imprisons us in that cramped cell that is me. If the psychic reality is identified with experience, it becomes necessary for psychological logic: we have to invent an inner witness, someone who, at the center of subjectivity, has experience - and we can't imagine otherwise."
If we do not succumb to that subjectivism who is no longer literal in the experience of thinking about ourselves, we can get rid of that fictional subject, which is our "I". "His manifestation, Interiority, subjectivity [and not vague subjectivism] and psychic depth [is] all out there." Then we will discover that, "this answer immediately connects the individual soul to the soul of the world: I, I am "animated" as an animal from the soul of the World. [....] any alteration in the human psyche is in resonance with a change in the psyche of the world."
Paradox constantly reenters itself through the process of iteration -- feedback loops involving the continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has come before. Hillman’s dramatic lens shifts consciousness from mono Apollonian-scientific logic to the polyphonic, theatrical, and “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow.
The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies and multiple personifications of psyche -- gods, goddesses, demigods, and other imaginal figures. these figures begin to speak with the elegance of the mytho-poetic language of Archetypal Psychology.
Imaginal reality is uppermost in archetypal psychology. A poetic basis of mind becomes the lens through which all other ideas are to be understood. To approach myths requires embracing paradox as they renew contact with the present, instilling wisdom and inciting thought.
We encourage imaginal figures to flow forth in and through the image towards the ‘maker’ of the image - moving from the image rather than towards it. The development, recognition and appreciation of its autonomy will become manifest. The poetic, metaphoric and affective realms of the imaginal infuse ordinary life.
Myths are the resonating patterns of imagination (awareness, beliefs, fears, dreams, uncertainties, gifts, memories and creative fantasies), which is embodied in myth. Myths maintain their own autonomy and rhythm.
Events can be reinterpreted, re-imagined, and re-contextualized in different mythical currents. Like cultural phenomena, experiences can be seen through to their mythic and archetypal undercurrents.
We retrieve what we are through the poetics of depth and the shaping/forming instincts of the soul -- a fuller, deeper revealing we don't analyze, but contemplate, confront and recognize -- shadowed, illuminated, or soulfully ambivalent.
Thus, myth is given new life. Myth is the irreducible, irrefutable mode of imagining. Mythology helps us look toward myth for perception and articulation. Myth bridges cosmos, soul, and culture with multiple layers of wonder and mystery. Mythos is a porous dimension of human awareness surfacing in everyday life -- worldview.
A process of reciprocity between self and ‘other’ (image) becomes possible. This is an important point in terms of considering the ‘organism’ of psyche as being that of generator and metabolizer of image with the capacity to include and engage beyond its present parameters. A living organism.
The nature of psyche is image. As an image-making organism, the psyche spontaneously produces images from the unconscious. These images then move quite naturally towards making some sort of sense or meaning on behalf of the personality.
A simple analysis of this meaning-making process would include tracking the connecting of spontaneous images towards story, a linking of images into a cohesive narrative of sorts, which then creates a sense of continuity, as process.
We interpret these spontaneous images of course, are a myriad of emotions. These emotions are often not readily discernible, as their affective nature can tend to overwhelm as they diffuse the situation that triggered them. They can however, be traced back through the images and/or stories they are expressed through, archetypal images perhaps, which then act functionally as containers - much like a still frame that both holds and offers expression to emotions symbolically.
Hillman speaks of how “The healer is the illness and the illness is the healer”. ...“The art of healing is healing into art.” Between conscious/unconscious, visible/invisible, archetypal image/archetype per se, light/dark, illuminated/shaded, ego/shadow, Apollonian/Dionysian lies Hermes, god of communication, guide of souls to and from the Underworld. It is his role to assist in tolerating the liminal spaces that occur at points in the process of trans/formation.
"Hillman places the revelatory and ontological implications of his transformational hermeneutic firmly within the imaginal capacities of the psyche itself. To Hillman (1972), it is through engagement with archetypal material (as image), that one emerges as mystes . In this sense, Hillman’s underlying epistemological claims can be considered not only “mystical” in the classical sense, but also “gnostic,” in that he affords a revelatory and ontologically numinous dimension to the psyche’s image-generating orientation.
Articulating these claims, Hillman (1972) describes the psyche’s “reflective subjectivity, its own afflictions, pathologies, and fantasies” as the locus “where the archetype can speak individually and directly, where our psychopathology is a revelation, a gnosis” (217). This is Hillman’s own “mystical hermeneutic” par excellence and reveals his ontological assumptions about the inherent numinosity of the psyche and firmly establishes his claims within the context of a psychology as religioframework. Hillman’s telos is the transformation of consciousness itself. His interest is not in novel or adaptive therapeutic ideation alone; rather, Hillman’s depth psychological project is mystical, methodological
(i.e., hermeneutic), and gnostic .
at its core. https://www.academia.edu/29810474/Dionysus_in_Depth_Mystes_Madness_and_Method_in_James_Hillman_s_Re-visioning_of_Psychology
Hillman's idea is that the telos for Soul is the call of Hades. This is not to be taken as literal death, but as an experience of Soul. What to make of this mysterious statement? Hades is calling to us now, throughout our lives, not just toward the end. The objective, or goal, is always occurring now, in this present moment.
"By the call to Hades I am referring to the sense of purpose that enters whenever we talk about soul. What does it want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individuation process going? If we stare these questions in the face, of course we know where our individuation process is going—to death. This unknowable goal is the one absolutely sure event of the human condition. Hades is the unseen one and absolutely present" (Dream and the Underworld, page 31).
"Soul-as-metaphor also describes how the soul acts. It performs as does a metaphor, transposing meaning and releasing interior, buried significance. Whatever is heard with the ear of soul reverberates with under-and overtones. The perspective darkens with a deeper light. But this metaphorical perspective also kills; it brings about the death of naive realism, naturalism, and literal understanding. The relation of the soul to death - a theme running all through archetypal psychology - is thus a function of the psyche's metaphorical activity. The metaphorical mode does not speak in declarative statements or explain in clear contrasts. It delivers all things to their shadows. So its perspective defeats heroic attempts to gain a grip on phenomena. Instead, the metaphorical mode of soul is 'elusive, allusive, illusive', undermining the definition of consciousness as intentionality and its history as development." - James Hillman
“The work of soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith, the faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul… Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life. Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. Its trust is in the imagination as the only incontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt.
Soul making, as work on anima through images, offers a way of resolving the dependencies of transference. For it is not the therapist or any actual person whatever who is the keeper of my soul beyond all betrayals, but the archetypal persons of the Gods to whom the anima acts as bridge. The shaping of her amorphous moods, sulfuric passions, bitter resentments, and bubbles of distraction into distinct personalities is the main work of therapeutic analysis or soul-making. Therefore, it works in imagination, with imagination, and for imagination. It discovers and forms a personality by disclosing and shaping the multiple soul personalities out of the primary massa confusa of arguing voices and pushing demands" -Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50
The Power of Soul
Soul means caring for the most important parts of ourselves, a willingness to take risks and do something different. Soul is mystifying, seductive and compelling. We can have faith in the reality of soul and devotion to its self-revealing panoply of phenomena. We can convert understanding into the vitality and inspiration of the emotions and actions. Marcilio Ficino described soul as "the power of life, of understanding, and of desiring."
The soul's deepest longings, from the ill-conceived to the harrowing and profound, embody the search for self and truth. We aren't detached observers. We can only observe a psychological phenomenon of the soul by attachment, involvement, and direct experience. We are not containers of the life of the soul but are contained by it.
The living truth of self is the conscious shock that moves us from complacency to symbolic resonance. Understanding in an instant of compassionate comprehension, we 'get it.' Momentarily awakened by inner transformation we compare our habitual awareness to our potential for conscious presence.
Only by giving up our defenses can we give up the past and future to be fully present. Soul seeks falling apart as much or more than it seeks integration. Every moment that opens new territory demands the death of our old self, which has already been seized down and permanently claimed by the underworld of the past, constantly slipping away into invisibility.
Soul produces our crises, resolutions, and transformations. Our therapies refer to the care of that continuously dying self. As we die, new images come vividly to life. They carry, support, and hold us in our infirmities. Such suffering of the inside meaning funds our capacity for endurance in the deluge of the flow of feelings. When our aspirational wings are burnt, psyche no longer soars, but is blown away, compelled to stick with the issues at hand.
We lean with mystic sorrow on soul as our transpersonal emotional partner. Psyche is not unconscious; rather, we are largely unconscious of psyche that is wrapped all around and permeating us. We ourselves, our consciousness, our lives, our bodies, can all be quite unconscious. Where psyche is, there is image, and we are in it, with our perpetual imaginings. We don't make images conscious; they make us more conscious.
That immediacy keeps us real, and makes us different. It lets us know where we are and what we are doing there, watching the morphological phenomena unfolding, doing something in relationship to this actual unfolding process. Direct experience is gnosis, a synthesizing of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, a multi-dimensional conceptual system.
Soul is not a surface-dweller, and its dreamy journey may be disjointed, confusing, and full of Mystery reflected in our essential Being. It raises honest questions close to the human heart of love, destiny, faith, truth, and hope. We hope that light may be extended unto us in our darkness, all they down to the chthonic depths, with its vortices of universal wave patterns.
Soul calls us to be different, not the same, and never to surrender that poetical desire and sustaining practice. Though influenced, our transmutations are not imitations. We cleave to the privilege of our pathos, our soulful yet eloquent suffering beyond pity -- the sustenance of dreams, imagination, and understanding.
Constant Craving
Soul craves depth unfolding through highly engaged interactions in a complex context, the inherent meaning of being, the immanence of the sacred in the capacity for spiritual experience. Wonder and astonishment are part of taking it to heart, interiorizing it, becoming intimate with it.
Such connection, intimacy, meaning, and destiny are revealed in truth, beauty, wisdom, love, our imaginations, in our dreams. They reflect our humanity and embeddedness in the natural world, expressing true nature through multiple perspectives of the imaginal capacity.
Soul is central to inquiry and practice. Our approach is living through being and a practice of reflecting domains of the unknown simply for the sake of tending the soul of the world. We are dedicated to the individual soul being in conscious connection with the soul of all things, sourced in a deep ground of being in sacred partnership among all forms of life.
Most of the time we don't realize a fraction of what is happening to us, personally, relationally, or politically. We tend to focus on intentions rather than real effects. Even if we manage to orchestrate a minor mental retreat, nothing of significance turns up. Can we overcome our anthropomorphic myopia? The imaginal perspective means seeing through the visible content to the invisibles of imagination.
As in art, in the optic metaphor, whatever lies within the small or large context of depth of field is in focus, which blurs currently irrelevant objects and thus guides the viewer’s attention towards the relevant, the zone of acceptable sharpness.
All theories have implicit philosophical views to bring reality into focus. The same events, including the flow of life, reveal different facets under different conceptual foci. The depicted information has no inherent spatial structure in visualization space. What provides vision for our focus, including the orientation that the world itself is ensouled?
Cosmology is a metaphor for some of our most intimate psychological realities. The only inquiry more archetypal and mythological than asking how the universe began, how it evolves and what is its final state, is asking the same questions about ourselves.
Cosmology is a metaphor for the relationship between the conscious / unconscious aspects of the human psyche. The arena of images, known content, feelings, thoughts and desires is only a fraction of the total psyche. Luminous galaxies are enfolded in a much larger, invisible component like the unconscious that dominates psychological evolution, though often reacting to consciousness.
Elemental psychic processes are disclosed by introspection. To know ourselves, we turn to and tend to our psychic images. We adopt a soulful point of view in our individual soul-searching or attempts at self-understanding. All primordial creative acts manifest self-revealing luminous imagination.
Unconscious psychic processes are instinctive. Archetypal longing pulls us into the process, including learning how to ‘interpret’ the world, both internally and externally. The solution for coping with our destiny is carried on the wings of suffering, affliction, and disappointment through anticipation and reflection, psycho-spiritual deepening and healing.
The exact nature of the inner journey remains ambiguous, tumultuous, arcane, and emotionally draining. Yet the prescriptive solutions of religions tend to be flawed ideologies or ossified superstitions rather than a solution space. How can we make more accurate and informed decisions at the many crossroads we stumble across in our inner pilgrimage? In what useful domains can we formulate multi-dimensional views?
Despite our immense curiosity and self-absorption, a working knowledge of our own psyches seems to elude us because we lack introspection and reflection. We must develop a psychic GPS of discernment, ethical observances, and situational awareness. Otherwise, we remain clumsy victims of our own self-defeating and self-destructive immaturities and tragedies, unaware of our own precarious grasp on reality. We can perhaps aspire toward, but never presume to know the psyche in its completeness.
Mistaking self-delusion for 'awakening,' our psychological capabilities remain latent. There is a lot about our own minds, personally and collectively, we know absolutely nothing about. We may find some parts of the unconscious don't have to always remain unconscious. They emerge in non-mundane experiences. Psyche's mediating power guards the threshold of the metaphysical.
But, not many truly want to watch and analyze their own dissociative or dysfunctional behaviors. Most prefer doping up and numbing out to any illuminating view of our roadblocks or personal blind spots. Those who are “good at” thinking tend to be bad at feeling and vice-versa. The inferior function is the hardest to understand and describe.
Repressed energy “leaks" into the conscious mind as inexplicable urges, compulsions, and idiosyncratic ideas, especially under stress. The inferior function is reactive and a distorted view of reality and the weaknesses or destructive side of that function will manifest.
Symbolic, metaphorical, and metaphysical ideas are externalized, concretized, and taken literally for a mistaken reality. Social bonding creates belief subcultures, wrongly validates and compounds errors created by those 'pesky facts', so we get 'flat earthers' and other misbegotten 'nutty' kitchen-sink theories. Rather than insight, they are fascinated, possessed or gripped by ideas, confirmation bias, and spiritual by-pass (using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs).
"I think the soul wants to be made. After all, why so much worry over our dreams, our poems, and our paintings, getting them right, making them “work,” fussing over how they fit into our lives, other lives, the world. Isn’t the psyche itself causing this obsessiveness, urging us to articulate our images for its sake, as if the psyche desires to fit in somewhere, find a context for its continuous production of fantasies, thoughts, feelings, and baroque inventions? The psyche seems to want the mind to suppose and speculate, the hands to craft, and so it gives with each image some significant detail to catch our notice and draw us in. And that’s the job of our art, whether artists, scientists, or therapists— to pick up on the significant detail.
But now I better conclude: By context I mean the psychological entanglement within a mood and scene. I could call this entanglement “resonance,” “implication,” or “depth.” Whatever the term, I mean something more than just tying bits of mood and parts of scene or even their full interrelation as a unity. Entangled in an image is its implication whose depth amplifies into the wide world. Hidden, obscure, suggested only, nonetheless these implications suppose that the ultimate context of an image is the anima mundi, the soul of the world."
(James Hillman, From Types to Images)
Path of Soul
Jenna Lilla
http://box5415.temp.domains/~sacreeh5/2014/01/30/path-of-soul/#more-16465
The word ‘psychology’ is rooted in the word psyche. Psyche is from Greek psykhe “the soul, mind, spirit; breath.” It is unfortunate that the field of psychology has moved away from its glorious roots, loosing contact with the soul. Depth psychologist, James Hillman understand this. He calls on us to “speak for the soul” (p. 161). In doing so he is aware of the difficulty of such a tasks.
According to Hillman, psychopathology rejects the soul and the soul’s language, “calling it pejorative names” (p.161). In Myth of Analysis, James Hillman says that “Freud’s Psychology, and Jung’s, and analysis itself all arise from the ontological ground of pathological imagination” (1972, p. 172). How can psychology speak for the soul if the soul’s language is seen as pathological?
From the perspective of enlightenment spirituality, it is the fantasy relationship of the ego toward the soul that may become pathological. The soul is never pathological. Meister Eckhart said that the “soul is an image of God” (cited in Jung, CW 5 para. 424). The soul’s instincts and aims are fundamentally linked to the God image. In archetypal terms the soul holds an “intermediate position” within the inner psychic world (CW5, para. 425). She is the “mediatrix to the eternally unknowable” (Hillman, p.133). The soul guides us beyond what is known into the unknown.
The soul guides us on a journey into the great mystery of life. By opening to the soul we open to the transformational potential of being.the true nature of Self. Jung understood that the transformations of the soul are teleological. The word teleological comes from Latin word télos, meaning the ‘consummated goal.‘ The soul ask us to trust in life. Life offers transformations in the field of being, toward a ‘consummated goal.‘ The soul’s transformations are expressed through acts of creative imagination: through our narrations, through our dreams and personal storytelling.
Jung writes: “symbols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a “lower” into a “higher” form… “It is able to do this because of the numen, the specific energy stored up in the archetype” (Cw5, para. 344).
The soul is always in relation to inner numinous forms which, if respected, guide the soul in psychical development. Dreams, imagination, narrations offer access to this transformational potential.
Opening to our the transformational potential of the soul, we may realize the power of ‘creative imagination.’ Henry Corbin speaks of “the world of the Image, the mundus imaginalis,” focusing on the symbolic perspective of the soul. Corbin says:
It is “a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition. This faculty is the imaginative power, the one we must avoid confusing with the imagination that modern man identifies with “fantasy” and that, according to him, produces only the ‘imaginary.’”
Corbin delineates an imaginal sphere separate from an egoic fantasy sphere. The mundus imaginalis is the realm of the soul, of spirit, of God. All fantasy is egoic fantasy, fundamentally in relationship to egoic desires, desires in and of the material (object) world. The mundus imaginalis transcends such egoic desires.
References:
Jenna Lilla
http://box5415.temp.domains/~sacreeh5/2014/01/30/path-of-soul/#more-16465
The word ‘psychology’ is rooted in the word psyche. Psyche is from Greek psykhe “the soul, mind, spirit; breath.” It is unfortunate that the field of psychology has moved away from its glorious roots, loosing contact with the soul. Depth psychologist, James Hillman understand this. He calls on us to “speak for the soul” (p. 161). In doing so he is aware of the difficulty of such a tasks.
According to Hillman, psychopathology rejects the soul and the soul’s language, “calling it pejorative names” (p.161). In Myth of Analysis, James Hillman says that “Freud’s Psychology, and Jung’s, and analysis itself all arise from the ontological ground of pathological imagination” (1972, p. 172). How can psychology speak for the soul if the soul’s language is seen as pathological?
From the perspective of enlightenment spirituality, it is the fantasy relationship of the ego toward the soul that may become pathological. The soul is never pathological. Meister Eckhart said that the “soul is an image of God” (cited in Jung, CW 5 para. 424). The soul’s instincts and aims are fundamentally linked to the God image. In archetypal terms the soul holds an “intermediate position” within the inner psychic world (CW5, para. 425). She is the “mediatrix to the eternally unknowable” (Hillman, p.133). The soul guides us beyond what is known into the unknown.
The soul guides us on a journey into the great mystery of life. By opening to the soul we open to the transformational potential of being.the true nature of Self. Jung understood that the transformations of the soul are teleological. The word teleological comes from Latin word télos, meaning the ‘consummated goal.‘ The soul ask us to trust in life. Life offers transformations in the field of being, toward a ‘consummated goal.‘ The soul’s transformations are expressed through acts of creative imagination: through our narrations, through our dreams and personal storytelling.
Jung writes: “symbols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a “lower” into a “higher” form… “It is able to do this because of the numen, the specific energy stored up in the archetype” (Cw5, para. 344).
The soul is always in relation to inner numinous forms which, if respected, guide the soul in psychical development. Dreams, imagination, narrations offer access to this transformational potential.
Opening to our the transformational potential of the soul, we may realize the power of ‘creative imagination.’ Henry Corbin speaks of “the world of the Image, the mundus imaginalis,” focusing on the symbolic perspective of the soul. Corbin says:
It is “a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition. This faculty is the imaginative power, the one we must avoid confusing with the imagination that modern man identifies with “fantasy” and that, according to him, produces only the ‘imaginary.’”
Corbin delineates an imaginal sphere separate from an egoic fantasy sphere. The mundus imaginalis is the realm of the soul, of spirit, of God. All fantasy is egoic fantasy, fundamentally in relationship to egoic desires, desires in and of the material (object) world. The mundus imaginalis transcends such egoic desires.
References:
- Symbols of Transformation(Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 5)
- Myth of Analysis by James Hillman
With archetypal psychology, Hillman moved away from a dependence on the concept of a personal ego in favor of larger sources that relied on his notion of variegated identity. He proposed a profusion of mythical images that emerge under the rubric of "soul." Soul stands as an appellation indicating a deepening of psychic events, such as when dreams, chaos, and "pathologizing" (the struggles of imagination) are most experienced. For Hillman, psychology could not be taken as a separate discipline isolated from mythology, literature, art, philosophy, politics, religion, natural science, and the ordinary affairs of individuals. Hillman envisioned archetypes as processes that bear evidence to personal suffering and, in so doing, prompt the expansion of compassion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22963419
Imaginal Memory
James Hillman envisioned a new Renaissance to fill the gap in imagination that wiped out the old one from our contemporary view of the world and ourselves. The imaginative world of the soul has an objective existence. Archetypal psychology emphasizes the revelation of soul through the cultivation of the imagination.
Renaissance Neoplatonists evoked ancient thinkers in their personified images. The presence of living archetypal energies informs our lives and imagination. Image is the primary phenomenon of psychic life. The elusive personified element or presence is a phenomenon of imagination.
Hillman's gods are psychological realities, never transcendent but archetypal aspects of the psyche. He opposed soul to spirit, effectively splitting any possible image of a unified psyche or a transcendent God behind all images.
He suggests, "giving each God [and Goddess] its due over that proportion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy which calls for an archetypal background. It would accept the multiplicity of voices … without insisting upon unifying them into one figure, and accept too the dissociation process into diversity as equal in value to the coagulation process into unity. The pagan Gods and Goddesses would be restored to the psychological domain." (James Hillman, 1981. “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?” in D.L. Miller: The New Polytheism (Revised Edition). Spring Publications, p. 197)
Archetypal psychology is part of the Jungian psychology tradition, seeing every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry. The neo-romantic movement also has embraced mythology, polytheism, and imagination, though positivism and reductionism.
We learn to look, to 'see through' with the eyes of the soul. The presence of an archetype often causes a strong emotional reaction. Feelings of awe, fear, and trembling arise with such Mysteries.
An image-based archetypal psychology is a ritual-like devotion to poetic imagination. A sense of calling amplifies our dedication to it. The term archetype is commonly used interchangeably to refer to both archetypes-as-such and archetypal images. We know them by the transformative feelings of affective experience. Separated from imagination, archetypes, instincts, and images, we lose our roots.
Numinous archetypes are archaic "ruling powers, the gods." They are not passive entities but metaphorical living presences, processes, and energetic dynamics whose universal, collective, and impersonal nature and form never changes. The living presence of the eternal images can lend the human psyche a dignity which makes it morally possible for us to stand by our own soul.
Hillman's acorn theory as a foundation of character is a worldwide myth in which we all come into the world with something to do and to be. The myth says we enter the world with a calling and a basic form that encompasses our entire destinies. Life is full of ineffable Mysteries.
This accompanying image shadowing our lives is our bearer of fate and fortune. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world, that is particular to us, which is connected to our "daimon," genius, or angel.
"Imagining offers freedom from the magic of certitude, by recognizing that beliefs begin in images and are always images too, images that have lost their wings and fallen into truths. The angelic aspect of human being is the unbounded imagination." (Hillman, Philosophical Intimations)
No experience lasts for even a micosecond, so we cannot identify with it. But we can identify with the living presences of psyche that we tend to personify for relationship and dialogue. Psyche contains all the momentary possibilities for creativity in life.
Psychic existence is recognized only by the presence of contents that are capable of consciousness. We have an instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations, the fluid subjectivity of extended mind. This symbolic or mythopoetic life precedes or accompanies all mental and intellectual differentiation.
The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. Much of what goes on today, intersectional points, and subsets of culture space can only be grasped through the mythopoetic lens that echoes through multiple dimensions. That includes our fields of intelligence: imaginal, mythic, psychic, aesthetic, spiritual, embodied, and wounded selves.
Archetypal psychology can put its idea of psychopathology into nested nutshells: "within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a God. Afflictions point to Gods; Gods reach us through afflictions" (EVP 1975).
"Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul's painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is best for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams." (Robert M. Stein, "Body & Psyche")
In this time of great uncertainty and isolation, it is important that we come together to put our current messy, chaotic situation and institutional narratives (including psychology) in perspective.
Today we do our best to live in a world going mad. We are trying so hard to escape the past we paradoxically destroy it. We destroy our past, our obsolete products, the environments and ultimately risk destroying our planet’s future. Is this blighted world our legacy to our grandchildren? Please let’s say “no” to this bleak potentiality.
It’s as if we need to give ourselves a‘ psychic vaccination’, to inoculate ourselves from this madness. This injection protects us on a contemplative or archetypal journey the foreign lands of our unconscious. The shamanic tincture allows us to safely explore the darkness and light of our own depths. Only by going through and making the darkness conscious and conscious darkness do we arrive at the light.
As Jung says, we learn to "embrace this life, in all its realness -- broken, messy, vivid, and alive." Life is a series of encounters where one confusing event after another changes unpredictably or even catastrophically what follows. We learn to embrace ambiguity. The inherently orderly nature of 'chaos', is not, needless to say, a level-one view.
"Necessity breaks into the world. If this errant cause, necessity, is the principle in errors, then let us consider error necessary, a way the soul enters the world, a way the soul gains truths that could not be encountered by reason alone. Psychological awareness rises from errors, coincidences, indefiniteness, from the chaos deeper than intelligent control (RV, pp. 159-60)
Psyche is an intense living presence, a metaphorical presence. The psyche has deep roots in much older traditions and philosophical commitments such as embodiment and spirituality that honor our relationships. We explore by slowing things down and connecting with the deeper layers of our lives. Dreams introduce us to mystery, chaos, and most importantly, death. We are ruled by emotions and instincts, not rationality.
A calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being. Even art can be research. The anima is “the chaotic urge to life”, but it is also wisdom of “a hidden purpose which seems to reflect a superior knowledge of life’s laws” (Jung, 1954a, pp.30-31).
Is there a pull into life from more sacred realms as Hillman (1989) proposed? Is the familiarity, and the intense aesthetic appeal, related to our own participation in the mystery? Could these phenomena alert us, subtly, yet powerfully, that there is something here we should take care to not miss? This time, we turn the light around on ourselves and may, furthermore, look within.
We are both more isolated and more connected by a different mode of vision, a psychological life that births the imaginal. We're between paradigms in liminal space that reflects two separate, interlinked, streams – the supra-liminal and the sub-liminal mind.
There is part of psyche that knows more than we know being rooted in a timeless dimension, a field that extends beyond the self. Jung wrote that “a psychological truth is…just as good and respectable a thing as a physical truth [because] no one knows what ‘psyche’ is, and one knows just as little how far into nature ‘psyche’ extends” (Jung, 2007).
Just below the surface of our narrow awareness, occasionally intruding above the threshold of consciousness arise moments of inspiration, dreams, reveries, apparitions and possession experiences. Hillman suggests in Re-Visioning Psychology, the invisible figures inspire, protect, guide, influence and constitute us; they do not just “target” us.
Puritanical and enlightenment era disenchantment is also a myth. The conventional perspective has one-sidedly defended reason, growth, and runaway progress to the bitter end of 'rapid-fire' progression.
The collective mask of order, control, and power has led to global nightmares and deadly risks, burning with the fierce energy of now. Life's mysteries are irrational and engaged through imagination and relationship. The necessity of chaos gives birth to new and unruly life.
We experience our own imaginal essence through the power of love (Eros) and other structures of human experience, the archai. Raw nature, fertile chaos, lies at the heart of the psyche -- the wild energies of creation. Love is a path for consciously realized life. Imaginal love plays a central role in human life that softens the heart. We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience.
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)
Shadow belongs to soul or unconscious, but the luminous darkness is an imaginal world of spirit or superconscious (Cheetham), intensification of spiritual awareness. Both can be radically altered by encountering the underworld perspective of the psyche as we mine for psychological gold in the darkness. Shakespeare had a remedy: "This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine."
Hillman tells us that “by refusing chaos...eros may also be lost” (1972, p. 99). The sign of a soulful life is its rich texture and its complexity. Eros is identification with the expressions of the creative soul. Chaos and creativity are inseparable. Since every creative act holds a death, "soul-making entails soul-destroying. (RVP. p. 37)
We are in a Renaissance of expression, metaphorical perspectives that revision world phenomena as images. It is a countermove to the sheer volume of collective image-glut that leads to the rapid evolution of collective consciousness. To see the archetypal in an image is an imagistic move with precisely embodied meaning, a mythical amplification. Safron Rossi describes the four modes of imagining:
- Dehumanizing: moving from the personal to transpersonal;
- Psychologizing: seeing through from the literal to the metaphorical;
- Pathologizing: moving an affliction into a sense of hidden purpose;
- Personifying: moving from principle to presence.
Hillman (1976) identifies archetypes with the fundamental metaphors of life and as “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning” (p. xix). We enter the realm of psyche by 'becoming' images. He suggests more than making archetypes conscious.
Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.”
Imagination becomes a meeting place between the conscious and unconscious by entering the metaphor of the archetype. Hillman describes how it takes invisible perception to perceive invisible. Invisible, inaudible, intangible psyche perceives invisible, inaudible, intangible essences through sensate intuition or intuitive sensation. (Blue Fire)
Re-mythologization of Change
"It is our task to seek art, for without seeking it we shall never learn the secrets of the world." --Paracelsus
Our soul is deepened by tending and attending to it. Soul operates through artistic being to overcome differences between the physical and symbolic. It potentiates the gamut of feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the physical. The "no-thing" of pure information becomes a structured "some-thing," through intentionality coupled with chaotic determinism (self-organized emergent order).
We can penetrate deeply into the psyche--into the vortex of the internal structuring process--through progressively de-structuring patterns of organization. The undecomposable level of chaotic consciousness is experienced as the pure, unconditioned imprint of the whole, resulting in a new primal self image and sense of relationship to the greater whole which emerges through nonunitary transformation.
In narrative the meaning emerges at the end, but an imagistic reading has sense throughout. Not the visible but the intelligible is the foundation that directs the future of creative change in sensations and perceptions, the scientific and artistic imagination, stimulating psychobiological potential.
The blindspot of science negleccts lived experience. How so we process experience? Contemporary imaginary and fantasy promote a novel 'investigation of future reality' into anything that is not materially visible both inside and outside the perceptual and sensory world traditionally conceived.
We live in an ensouled world with an ecological consciousness, denizens of the psychic ecosystem. A boundaryless perspective specifically highlights the complex connections between phenomena in the natural world. We suggest that the 'polypsychic' self is a sort of ecosystem in itself. The world is radically more alive than we have tended to assume in the post-modern, post-industrial Western world.
Archetypal psychology is a way to learn differently, to allow new paradigms to be envisioned, and our particular stories to emerge through new perceptions, perspectives, and meaning. Each outer presence reflects its interiority bearing witness to itself. Depth is the absolute love of an endlessly receding horizon and mystery.
Simultaneously, depth is how we are in the world, re-ensoulment, engagement with our symptoms, suffering and pathos. The images that come to us are autonomous, spontaneous, self-generating, more-than-personal as well as frustrating and maddening. Everything has its archetypal face. We are richly companioned by archetypal voices and visions.
Our response is unprecedented creativity, a process of metamorphosis in the social fabric through images of transition. Transformation requires liquefying. Our subjective imaginings and expressions ripple through the social fabric of all disciplines. This has been called the central planet-saving activity of our precarious but vital times.
Hillman considered one of the greatest of these mysteries the question of character and destiny. Another is psychic multiplicity, plurality, liminality, multiple contexts. His approach to psyche was nonliteral, aesthetic, and phenomenological. "The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body." (Hillman, RVP)
"First of all, literalness can appear in highly abstract ways. We may take abstractions literally, as truths, rules, laws. Metaphysical thinking is one such example of abstract literalness; so too is theological thinking, where the most abstract notions about divinity are taken as literal dogmas. It is for this reason that metaphysics and theology so easily become ways of avoiding psychologizing. Even at the very moment they are talking of soul they may be escaping from it into a literalness about its problems, its truth, its redemption. Whenever we say "the soul is" this or that, we have entered upon a metaphysical venture and literalized an abstraction. These metaphysical assertions about the soul may produce psychology, but not psychologizing, and as avoidances of psychologizing they are an abstract acting-out. We act out not only by running away into concrete life; we act out equally in the flight upward into the abstractions of metaphysics, higher philosophies, theologies, even mysticism. The soul loses its psychological vision in the abstract literalisms of the spirit as well as in the concrete literalisms of the body."-Revisioning Psychology, pp 136-137
In his bestseller The Soul's Code, he proposed that our calling in life is inborn and that our mission in life is to realize its imperatives -- to be something we've never been before, to attend to what's being revealed, a new collaborative sense-making.
Hillman's "acorn theory" is the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn. He linked it to the notion of a 'calling' or vocation that can mean work, but also to ways of being. The acorn theory expresses our unique being that we carry into the world and possibility space -- our experiences, imagination, memories, and expressions.
Hillman says, "Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn't have it."
Hillman drew a careful distinction between the upward impulses of striving spirit that urges us toward transcendence, and the labyrinthine downward movements of soul that "deepen events into experience."
Many myths feature characters who exhibit common symptoms of modern behavioral and mental disorders through their actions and choices. In fact, much of our society is pathological. Cure or change is not so much about illness but transformation of consciousness after undergoing a pathos or initiatory ordeal.
Archetypal psychology is more about levels of feedback, what happens when we fragment or fall apart than exhausting heroic achievement. He wanted us to remain connected to the world, to body, to others, to the living system -- the subtle, diffuse, complex soul of the world, Anima Mundi, and her cosmological aspects.
He also suggested lifting the repression on Beauty and our sensitivity to it, which may not be literal but moves beyond surface imagery into depth. Ordinary experiences and dreams can be extraordinary. Experiencing these states deeply brings knowledge and wisdom. Insightful guidance helps us remember that every moment of life is extraordinary.
Hillman links it to aesthetics and loving the image. Fragility is in the relationship between them. "Beauty is an epistemological necessity," says Hillman. "It is the way in which the Gods touch our senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life.” But which god? Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess.
James Hillman called images 'concrete particularizations.' If symbols belong to one god or another "where better to find the gods than in the things, places and animals that they inhabit, and how better to participate in them than through their concrete natural presentations." We cannot acces the mind of nature without accesing the natural mind (Blue Fire).
Art of Memory
Memory is the 'art' of the imagination. It is inherent in the being of images. Memory is a phenomenon of imagination. The nature of psyche teaches us the art of memory, allowing the images to autonomously speak for themselves.
Hillman is also interested in lifting the repression on Beauty and our sensitivity to it, which may not be literal but move beyond surface imagery. Ordinary experiences and dreams can be extraordinary. Experiencing these states deeply brings knowledge and wisdom. Insightful guidance helps us remember that every moment of life is extraordinary. Hillman links it to aesthetics and loving the image.
"Beauty is an epistemological necessity," says Hillman. "It is the way in which the Gods touch our senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life.” But which god? Neglect of beauty neglects the Goddess.
"...becoming aware " means finding out which God, to which altar, we are dedicating our lives to." (Hillman, On Devotion, p. 37)
He says, "The gift of an image is that it provides a place to watch your soul." Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, The poetic basis of mind makes communication possible between all people and all things by means of metaphors.
Imagination, memory and active engagement with the world is an unseen reality that reveals itself to those who attend and tend to it. Soul or psyche is the reflection of the world in humanity and an aware presence in the world itself. This is seeing the world as the place of imagination. Like myth and dream, all of its transformations can be seen as simultaneously present.
A falsity is concealed by intolerance of the imaginal. Hillman overhauled the top-heavy system from top to bottom. A science-art of the imagination explores through its own methods creating lasting impressions, images in the house of memory, a complex web of archetypal configurations, an array of archetypal patterns. Memory is essentially polytheistic and the total scheme of things is simultaneous.
The past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment where distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent express as an ongoing pattern -- active engagement in lived experience, unconscious communications and ways to create meaningful responses to them.
Memory is a phenomenon of imagination but this psychic dimension is a real one. The nature of psyche teaches us the art of memory, allowing the images to autonomously speak for themselves.
Memory serves the life of images, the soul's life of living and dying. It takes us to an in-between realm. Remembering images also means the images themselves are remembering. We give images a place to continue their work of remembering us.
Memory kills with the death-equivalent of immobilizing images. But stasis is a way of moving by keeping images alive through remembrance.
This inactive imagination carries archetypal values -- their unchanging aspect. We are at another level with our significant and potent reflections.
An inspired melancholy, 'reminiscence,' involves a special sensitivity to and capacity to be moved by fantasy images. Chains of fantasy images develop and take on dramatic character, deepening their sense of significance. This death-like stillness is a profound psychic activity -- holding.
Hillman validates the art of memory as as a process of deep and complex soul-making (DU, p. 128). It is a form of alchemy, a loving engagement that transforms our basic life experiences into metaphorical images and complexes. Memories are treasured and their value disclosed in the house of memory. Memory keeps soul alive, moving yet still dead.
Archetypal images as a complex metaphor have deep resonance that is soul in the making. They are visual, synesthetic, and kinesthetic. Moral strictures on images are suspended so the soul can fully engage the memory. In the Renaissance, they were mirrored in Neoplatonic and Hermetic imaginings. The world emerges as the foundation of memory, not the brain or mind.
Something in the soul is deeply moved by grotesque, disfigured, and monstrous images. Imagination naturally creates bizarre, disfigured, unnatural, pathologized images with tremendous capacity to stir the soul and the power to move it.
Such art gives places to pathological images. We make room in imagination for the dead. Many gods reveal the archetypal configurations and dynamics -- the memory of myth. Imagination is rendered strikingly memorable.
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The Aesthetic Dimension
“The image is regarded as an irreducible fact that cannot be explained in terms of anything other than itself. The source of all images is the soul, which simply creates images and itself consists of images.
"Dreams are a direct outflow from the soul’s activity and have a central role in archetypal psychology, which is concerned primarily with ‘soul-making’, that is, the free development of the soul.
"The soul constitutes an intermediary between body and mind. It is the third organ of perception, the one between the other two. Rafael Lopez-Pedraza calls this level of perception ‘Hermetic consciousness’, as it mediates between worlds like Hermes, messenger of the gods.
"Hillman sees his task as being to re- ‘ensoul’ and re- ‘animate’ the world. Hence Hillman’s involvement in ecology and politics. In common with oriental philosophy such as Advaita- Vedanta or Zen, archetypal psychology aims to achieve a blurring of the bounds between subject and object, to dissolve the ego and the illusion of ‘substancem’ and to reveal the emptiness of Western positivism."
[JH's Phenomenology]
"For Hillman, the soul is something that reaches far beyond the individual human being, even extending to the Neoplatonic world soul. … In this perspective, the soul is not enclosed in the individual body. Rather it is the individual who moves about within the sphere of the soul. Similarly, dreams are not located within the individual, but rather the individual is embedded in the world of dreams. Fantasy and reality are for Hillman not in contrast with to other, but rather can change place with each other.
… And the world of ‘hard facts’ is at the same time always the bodily expression of a certain fantasy image. The image is not confined to the individual but is in resonance with a collective image. Thus a personal experience can take on a universal significance. That which is true for the realm of soul, and manifests itself in the individual, is in this sense also true for the world soul. As above, so below. As within, so without."
[Quotations from Hans Thomas Hakl, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (C. McIntosh, trans.). Montreal, Kingston, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013, p. 226.]
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Carl Jung and James Hillman; Jungian and post-Jungian, represent wholeness and fragmentation. Tom Cheetham (in his works on Henry Corbin) trys to reconcile the drive toward integrative wholeness while recognizing the necessity of falling apart:
To compare Hillman and Jung in any detail is far beyond the scope of these remarks...Hillman is "a Jungian" by any standard, but rather a wayward one. Any simple contrast will be inadequate and perhaps misleading; but if Jung is the Wise Old man, Hillman is the Trickster, or pretends to be. Years ago when I was immersed in reading them both rather obsessively in the midst of the beginnings of my own psychic crisis, the difference was quite a practical one about which I thought very little. If I were feeling threatened by fragmentation, I would read Jung. If I were in terror of being bound and stifled, I would read Hillman. I still think that says a lot about their differences. (All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings, pp. 190-91)
Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (2006)
was written in 1981 as a chapter in the Enciclopedia del Novecento in Italy and published by Hillman in 1983 as a basic introduction to his mythic psychology. It summarizes the major themes set out in his earlier, more comprehensive work, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975). The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place. Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture. The goal is to draw soul into the world via the creative acts of the individual, not to exclude it in the name of social order. The potential for soulmaking is revealed by psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way. Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul.
Hillman's project includes a sense of the dream as the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in The Dream and the Underworld (1979). He suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than placing images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head.
The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but, rather, there is a world full of images that this 'I' inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology. He stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces a medical understanding with a poetic one. In this idea, sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon, becomes known. (Wikipedia)
Hillman presented wide-ranging thoughts about what became the dominant theme of his career: soul-making. Although soul was “intangible and indefinable,” he wrote that it also carried the “highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.” [RVP, x]
If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not my life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for the soul. [RVP, xii]
Despite the soulfulness that so eloquently reverberated throughout Hillman’s writing, he was not a fan of the idea of hope, at least as it applied to psychotherapy. Tayria Ward, Depth Psychology PhD, summed up Hillman’s opinion about hope, in a blog post, from when she attended one of his lectures: I remember a classroom lecture during my doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute when archetypal psychologist James Hillman spoke of what he called the naivete of hope. Hope was, after all, he said, the one evil left in Pandora’s box when she snapped the lid back shut. His point as I understood it, was that hope is a reliance upon an unknown future that distracts us from the present, from dealing with what is here, right now. [xiii] There was, however, a softer, not so anti-hope side of Hillman, as evidenced in a 1993 book he co-authored with journalist Michael Ventura, titled “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–and the World’s Getting Worse.”: We do not die alone. We join ancestors and all the little people, the multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives, bringing us gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas. They are with us all along, those angels, those demons. [RVP, xiv]
Psyche is a hidden or invisible force.
The World is Psyche. Paul Levy
"https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articl…/the-world-is-psyche
"One of Jung’s greatest discoveries is what he called “the reality of the psyche,” by which he means that the psyche exists in its own right, in its own open-ended sphere of seemingly unlimited influence. To quote Jung, “The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics”[i] (Note: “psychic” is used throughout this article as the adjective form of “psyche” and not with any parapsychological connotation). Jung is using the word “psyche” in an all-inclusive sense, as he means the totality of all psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious. Jung says, “For me, the psyche is an almost infinite phenomenon. I absolutely don’t know what it is in itself and know only very vaguely what it is not.”[ii]
ung states, “For our only reality is psyche, there is no other reality.”[v] The psyche is a mysterious, substance-less substance through which spirit and matter work out their seeming differences and intermingle so as to reveal their unity. To quote Jung, “Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter stands the reality of the psychic – psychic reality, the only reality we can experience immediately.”[vi] We never have an experience, of either the world or ourselves, except within the psyche (please see my article It’s All in the Psyche). Jung writes, “The realm of psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit.”[vii] The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. We should not forget that, to quote Jung, “when we say ‘psyche’ we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.”[viii] The psyche is a true mystery that is impossible to pin down. Jung comments, “In reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same.”[ix] The world is the living psyche. Because the psyche is not separate from the farthest corners of the whole universe, Jung writes that “The psyche reflects, and knows, the whole of existence.”[x]
The psyche is inseparable from the whole materialized universe, while at the same time being a “no-thing” that is other than and transcendent to the physical universe. The psyche is indistinguishable from and expresses itself as and through its manifestations, yet is independent from and other than its forms.
Jung writes, “The psyche creates reality every day.”[xv] It is as if the psyche extends its tentacles out into the world and arranges, configures, and organizes the world so that the world becomes the very medium through which the psyche is simultaneously expressing, em-bodying and revealing itself. Being nonlocal, the psyche is “located” both within our heads (i.e., in the subjective domain of mind) and synchronistically out in the world at the same time, as time and space become relativized within the all-embracing realm of the psyche (please see my article Catching the Bug of Synchronicity). Jung points out that “it is clear that timeless and spaceless perceptions are possible only because the perceiving psyche is similarly constituted.”[xvi] The nonlocal psyche is not bound by either the rules of third dimensional space and time, nor by the laws of man. Because of the psyche’s nonlocality, “we have every reason to suppose,” Jung says, “that there is only one world, where matter and psyche are the same thing.”[xvii]
Jung writes, “‘At bottom’ the psyche is simply world.”[xviii] The psyche animates and gives rise to the world, while at the same time, the world reciprocally generates and in-forms the psyche. The psyche is not just a reflection of the world, however, but to quote Jung, “The psyche does not merely react, it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it.”[xix] Endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, the psyche has a pre-eminent place in the natural order of things. The life of the psyche arises out of organic life, while at the same time transcending it through its own self-creation. The psyche has the unique quality of creating itself through its own activity.
Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (2006)
was written in 1981 as a chapter in the Enciclopedia del Novecento in Italy and published by Hillman in 1983 as a basic introduction to his mythic psychology. It summarizes the major themes set out in his earlier, more comprehensive work, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975). The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place. Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture. The goal is to draw soul into the world via the creative acts of the individual, not to exclude it in the name of social order. The potential for soulmaking is revealed by psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way. Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul.
Hillman's project includes a sense of the dream as the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in The Dream and the Underworld (1979). He suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than placing images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head.
The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but, rather, there is a world full of images that this 'I' inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology. He stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces a medical understanding with a poetic one. In this idea, sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon, becomes known. (Wikipedia)
Hillman presented wide-ranging thoughts about what became the dominant theme of his career: soul-making. Although soul was “intangible and indefinable,” he wrote that it also carried the “highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.” [RVP, x]
If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not my life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for the soul. [RVP, xii]
Despite the soulfulness that so eloquently reverberated throughout Hillman’s writing, he was not a fan of the idea of hope, at least as it applied to psychotherapy. Tayria Ward, Depth Psychology PhD, summed up Hillman’s opinion about hope, in a blog post, from when she attended one of his lectures: I remember a classroom lecture during my doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute when archetypal psychologist James Hillman spoke of what he called the naivete of hope. Hope was, after all, he said, the one evil left in Pandora’s box when she snapped the lid back shut. His point as I understood it, was that hope is a reliance upon an unknown future that distracts us from the present, from dealing with what is here, right now. [xiii] There was, however, a softer, not so anti-hope side of Hillman, as evidenced in a 1993 book he co-authored with journalist Michael Ventura, titled “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–and the World’s Getting Worse.”: We do not die alone. We join ancestors and all the little people, the multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives, bringing us gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas. They are with us all along, those angels, those demons. [RVP, xiv]
Psyche is a hidden or invisible force.
The World is Psyche. Paul Levy
"https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articl…/the-world-is-psyche
"One of Jung’s greatest discoveries is what he called “the reality of the psyche,” by which he means that the psyche exists in its own right, in its own open-ended sphere of seemingly unlimited influence. To quote Jung, “The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics”[i] (Note: “psychic” is used throughout this article as the adjective form of “psyche” and not with any parapsychological connotation). Jung is using the word “psyche” in an all-inclusive sense, as he means the totality of all psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious. Jung says, “For me, the psyche is an almost infinite phenomenon. I absolutely don’t know what it is in itself and know only very vaguely what it is not.”[ii]
ung states, “For our only reality is psyche, there is no other reality.”[v] The psyche is a mysterious, substance-less substance through which spirit and matter work out their seeming differences and intermingle so as to reveal their unity. To quote Jung, “Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter stands the reality of the psychic – psychic reality, the only reality we can experience immediately.”[vi] We never have an experience, of either the world or ourselves, except within the psyche (please see my article It’s All in the Psyche). Jung writes, “The realm of psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit.”[vii] The psyche is the essence of humanity, its greatest instrument, an indefinable creative entity of enormous scope, subtlety and power that eludes all attempts to explain it, including this one. We should not forget that, to quote Jung, “when we say ‘psyche’ we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.”[viii] The psyche is a true mystery that is impossible to pin down. Jung comments, “In reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same.”[ix] The world is the living psyche. Because the psyche is not separate from the farthest corners of the whole universe, Jung writes that “The psyche reflects, and knows, the whole of existence.”[x]
The psyche is inseparable from the whole materialized universe, while at the same time being a “no-thing” that is other than and transcendent to the physical universe. The psyche is indistinguishable from and expresses itself as and through its manifestations, yet is independent from and other than its forms.
Jung writes, “The psyche creates reality every day.”[xv] It is as if the psyche extends its tentacles out into the world and arranges, configures, and organizes the world so that the world becomes the very medium through which the psyche is simultaneously expressing, em-bodying and revealing itself. Being nonlocal, the psyche is “located” both within our heads (i.e., in the subjective domain of mind) and synchronistically out in the world at the same time, as time and space become relativized within the all-embracing realm of the psyche (please see my article Catching the Bug of Synchronicity). Jung points out that “it is clear that timeless and spaceless perceptions are possible only because the perceiving psyche is similarly constituted.”[xvi] The nonlocal psyche is not bound by either the rules of third dimensional space and time, nor by the laws of man. Because of the psyche’s nonlocality, “we have every reason to suppose,” Jung says, “that there is only one world, where matter and psyche are the same thing.”[xvii]
Jung writes, “‘At bottom’ the psyche is simply world.”[xviii] The psyche animates and gives rise to the world, while at the same time, the world reciprocally generates and in-forms the psyche. The psyche is not just a reflection of the world, however, but to quote Jung, “The psyche does not merely react, it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it.”[xix] Endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, the psyche has a pre-eminent place in the natural order of things. The life of the psyche arises out of organic life, while at the same time transcending it through its own self-creation. The psyche has the unique quality of creating itself through its own activity.
"Truth is a necessary fiction. Truth is just a faction of reality, usually stranger than fiction. History is infused by a fictional spirit. Truth gains traction from 'friction,' the mythic element of events. The real news arises in our gaps of awareness. The deep popular need for historical truth is a re-creation myth, reconstructed by answering the question 'whose truth'? Most people never experience truth, but view reality through a hypercluster of mindwarping archetypal lenses. Imagination isn't limited by scholarship. In some instances, fiction makes history. Imagination reshapes reality." - Io
INNER LINKS: PSYCHIC RELATIONSHIP
Widespread Ongoing Collective Event
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... .Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James HIllman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
Widespread Ongoing Collective Event
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... .Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James HIllman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
Archetypal
overview
WITH SOUL-SIZED STORIES
WE CLEAVE TO HEART & SOUL
Understanding our Multidimensional
Self, Society & World to Care for & Serve the Soul
For today's journey through the 'dark forest...' in a pathless land, as we follow our uncertainty.
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself. Archetypal Psychology, a poetic of depths, is a move from reductionism to a true holism that embraces what is as it is, inclusive of plurality and pathology.
We find our mythic voice, of the mythic dimension, that resonance that fuses subjective and objective, without an integrative agenda. The inner psychic world has its own objective nature that works through and informs us through a dark adaptive eye.
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." [James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20]
The imaginal perspective is seeing through the visible content to the invisibles of imagination, living essential figures of imaginal connectedness, lenses through which we grasp personal and collective phenomena. Each myth is a particular way intellectual and emotional Presence presents with paradoxical tendencies and shifting contours. Ficino suggested the art of magic "consists in comparing one thing to another."
The creative depths of the human psyche often emerge in unconscious mythopoetic ways of knowing that authenticity. The prima materia of our soul's experience and personal narrative incorporates eternal mythic processes and the Ineffable, eclipsing the autocratic dominion of the ego.
Archetypal World
The poetic ground of imaginal and oracular psyche is a larger sphere of being that interacts with our personal lives. The world of archetypal images lies between the physical world and the world of abstract intellect, lies another world, source of wisdom, authority, inspiration, insight, and knowledge.
The world of the archetypal image is just as real as either of the other two. All spiritual and transcendent experience derives from this source of synchronicities, ‘psychic’ experiences and creative insights, and visionary experiences. If we cut ourselves off from it we cut ourselves off from life.
Jung and Hillman insisted that psyche (or ‘soul’) is foundational. New perspectives and guidance constantly emerge through dreams and liminal experience. Imagining is an act of connecting. Creativity is an archetypal calling. Mythic figures are fully autonomous figures with their own nature, intentions, and guiding potential.
Its associated archetypes (the deepest patterns of psychic functioning) have an independent existence, beyond us. Myth is alive. Myth is present in the world. Myth isn’t only a key aspect of the structure of our own consciousness; it is a key aspect of the wider consciousness of the world. As Hillman put it: ‘It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.’
MYTHIC TERRITORY
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast."
Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal? We have to learn to tolerate ambiguity. Hillman expands our capacity for ambiguity, uncertainty, not-knowing and tolerating the terror of not having answers for our problems.
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
"Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods (la fonction essentielle de l'universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux)." --Henri Bergson
“...the Otherworld isn’t just a pretty place in a fairy tale - it is the source of life and inspiration...So it is that the Otherworld is more than a myth; the mundus imaginalis is real. Just as Corbin suggested, these old stories tell us that the material world which we take as real is in fact totally enveloped by a spiritual reality which not only influences, but perhaps even determines it. And we ignore it at our peril.” (Blackie, 2017).
WE CLEAVE TO HEART & SOUL
Understanding our Multidimensional
Self, Society & World to Care for & Serve the Soul
For today's journey through the 'dark forest...' in a pathless land, as we follow our uncertainty.
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself. Archetypal Psychology, a poetic of depths, is a move from reductionism to a true holism that embraces what is as it is, inclusive of plurality and pathology.
We find our mythic voice, of the mythic dimension, that resonance that fuses subjective and objective, without an integrative agenda. The inner psychic world has its own objective nature that works through and informs us through a dark adaptive eye.
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." [James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20]
The imaginal perspective is seeing through the visible content to the invisibles of imagination, living essential figures of imaginal connectedness, lenses through which we grasp personal and collective phenomena. Each myth is a particular way intellectual and emotional Presence presents with paradoxical tendencies and shifting contours. Ficino suggested the art of magic "consists in comparing one thing to another."
The creative depths of the human psyche often emerge in unconscious mythopoetic ways of knowing that authenticity. The prima materia of our soul's experience and personal narrative incorporates eternal mythic processes and the Ineffable, eclipsing the autocratic dominion of the ego.
Archetypal World
The poetic ground of imaginal and oracular psyche is a larger sphere of being that interacts with our personal lives. The world of archetypal images lies between the physical world and the world of abstract intellect, lies another world, source of wisdom, authority, inspiration, insight, and knowledge.
The world of the archetypal image is just as real as either of the other two. All spiritual and transcendent experience derives from this source of synchronicities, ‘psychic’ experiences and creative insights, and visionary experiences. If we cut ourselves off from it we cut ourselves off from life.
Jung and Hillman insisted that psyche (or ‘soul’) is foundational. New perspectives and guidance constantly emerge through dreams and liminal experience. Imagining is an act of connecting. Creativity is an archetypal calling. Mythic figures are fully autonomous figures with their own nature, intentions, and guiding potential.
Its associated archetypes (the deepest patterns of psychic functioning) have an independent existence, beyond us. Myth is alive. Myth is present in the world. Myth isn’t only a key aspect of the structure of our own consciousness; it is a key aspect of the wider consciousness of the world. As Hillman put it: ‘It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.’
MYTHIC TERRITORY
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast."
Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal? We have to learn to tolerate ambiguity. Hillman expands our capacity for ambiguity, uncertainty, not-knowing and tolerating the terror of not having answers for our problems.
"Now our image of the goal changes: not Enlightened Man, who sees the seer, but Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not world. For it is impossible to reflectively know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names. We are always behind our reflections—too late, after the event, or we are in the midst, where we see through a glass darkly." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis (p. 92).
"Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods (la fonction essentielle de l'universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux)." --Henri Bergson
“...the Otherworld isn’t just a pretty place in a fairy tale - it is the source of life and inspiration...So it is that the Otherworld is more than a myth; the mundus imaginalis is real. Just as Corbin suggested, these old stories tell us that the material world which we take as real is in fact totally enveloped by a spiritual reality which not only influences, but perhaps even determines it. And we ignore it at our peril.” (Blackie, 2017).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hillman
"An old soldier fights his first campaign again and again, in every new engagement. The last of life is filled with repetitions and returns to basic obsessions. My war—and I have yet to win a decisive battle—is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about being. Of these conditionings none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism)." —James Hillman, 1999
Resonance of Archetypal Theory & Practice
According to James Hillman, archetypal psychology is inspired by and rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. "Neoplatonism abhorred outwardness, the literalistic and naturalistic fallacies. It sought to see through literal meanings into occult ones, searching for depth in the lost, the hidden, and the buried (texts, words, leftovers from antiquity). It delighted in surprising juxtapositions and reversals of ideas, for it regarded the soul as ever in movement, without definite positions, a borderline concept between spirit and matter. ... [I]t recognized the signal place of imagination in human consciousness, considering this to be the primary activity of the soul. Therefore any psychology that would have soul as its aim must speak imaginatively. It referred frequently to Greek and Roman mythical figures - not as allegories, but as modes of reflection." [Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology 198]
"Thus, that sense of weakness, inferiority, mortification, masochism, darkness, and failure is inherent to the mode of metaphor itself which defeats conscious understanding as a control over phenomena. Metaphor, as the soul’s mode of logos, ultimately results in that abandonment to the given which approximates mysticism.
"The metaphorical transposition—this ‘death-dealing’ move that at the same time awakens consciousness to a sense of soul—is the heart of archetypal psychology’s mission, its world intention." (Hillman, "Senex and Puer" in *Puer Papers*, p. 22)
"A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word -- and angel means originally "emissary," "message bearer" -- how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? . . . We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." --James Hillman, "A Blue Fire," Thomas Moore, Ed., pg. 28.
James Hillman states our foundational condition in strong terms: “Each of us exists not as a material object but as an image. We are complex images given by the vocation of our soul that preceded our birth and all the dreams, missions and voices of our ancestors.
…We are images, not imaginations, but powerful images that are echoes of original or primordial images that belong to the time of origin and have produced in a legendary place: Olympus, mount Meru, Mount Popa, the home of the gods. ….We could say that our lives are the memory, the echo of those primordial images. Such images of origin can be defined as eidola, i.e. idols. We can only do in time what the gods do In eternity.” (The Vain Escape from the Gods)
"In "The Dream and the Underworld" James Hillman continues to deepen and to refine Jung's recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hillman's contribution lies in his "imaginal reduction"—relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of the psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness. Dreams, understood poetically, are neither messages to be deciphered and used for the benefit of the rational ego (Freud) nor compensatory to the ego (Jung); they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also sees dreams as initiations into the underworld of death—the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld." --Robert Avens, J. of Religion & Health, Vol. 19 No. 3, Fall 1980.
"A deprived myth is one that favors narrow and lame interpretations of consensus reality, interpretations that do not resonate with with one's deepest intuitions. A deprived myth makes life in the world seem futile and claustrophobic. But it is a myth nevertheless, because it entails an interpretation. Today, we don't live in a mythless society. Our condition is much more tragic: we live in a society dominated by increasingly deprived myths...The dominance of deprived myths is insidious and has severe consequences as far as one's psychic health and relationship with truth is concerned." ~ Bernardo Kastrup
“The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"An old soldier fights his first campaign again and again, in every new engagement. The last of life is filled with repetitions and returns to basic obsessions. My war—and I have yet to win a decisive battle—is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about being. Of these conditionings none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism)." —James Hillman, 1999
Resonance of Archetypal Theory & Practice
According to James Hillman, archetypal psychology is inspired by and rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. "Neoplatonism abhorred outwardness, the literalistic and naturalistic fallacies. It sought to see through literal meanings into occult ones, searching for depth in the lost, the hidden, and the buried (texts, words, leftovers from antiquity). It delighted in surprising juxtapositions and reversals of ideas, for it regarded the soul as ever in movement, without definite positions, a borderline concept between spirit and matter. ... [I]t recognized the signal place of imagination in human consciousness, considering this to be the primary activity of the soul. Therefore any psychology that would have soul as its aim must speak imaginatively. It referred frequently to Greek and Roman mythical figures - not as allegories, but as modes of reflection." [Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology 198]
"Thus, that sense of weakness, inferiority, mortification, masochism, darkness, and failure is inherent to the mode of metaphor itself which defeats conscious understanding as a control over phenomena. Metaphor, as the soul’s mode of logos, ultimately results in that abandonment to the given which approximates mysticism.
"The metaphorical transposition—this ‘death-dealing’ move that at the same time awakens consciousness to a sense of soul—is the heart of archetypal psychology’s mission, its world intention." (Hillman, "Senex and Puer" in *Puer Papers*, p. 22)
"A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word -- and angel means originally "emissary," "message bearer" -- how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? . . . We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." --James Hillman, "A Blue Fire," Thomas Moore, Ed., pg. 28.
James Hillman states our foundational condition in strong terms: “Each of us exists not as a material object but as an image. We are complex images given by the vocation of our soul that preceded our birth and all the dreams, missions and voices of our ancestors.
…We are images, not imaginations, but powerful images that are echoes of original or primordial images that belong to the time of origin and have produced in a legendary place: Olympus, mount Meru, Mount Popa, the home of the gods. ….We could say that our lives are the memory, the echo of those primordial images. Such images of origin can be defined as eidola, i.e. idols. We can only do in time what the gods do In eternity.” (The Vain Escape from the Gods)
"In "The Dream and the Underworld" James Hillman continues to deepen and to refine Jung's recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hillman's contribution lies in his "imaginal reduction"—relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of the psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making is poesis—a return to the imaginal and poetic basis of consciousness. Dreams, understood poetically, are neither messages to be deciphered and used for the benefit of the rational ego (Freud) nor compensatory to the ego (Jung); they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also sees dreams as initiations into the underworld of death—the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld." --Robert Avens, J. of Religion & Health, Vol. 19 No. 3, Fall 1980.
"A deprived myth is one that favors narrow and lame interpretations of consensus reality, interpretations that do not resonate with with one's deepest intuitions. A deprived myth makes life in the world seem futile and claustrophobic. But it is a myth nevertheless, because it entails an interpretation. Today, we don't live in a mythless society. Our condition is much more tragic: we live in a society dominated by increasingly deprived myths...The dominance of deprived myths is insidious and has severe consequences as far as one's psychic health and relationship with truth is concerned." ~ Bernardo Kastrup
“The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The soul is not an object, but a way of knowing objects.”
-James Hillman
Anima Mundi / Fluid Subjectivities
The Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, are the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body.” (CW8, § 663&664)
Jung said “the psyche creates reality everyday.” But the psyche or soul is not in us - we are in the psyche. When Jung tells us that psyche is image what he means is that reality is image. All of it. We are in the world of imagination because there simply is nothing else.
“Meaning is what we give to the image. Significance is what the image gives to us(egos). The archetype’s inherence in the image gives body to the image, the fecundity of carrying and giving birth to insights. The more we articulate its shape the less we need interpret.” -James Hillman, Egalitarian Typologies and the Perception of the Unique,p. 32
Archetypal psychology is a mythical method. Mythological networks can be classified both as real and fictional -- "as if" realities. James Hillman takes psychology and mythology out of our heads and back into the world again.
Mythic writing is a way of working such notions so we 'see through' them. We describe rather than explain psyche and psychic phenomena. We are not cataloguing archetypes or concepts but engaging living archetypal images and inter-relating.
The nature of reality is a living phenomenology of nature's processes and transformations. Invisible soul becomes physical body, what we imagine to be true about ourselves, our environment, and unspoken dimensions. From the archaic period, sociopoetic processes transformed the meaning of myth. They aim for completeness.
Myth illuminates and informs the way we see the world, and the way we live each day. We live mythically in full awareness of the mythic structures underlying life, the mythic elements informing it. A multi-layered life is rooted and grounded and gritty, yet rich with image and symbol. “miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately,”Hillman, The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire
“Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible. [M. Merleau-Ponty, Working Notes]” (Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
When we interrelate with psyche, the psychoid unconscious extends beyond the properly psychic into a realm which cannot, by definition, be integrated with consciousness. It is not un-conscious anymore, that is, deficiently conscious. Rather, it is the Unknown in the sense of the noumenon, a noumenal world which is completely unknowable to humans.
Hillman, "the soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept." Thomas Moore resists conceptualizing the term soul:
"It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway: the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars—good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy." (Care of the Soul, xi-xii)
“Outside and inside, life and soul, appear as parallels in “case history” and “soul history.” A case history is a biography of historical events in which one took part: family, school, work, illness, war, love. The soul history often neglects entirely some or many of these events, and spontaneously invents fictions and “inscapes” without major outer correlations. The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies … The experiences arising from major dreams, crises, and insights give definition to the personality. They too have “names” and “dates” like the outer events of case history; they are like boundary stones, which mark out one’s own individual ground. These marks can be less denied than can the outer facts of life, for nationality, marriage, religion, occupation, and even one’s own name can all be altered … Case history reports on the achievements and failures of life with the world of facts. But the soul has neither achieved nor failed in the same way … The soul imagines and plays – and play is not chronicled by report. What remains of the years of our childhood play that could be set down in a case history? … Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself … We cannot get a soul history through a case history.”
― James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul
Underlying the perceptible is a world that forever remains beyond the bounds of human awareness. Inexplicable as a function of archetypal reality, a psychic realm in principle cannot be known. The noumenal, however, is capable of reaching into our world, surreptitiously and inexplicably governing the universe.
"As mediatrix to the eternally unknowable she is the bridge both over the river and into the trees and into the sludge and quicksand, making the known ever more unknown." (Hillman, Anima, p. 133)
"Sophia was the Mediatrix between the upper and lower spaces, and at the same time projected the Types or Ideas of the plērōma into the cosmos" (Mead, 2008, where he also equates Sophia with "Soul" in a general sense).
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~James Hillman, “Anima Mundi,” Spring, 1982
Anima Mundi is NowHere…the very spirit of life, the ethereal angel of our destiny, the animated archetypal ground and individually the radiant subtle body. More than just the life-spirit, the sacred field body is a natural force, the cosmic energic principle of primordial Consciousness, implicate order – the essence of being and sacred embodiment.
Our daimon is a voice of the anima mundi, and there is no division between the little inner voices and the total world of the soul. Our fate is in fact our life.
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away." Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.
The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors”― James Hillman
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Herakleitos says that to a human ethos is daimon. Could that mean that the daimon that inspires each person is the source of his way of life or vision? Thomas Moore
Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious. In the divine act of reconnection, imagination conveys divine thoughts through images, penetrating deeper levels of insight with trans-sensory perception.
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination.
In other words, it is this soul that speaks through me and through all of us. “The postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.
"Soul becomes psyche through love and it is Eros that engenders the psyche [...] The creative is a result of love. It is marked by imagination and beauty and by the connection with tradition as a living force and with nature as a living body. This perception of instinct will insist on the importance of love: nothing can be created without love and love reveals the origin and principle of all living things, as in Orphic cosmogony." (James Hillman, Myth of Analysis)
In alchemy, Anima Mundi acts as the soul-guide to our heights and depths. Beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi. Union with her is consciousness of our primal existential self, and our deepest ecological self, right down to the virtuality of the Void – the primordial field.
Beneath the alienation from nature, which our culture has created, lies a deep resource we can tap which is fundamental wisdom about the unity of life. We are embedded within that seamless fabric of Cosmos, the Feminine source of wisdom. The importance of the present depends on its effect in the realization of a specific future. An experience is important if it suggests or fulfills visionary sight.
Anima Mundi is the secret powers of nature. We need those powers to heal and transform. The intentional use of imagination and image building is a foundation of mysticism. This wisdom is deep ecology, which reveals the way of living in balance through intuition. She is the dark of the Void and the natural Light of the Soul--illumination. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty.
The soul generates images unceasingly, purposefully ordering our lives. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
"Personification is a psychologism ... All three terms - anthropomorphism, animism, personification - contain one basic idea: there exists a "mode of thought" which takes an inside event and puts it outside, at the same time making this content alive, personal, and even divine. These three items, by saying that human beings tend to imagine things into souls, are actually describing a manner of soul-making. But by calling this activity a "mode of thought" it becomes an act we perform - conscious or unconscious - rather than something we immediately experience. Where these three terms assume thought makes soul, personifying recognizes soul as existent prior to reflection. Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field ... Through these concepts - personification, anthropomorphism, animism - reason could indeed make stones live again and even create souls and Gods." (Hillman, Revisioing Psychology, p. 12-13)
“On Senex Consciousness”:
Hillman suggests we have privileged the one God over the many.
"The main image of God in our culture: omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, seated and bearded, a ruler through abstract principle of justice, morality and order, a faith in words yet not given to self-explanation in speech, benevolent but enraged when his will is crossed, removed from the feminine (wifeless) and the sexual aspect of creation. . . this image depicts a senex god, a god imaged through the senex archetype. The high God of our culture is a Senex god, we are created after this image with a consciousness reflecting this structure."
Watch out that your spirituality is too escapist, too moralistic, too sentimental.
It's not easy to love Saturn. The ancient medical texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance link Saturn and Mars and labeled them as evil deities, important to human life, but difficult and pernicious. Distance, hardness of heart and pleasure for cruelty are not fascinating traits, however when they go beyond the most coarse misanthropy, when they filter a thin shadow into a whole of a person's elements, they definitely have a role to play in human relationships." (Thomas Moore)
Hillman, "The idea of a self, an enclosed and individual proprium, requires boundary and boundary is made by the senex." Saturn is connected with the educational value of pain and suffering,
But getting older isn’t, for better or worse, only about Saturn. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s book, “The Force of Character and the Lasting Life” is necessarily imbued with the themes of Saturn’s nobility and ignominity. In this work on aging, Hillman illuminates how intensely and richly other planetary archetypes are, and have the potential to be, operative during times of illness, debility or old age--- times we often dismiss as being meaningless or wasted. Although he doesn’t name the planets specifically, Mercury the Trickster necessarily comes to mind in his chapter “Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain;” Venus is evoked in his poignant discussion of mature beauty in the chapter, “Anesthesia;” and Pluto courses through the chapter, “Erotics.” Through these and other examples Hillman expands and transforms the selective, limited and habitual assumptions we make about the physical, cognitive, emotional and spirit/soul aspects of aging.
But getting older isn’t, for better or worse, only about Saturn. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s book, “The Force of Character and the Lasting Life” is necessarily imbued with the themes of Saturn’s nobility and ignominity. In this work on aging, Hillman illuminates how intensely and richly other planetary archetypes are, and have the potential to be, operative during times of illness, debility or old age--- times we often dismiss as being meaningless or wasted. Although he doesn’t name the planets specifically, Mercury the Trickster necessarily comes to mind in his chapter “Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain;” Venus is evoked in his poignant discussion of mature beauty in the chapter, “Anesthesia;” and Pluto courses through the chapter, “Erotics.” Through these and other examples Hillman expands and transforms the selective, limited and habitual assumptions we make about the physical, cognitive, emotional and spirit/soul aspects of aging.
ARCHETYPES
Archetypes are forms of different aspects expressing the creative psychic background. They are and always have been numinous and therefore "divine." --C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 605-606
The archetypes are raw unfiltered psychic experience, appearing sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams, oneiric images), or in more complex form in myths. Archetypal affects operate as attractors in the emotional field. The planetary gods insert disorder, woundedness, fragmentation.
Poetics of the soul focuses on the common ground between poetics, psyche, and memory's role in establishing authentic fictions that bring coherence to our life stories they would not have without its presence. The “as-if” quality of our lives is a central concern, as is the wounded nature of our narratives as a locus for mythmaking.
Archetypes affect us so strongly because they resonate with the deep, underlying structure of human motivation and meaning. They evoke strong feelings in us because they’re easily recognizable and tap into emotions and desires that we all share. James Hillman said, “we possess our feelings, but we are possessed by our emotions”.
Archetypes represent a common language, symbols that everyone understands, that all humans have in common.A plurality of possibilities lead to one actuality. We also make use of archetypes when we think, when we describe something. The words we use exist in a common pool. Language is a common thing, therefore a language has its own field.
When we think, our thoughts are coded by a common field and linked to our own unspeakable name (the DNA). But our thoughts still remain entangled with the common field of the language. Geometry is another archetypal form of communication. The field of form itself is a geometrical archetype, informed by the patterns of "sacred geometry", the flower of life, Fibonnaci, Solfeggio, Golden Mean and Fuller's synergetics. Reflected in our own being, is it possible that a true archetype of a universal nature begins in geometry itself?
The story goal may not be what defines the archetypal need. Archetypal meaning is the agent that links all threads together. Narratives always represent a kind of movement in moral space. They are energies that are in and around us that create a field that helps us develop certain qualities that we have innately within us as human beings. These can be expressed in good, bad or diabolical ways, depending on certain other factors.
Narratives are the way that humans have of constructing coherence and continuity in our lives. The most important stories that humans tell, retell, and reframe are the ones people do not generally recognize as stories at all. These are referred to as “metanarratives” -- ideologies, religions, and cultures. People do not even recognize them as stories, but rather tend to take them as an unarticulated background, the taken-for-granted truth, the way things really are. Our entangled world of stories includes many tragedies, too immense to even comprehend; but it is also a story of cosmic and comic improbabilities resulting in many fortuitous new possibilities. And thereby hangs a tale.
Archetypes are repetitious information-rich embedded directives --an informational, rational, and meaning-carrying structure that works by creating a field of influence and whose effect is not limited by space and time parameters. It is a kind of universal blueprint that underlies natural life. Itself unknowable, the archetype serves as a cornucopia from which themes, motifs, tendencies, and behaviors arise. We recognize these universal shapers of experience.
The quality of each archetype is a reflection of the pattern that embodies it. Repetition is resonance. A particular emotion is simply an impulse that pulls us into resonant conformance with a particular archetype. Archetypes build on, feed on, and regulate one another. Archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including pathologizing and creative insight. They share a similar field pattern that is paradoxically both the source of disease manifestation and its ultimate healing.
In the Jungian sense, order and chaos are not strictly archetypes. Rather they are meta-types, tendencies, potentials, paths, waiting to be materialized and made use of by archetypes. Chaos and order are still regarded as states of matter and of energy, as organizational principles, as residents of the twilight zone between the mental or subjective and the external, the "objective". Consequent effects are not necessarily random and chaotic because of an inherent order that emerges at the edge of chaos.
This order does not occur according to a “blueprint” or prior determination. It is created out of the chaotic conditions themselves.
A-field
Archetypes can be compared to a blueprint or a genetic code, representing predetermined plans for the structure, function and development of each aspect of human life. These archetypal patterns are the common foundations of our personality traits, drives, feelings, beliefs, motivations and actions. Archetypes involve all aspects of our lives.
Archetypes are structuring principles/numinous fields/forms of indefinable content which, when manifest, will express that content through symbol (image). Jung affirms the symbol as grounded in the unconscious archetype while their manifest forms are shaped by the ideas harboring in the conscious mind (the "I" value). The archetype, therefore, is a structuring principle that is itself without a structure. This is why the notion of a field works well with archetypes. The archetype of Light is the personifications of the field itself.
Von Franz observes that the archetypes are interconnected in a continuous field. A field can be understood as a region or space where something happens. If each archetype has as its "energetic component" a field can store and shape information, matter, and behavior. So, we can hypothesize that the archetypal field serves as the ground of being or the ground of creation from which form arises. While an electromagnetic or gravitational field is space and time dependent, an archetypal field appears to be "nonlocal"-- not limited to the mandates of space and time.
An archetype is a primary patterning upon which manifestion organizes itself in self-similar formulae recurring in human experience. They work through the creation of attractors -- complexes, magnetic epicenters creating the convergence of archetypal potentialities into singularities, highly patterned behavioral tendencies that draw specific facets of archetypes. Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation.
A "field" of activity and influence surrounds an archetype, like the magnetic field around a magnet, or the gravitational field around a planet. An archetypal complex is the experiential equivalent of a force field or a magnetic field in physics, producing an integrated pattern or gestalt out of many diverse particulars. Any given archetypal complex always contains problematic and pathological shadow tendencies intertwined with more salutary, fruitful, and creative ones, all of which inhere in potentia in each complex (Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 105).
Every archetype has its own embedded field -- the "archetypal field," or "a-field." The a-field and ZPE field are complementary if not identical. An archetypal complex as "a coherent field of archetypally connected meanings, experiences, and psychological tendencies. They are expressed in perceptions, emotions, images, attitudes, beliefs, fantasies, and memories. Synchronistic external events and historical and cultural phenomena also appear to be informed by a dominant archetypal principle or combination of such principles.
Jung connected the phenomenon of synchronicity to psychic conditions. He felt inner and outer realities (subjective and objective) evolved through the archetypes. Jung theorized that these archetypal images belonged to a part of the unconscious not derived from personal experience. The archetypal images form the "collective unconscious". This collective is all things working synergetically, totality of consciousness vibrating and working as one coherent mass of energy.
The field of all archetypes is the existential ground of our being, but different archetypes may be more prominent at any given time. Such a conceptual field may be more or less co-extensive with biopsychosocial fields. The field archetype defines the interface that all field implementations must satisfy. The distinguishing feature of an archetype is its schema. A schema defines the fields of an archetype. Archetypes specify a static default value for a field.
As part of the cosmic holographic field, archetypes are nested hierarchies. They appear transpersonal and numinous because every part of the hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The implicate (implied) order is the holographic medium. Matter and consciousness have implicate order in common.
Each particle is an image constructed from information enfolded into a vacuum, providing a dynamic order in which change anywhere in the pattern is mirrored by the whole. The part projects itself by its self-similarity in the whole and the whole in the part, with different degrees of resolution and angles of perspective. The implicate order is a holographic medium that connects apparently disconnected individuals/ experiences/ information. Our consciousness is not three-dimensional, but multidimensional.
Preconscious archetypes are formative principles and structural elements, as well as typical modes of apprehension and action. Frey-Rohn characterized them as, "...not only the focal point of ancient pathways but also the center from which new creative endeavors emanated. "The archetypes, then being inherent in the life process, represented forces and tendencies which not only repeated experiences but also formed creative centers of numinous effect ."
The numinous arises from the autonomous level of the psyche. The experience of the numinous also lies at the heart of Jungian therapeutic practice. Without it no transformation takes place. Jung (1973) asserts, “But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology” (p. 377).
Archetypal images designate patterns, typical basic forms, prefigurative determinants, and the tendency to repeat the same psychic experiences. They conceal the unborn eternal archetype (unconscious nucleus of meaning) while they reveal particularized meaning and form. Such ‘oculi piscium’ (fishes eyes)” are fiery soulsparks of the World-Soul, the light of nature, divine sparks of the spirit.
Paracelsus perceived scintilla or sparks of this new light, calling it the Lumen Naturae. We might liken them to a quanta of the pleroma or void - a glimmer of the divine within. Holographically, each level of emanated creation contains within it a "spark" or "scintilla" of the divine, making it "like" the divine. Jung termed the nondual "Pleroma," where nothingness is the same as fullness"...an Absolute in which there is no division between subject and object. Jung intuited this nondual Pleroma to be a collective transpersonal reservoir, an ocean of collective unconscious. From this omnipotent universal Pleroma our individual psyches coalesce around "attractor archetypes." In this sense Jung echoed the axiom: "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness."
Archetypes are shapers of human experience, “fields” of interrelated experience that the human psyche is predisposed to find significant.. They are defined by motivation, but are more about a deep underlying need, often subconscious, that then affects all the other goals and motivations. Archetypes are negentropic drives, revealing latent information and identity. They are not pieces of a mosaic but interrelational systems in a Universe of of multidimensional relationships.
Archetypes characterize and particularize perennial wisdom, language, images and ideas (theories), and emotion-laden complexes. Sometimes, such complex expression looks like pathology or pathologizing but psyche is trying to tell its perennial story in particularized form. We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, or to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being.
Myth involves an intrinsic understanding of the nature of reality, couched in imaginative terms, carrying a power as strong as nature itself. Myth-making is a natural psychic characteristic, a psychic element that combines with other such elements to form a mythical representation of inner reality. That representation is then used as model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in there historical context. Seth from, the individual and the nature of mass events. by Jane Roberts.
GIST / ESSENCE
Soul is the foundation of our existence. We live on images. We know our mind and body only through what we can imagine. Images are the irrational, submerged, and emergent aspects of our stories. In soul-tending we work toward a more soulful world, bringing more soul into life. Even our failures contribute to the overall flow, cycling in a complex way.
We look for ways to accept our feelings, a way of being in the world -- organic, grounded, fertile, and nourishing creativity. Soul can sing out, as well as rage or mourn in grief. Moore suggests, "Don't try to figure yourself out but go through the process needed to become a loving person in a beautiful world."
All events are disturbances of the present matrix, they are self-created, emanating from within the human psyche. Every event is the result of a cause, an intent, a yearning, initiated long before it manifests. The emotional tone generated by this event, emanates from within the psychic landscape of the human being and reverberates across the entire unified field, across the whole of the cosmos so to speak.
Thomas Moore writes: "The images are ' daimons' that bear directions about our destiny ". Each image we take as significant, becomes for Hillman that necessary angel, waiting of our answer to his epiphany. Our imaginal task will be to welcome that image, welcoming "the Angel". (e.s.)
We engage the imaginal through images; we see ourselves through images, stories, and patterns. Our childhood stories are images, as is our home where we choose to live, our art, and magic, since magic happens in the gaps of reality, the unborn potential of the Abyss.
Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning. Myth is rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, a never-ending renewal.
The unrelenting outpouring of psychic images situates our immediate experience. The visionary path is psychic. Psychic reality includes the rich layering of our inner perception and response to the outer world and the sensations they might induce. Soul searches everywhere for myths that can nourish it.
“Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process—alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure—so that we don’t expect instant success or even any kind of finality. All goals and all endings are heuristic, important in their being imagined, but never literally fulfilled.”
— Thomas Moore
"What I'm trying to do is say lighten up and let life flow through you, and be on the waves as they go up and down. . . . You float your way. You drift. The essence of my approach is to be extravagantly accepting and forgiving of yourself and others. Ride the waves and let life take you where it has good things for you." Thomas Moore
Thomas mentions James Hillman’s intelligence and also cites his relationship to spirituality as somewhat wrong. I always wondered how someone like Hillman could make Soul a central notion of their psychology without considering it to be a spiritual dimension of Soul.
Thomas Moore
" Ultimately, if we talk about taking life seriously, everyone of us is alone. We just have to appreciate its complexity. And as the jungians say, pay tribute to his shadows. Irony can only result from the awareness of positive and negative aspects, successes and failures, territories where intelligence reigns and those where madness and ignorance reign.
It is important to recognize that we are both intelligent and stupid, often at the same time, as it is important to admit our fears and desires. This is almost enough to fill us with irony, and the honesty that comes with it will make our actions infinitely more reliable. There's nothing wrong with cultivating intense and quirky desires. And there's nothing wrong with being afraid of it. Only when we have embraced these two fundamental emotions can we see the nature of our soul, which forms the very foundation of our existence."
“The soul cares less about 'right' and 'wrong,' and more about what is nourishing or not.” ~~ Thomas Moore
"Every day a fragment of your past may come to mind. Process it by speaking about it thoughtfully with a friend—Soul-making"~~ Thomas Moore, Twitter @thomasmooreSoul 28 Aug 2015
"Conversation does not have to be confessional in order to be soulful." "… Talk from and about the soul may be about 'the good and desirable,' about the direction in which we are all going as human beings, about the life and world we commonly know. … It's favorite modes are reverie, reminiscence, reflection - these re- words that point to the soul's task of working imagination into past experience." Thomas Moore, (Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationships)
" The unilaterality and moralism of the different attacks on narcissism suggest that around this pillar rejected by ego and self-love can be soul: everything, even bad, must have some value in itself. Is it possible that our fair rejection of narcissism and selfishness hides a mystery about the nature of what the soul prefers? The fact that we negatively stigmatize narcissism is perhaps a defense against the difficult demand of the soul to be loved?" The care of the soul Thomas Moore
THE SPIRIT OF SEX
" If you want to know what sex is, think long and intensely about a flower, especially its beauty and the charm it exercises on the senses. So think of nature all, and the place you occupy in it. What gives charm and charm to a flower is also the essence of your sexuality. [...] Making love is a ritual that like any liturgy, aims to evoke the presence of the spirit, which will magically make human activity effective. Like all rituals, sex demands special attention, dedication and fantasy. It demands that kind of humility of the religious ritual in which the devotee invokes, and not force, the presence of a god or spirit ". Thomas Moore, The Spirit of Sex, pp. 23,26 23,26 23,26 23,26
The Mystery of Intimacy
The Word intimacy means "profoundly interior." It comes from the superlative form of the Latin word inter, meaning "within." It could be translated "within-est," or "most within." In our intimate relationships, the "most within" dimensions of ourselves and the other are engaged.
... The deep interiority of a person may be revealed in her transparent life: allowing her emotions to show, letting her thoughts out, being familiar with her deeper soul. It is the controlled, tightly lidded individual who finds intimacy difficult, because she is disconnected from her interiority, and therefore it has no place in her relationships. The unintimate person hovers nervously in air, separated both from her own depth and from the souls of others. Intimacy begins at home, with oneself. It does no good to try to find intimacy with friends, lovers and family if you are starting out from alienation and division yourself." Thomas Moore, "Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships"
"Naturally, no person and no relationship is going to be perfectly free of unconsciousness. To be completely conscious, were such a condition possible, is not even desirable, since "unconsciousness" is a negative word for what could be described more positively as the richness that lies beneath the surface of awareness. Much of what goes on in a relationship and even much that accounts for it's pleasures and rewards, is unconscious. Still conflicts and difficulties can arise from faulty connections to that richness of personality and soul."
~~ Thomas Moore, chapter two 'The Mystery of Intimacy,' "Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships"
THE SPIRITUALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
"I encounter many people in therapy who need more spirit in their makeup. Spirit is the element that wants to perfect, purify and transcend. It directs our attention to the future, the cosmos, and the infinite. It is abundant in education, progress, and vision. It allows us to advance and move upward in all our pursuits. It directs the attention away from ordinary life, the body, and sensual existence. Soul is the opposite: It lies embedded in our struggles and pleasures, in our ordinary circumstances and relationships, and in the emotions and fantasies that lie deep. We feel our soul stir at family gatherings and visits home, in deep friendships and romantic relationships. Comforting dinners and friendly lunches - food in general- makes the soul come alive. People often bring their soul issues to therapy and yet may need better ideas and visions for their lives."
~~ Thomas Moore, p.29, A Religion of One's Own
"Beauty feeds the soul, wakens it, and brings it to life as nothing else can. Beauty is a deep-seated reaction to some meaningful and stunning presentation of life. It stops you and gives you an instant promise of pleasure. But if you have no soul, you won't even see the beautiful in the thick layers of your practicality and in the density of your own ego. All your senses and your full imagination have to be alert when beauty makes its appearance. If you miss it, it is like going without food."— Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals
Living Imagination
In archetypal psychology, the image is allowed to express its essence, reflect, and echo, without being categorized, interpreted, or frozen into a fixed symbol. Even its own theory is a 'healing fiction,' which like 'evolution,' progress, or ideological growth pretend to not be myth. It rejects 'getting the world in order' as developmental fantasy and spiritual detachment from the world. Spirituality can be dissociative.
Thomas Moore says, “It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.” (p.9, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life)
There is also dissolution in the metaphorical depths. Fixed beliefs about an image say more about ourselves and our own interpretation of it. These images structure images into metaphor and models to grasp our humanity. Writers, artists, visionaries, philosophers, therapeutes, healers have always known this.
Soul: refers to the deepening of events into experiences ... the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy - that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," (Hillman, RVP)
"On this point we take inspiration from the work of Jung: “The gods have become diseases.” Jung is indicating that the formal cause of our distress and our abnormalities is the mythic figure, our psychic diseases are not imaginary, but rather imaginal (Corbin). Better still they are psychic diseases of fantasy, the sufferings of fantasies, of mythic realities, the incarnation of archetypal events." --James Hillman
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany fosters a relationship and engagement with soul, nonconscious processing, many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience. Are we all alters of universal consciousness?
Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another. There is a dialogue between experience and interpretation.
Hillman declares, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform. The soul “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Some of us are now wary of therapeutic scripting, whether in the Story-
centered approach of the jungians, or in the transcendent and shadowless goal of the humanists. Hillman condemns all existing forms of psychological practice for producing scripted behavior, "programs" for the Self which, he believes, insult the soul. "A discipline of the imagination does not have to become a program of the imagination." RVP
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
Archetypal psychology challenges orthodox psychological thinking by replacing its humanistic and scientific assumptions with a psychology founded in soul. Psyche is the word which Jung used to describe the totality of all our psychological processes. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.
Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. In either approach to the numinous, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not. Whatever soul touches becomes numinous.
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
Jung famously stated that the gods have become diseases and Hillman reiterated, "There is disease in the archetype." We recognize the Gods by our symptoms. They gods themselves can be quarrelsome, envious, deceive, and have sexual obsessions. They are vindictive, isolated, and vulnerable at the bottom. But we suffer the consequences.
The wounding and suffering itself is eternal and archetypal. The wound directs our existential development. Therefore, symptoms like dreams, are a road to the unconscious. We are never alone if we recognize archetypal dynamics in our lives.
Archetypes are real but invisible presences, the 'dark matter' of the soul. Psyche is the unconscious field. The voice of the psyche is unconscious communication. Entangled modes are superimposed, switchable interference patterns that always complement each other and together become invisible.
Archetypes, as liminal entities are numinous or “spiritual,” if “magical” is too strong a word. Magic is inherent in our instinctual roots. The 'supernatural' is the truly chaotic world of collective unconscious. In that "in between" place we can access who we are at the heart of it all. Symbols are grasped by the power of the heart.
Mythical figures, themes and images orient us as we learn to balance masculine strength and inner authority with feminine wisdom and inner power transforming identity and consciousness and patterned forms of attachment to the personal in the transpersonal.
As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Shame, vulnerability, and sexual objectification.
Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Strong religious or spiritual qualities (arousing, awe-inspiring, mysterious, dreadful) suggest the presence of a divinity which appeals to the higher emotions or aesthetic sense, the poetic basis of the soul, thereby altering ego-based consciousness. Experiencing awe can lower stress levels, expand our perception of time, and improve social well-being.
Uniting the opposites, resonant aesthetic structures of the numinal and phenomenal realms are held in tension, converging in “flowering light.” The angel allows us see and to know, and encounter our spiritual essence. The demon lover results from failure to differentiate our anima or animus from the darkness of our shadow, of incarnation.
Archetypes are part of our common biological, cultural and personal heritage, rooted in matter and spirit. We grow from a magical, to mythic, to rational, and transcendent perspective over our lifetimes. https://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/
"First, what is an archetype? Archetypes can be understood and described in many ways, and in fact much of the history of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle onward has been concerned with this very question. But for our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects--impels, structures, permeates--the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. One can think of them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as James Hillman does. Archetypes (for example, Venus or Mars) seem to have a transcendent, mythic quality, yet they also have very specific psychological expressions--as in the desire for love and the experience of beauty (Venus), or the impulse toward forceful activity and aggression (Mars). Moreover, archetypes seem to work from both within and without, for they can express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, yet also as events and situations in the external world." (Richatd Tarnas)
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92)."
"So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? We find the past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment, and the distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent is expressed as an ongoing pattern in our lives. These behaviors live on and affect our life and soul, while also providing the archetypal meaning of this behavior.
Psyche engages our capacity for experiencing and living within soul/spirit awareness, for entering psychic space: the descent of the divine and the ascent of unconsciousness, and discovering destiny in the fullness of human and cosmic presence. Engagement is an archetypal and spiritual experience, worthy of our attention, dedication, and even awe.
Hillman argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggests the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Among psychological theories, only archetypal psychology continuously insists on a constant re-visioning of psychology’s own ideas with shimmering symbols of semantic depth with an eye toward the aesthetics of transformation and mystery.
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (JH, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
Forgotten myths weave reality in stories by changing perception of reality through the deconstruction of our current worldview, a radical reformation of the story lines that will shape the future.
Soul is the foundation of our existence. We live on images. We know our mind and body only through what we can imagine. Images are the irrational, submerged, and emergent aspects of our stories. In soul-tending we work toward a more soulful world, bringing more soul into life. Even our failures contribute to the overall flow, cycling in a complex way.
We look for ways to accept our feelings, a way of being in the world -- organic, grounded, fertile, and nourishing creativity. Soul can sing out, as well as rage or mourn in grief. Moore suggests, "Don't try to figure yourself out but go through the process needed to become a loving person in a beautiful world."
All events are disturbances of the present matrix, they are self-created, emanating from within the human psyche. Every event is the result of a cause, an intent, a yearning, initiated long before it manifests. The emotional tone generated by this event, emanates from within the psychic landscape of the human being and reverberates across the entire unified field, across the whole of the cosmos so to speak.
Thomas Moore writes: "The images are ' daimons' that bear directions about our destiny ". Each image we take as significant, becomes for Hillman that necessary angel, waiting of our answer to his epiphany. Our imaginal task will be to welcome that image, welcoming "the Angel". (e.s.)
We engage the imaginal through images; we see ourselves through images, stories, and patterns. Our childhood stories are images, as is our home where we choose to live, our art, and magic, since magic happens in the gaps of reality, the unborn potential of the Abyss.
Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning. Myth is rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, a never-ending renewal.
The unrelenting outpouring of psychic images situates our immediate experience. The visionary path is psychic. Psychic reality includes the rich layering of our inner perception and response to the outer world and the sensations they might induce. Soul searches everywhere for myths that can nourish it.
“Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process—alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure—so that we don’t expect instant success or even any kind of finality. All goals and all endings are heuristic, important in their being imagined, but never literally fulfilled.”
— Thomas Moore
"What I'm trying to do is say lighten up and let life flow through you, and be on the waves as they go up and down. . . . You float your way. You drift. The essence of my approach is to be extravagantly accepting and forgiving of yourself and others. Ride the waves and let life take you where it has good things for you." Thomas Moore
Thomas mentions James Hillman’s intelligence and also cites his relationship to spirituality as somewhat wrong. I always wondered how someone like Hillman could make Soul a central notion of their psychology without considering it to be a spiritual dimension of Soul.
Thomas Moore
" Ultimately, if we talk about taking life seriously, everyone of us is alone. We just have to appreciate its complexity. And as the jungians say, pay tribute to his shadows. Irony can only result from the awareness of positive and negative aspects, successes and failures, territories where intelligence reigns and those where madness and ignorance reign.
It is important to recognize that we are both intelligent and stupid, often at the same time, as it is important to admit our fears and desires. This is almost enough to fill us with irony, and the honesty that comes with it will make our actions infinitely more reliable. There's nothing wrong with cultivating intense and quirky desires. And there's nothing wrong with being afraid of it. Only when we have embraced these two fundamental emotions can we see the nature of our soul, which forms the very foundation of our existence."
“The soul cares less about 'right' and 'wrong,' and more about what is nourishing or not.” ~~ Thomas Moore
"Every day a fragment of your past may come to mind. Process it by speaking about it thoughtfully with a friend—Soul-making"~~ Thomas Moore, Twitter @thomasmooreSoul 28 Aug 2015
"Conversation does not have to be confessional in order to be soulful." "… Talk from and about the soul may be about 'the good and desirable,' about the direction in which we are all going as human beings, about the life and world we commonly know. … It's favorite modes are reverie, reminiscence, reflection - these re- words that point to the soul's task of working imagination into past experience." Thomas Moore, (Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationships)
" The unilaterality and moralism of the different attacks on narcissism suggest that around this pillar rejected by ego and self-love can be soul: everything, even bad, must have some value in itself. Is it possible that our fair rejection of narcissism and selfishness hides a mystery about the nature of what the soul prefers? The fact that we negatively stigmatize narcissism is perhaps a defense against the difficult demand of the soul to be loved?" The care of the soul Thomas Moore
THE SPIRIT OF SEX
" If you want to know what sex is, think long and intensely about a flower, especially its beauty and the charm it exercises on the senses. So think of nature all, and the place you occupy in it. What gives charm and charm to a flower is also the essence of your sexuality. [...] Making love is a ritual that like any liturgy, aims to evoke the presence of the spirit, which will magically make human activity effective. Like all rituals, sex demands special attention, dedication and fantasy. It demands that kind of humility of the religious ritual in which the devotee invokes, and not force, the presence of a god or spirit ". Thomas Moore, The Spirit of Sex, pp. 23,26 23,26 23,26 23,26
The Mystery of Intimacy
The Word intimacy means "profoundly interior." It comes from the superlative form of the Latin word inter, meaning "within." It could be translated "within-est," or "most within." In our intimate relationships, the "most within" dimensions of ourselves and the other are engaged.
... The deep interiority of a person may be revealed in her transparent life: allowing her emotions to show, letting her thoughts out, being familiar with her deeper soul. It is the controlled, tightly lidded individual who finds intimacy difficult, because she is disconnected from her interiority, and therefore it has no place in her relationships. The unintimate person hovers nervously in air, separated both from her own depth and from the souls of others. Intimacy begins at home, with oneself. It does no good to try to find intimacy with friends, lovers and family if you are starting out from alienation and division yourself." Thomas Moore, "Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships"
"Naturally, no person and no relationship is going to be perfectly free of unconsciousness. To be completely conscious, were such a condition possible, is not even desirable, since "unconsciousness" is a negative word for what could be described more positively as the richness that lies beneath the surface of awareness. Much of what goes on in a relationship and even much that accounts for it's pleasures and rewards, is unconscious. Still conflicts and difficulties can arise from faulty connections to that richness of personality and soul."
~~ Thomas Moore, chapter two 'The Mystery of Intimacy,' "Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships"
THE SPIRITUALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
"I encounter many people in therapy who need more spirit in their makeup. Spirit is the element that wants to perfect, purify and transcend. It directs our attention to the future, the cosmos, and the infinite. It is abundant in education, progress, and vision. It allows us to advance and move upward in all our pursuits. It directs the attention away from ordinary life, the body, and sensual existence. Soul is the opposite: It lies embedded in our struggles and pleasures, in our ordinary circumstances and relationships, and in the emotions and fantasies that lie deep. We feel our soul stir at family gatherings and visits home, in deep friendships and romantic relationships. Comforting dinners and friendly lunches - food in general- makes the soul come alive. People often bring their soul issues to therapy and yet may need better ideas and visions for their lives."
~~ Thomas Moore, p.29, A Religion of One's Own
"Beauty feeds the soul, wakens it, and brings it to life as nothing else can. Beauty is a deep-seated reaction to some meaningful and stunning presentation of life. It stops you and gives you an instant promise of pleasure. But if you have no soul, you won't even see the beautiful in the thick layers of your practicality and in the density of your own ego. All your senses and your full imagination have to be alert when beauty makes its appearance. If you miss it, it is like going without food."— Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals
Living Imagination
In archetypal psychology, the image is allowed to express its essence, reflect, and echo, without being categorized, interpreted, or frozen into a fixed symbol. Even its own theory is a 'healing fiction,' which like 'evolution,' progress, or ideological growth pretend to not be myth. It rejects 'getting the world in order' as developmental fantasy and spiritual detachment from the world. Spirituality can be dissociative.
Thomas Moore says, “It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.” (p.9, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life)
There is also dissolution in the metaphorical depths. Fixed beliefs about an image say more about ourselves and our own interpretation of it. These images structure images into metaphor and models to grasp our humanity. Writers, artists, visionaries, philosophers, therapeutes, healers have always known this.
Soul: refers to the deepening of events into experiences ... the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy - that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," (Hillman, RVP)
"On this point we take inspiration from the work of Jung: “The gods have become diseases.” Jung is indicating that the formal cause of our distress and our abnormalities is the mythic figure, our psychic diseases are not imaginary, but rather imaginal (Corbin). Better still they are psychic diseases of fantasy, the sufferings of fantasies, of mythic realities, the incarnation of archetypal events." --James Hillman
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor. Word, metaphor, and epiphany fosters a relationship and engagement with soul, nonconscious processing, many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience. Are we all alters of universal consciousness?
Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another. There is a dialogue between experience and interpretation.
Hillman declares, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform. The soul “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Some of us are now wary of therapeutic scripting, whether in the Story-
centered approach of the jungians, or in the transcendent and shadowless goal of the humanists. Hillman condemns all existing forms of psychological practice for producing scripted behavior, "programs" for the Self which, he believes, insult the soul. "A discipline of the imagination does not have to become a program of the imagination." RVP
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
Archetypal psychology challenges orthodox psychological thinking by replacing its humanistic and scientific assumptions with a psychology founded in soul. Psyche is the word which Jung used to describe the totality of all our psychological processes. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.
Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. In either approach to the numinous, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not. Whatever soul touches becomes numinous.
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
Jung famously stated that the gods have become diseases and Hillman reiterated, "There is disease in the archetype." We recognize the Gods by our symptoms. They gods themselves can be quarrelsome, envious, deceive, and have sexual obsessions. They are vindictive, isolated, and vulnerable at the bottom. But we suffer the consequences.
The wounding and suffering itself is eternal and archetypal. The wound directs our existential development. Therefore, symptoms like dreams, are a road to the unconscious. We are never alone if we recognize archetypal dynamics in our lives.
Archetypes are real but invisible presences, the 'dark matter' of the soul. Psyche is the unconscious field. The voice of the psyche is unconscious communication. Entangled modes are superimposed, switchable interference patterns that always complement each other and together become invisible.
Archetypes, as liminal entities are numinous or “spiritual,” if “magical” is too strong a word. Magic is inherent in our instinctual roots. The 'supernatural' is the truly chaotic world of collective unconscious. In that "in between" place we can access who we are at the heart of it all. Symbols are grasped by the power of the heart.
Mythical figures, themes and images orient us as we learn to balance masculine strength and inner authority with feminine wisdom and inner power transforming identity and consciousness and patterned forms of attachment to the personal in the transpersonal.
As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Shame, vulnerability, and sexual objectification.
Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Strong religious or spiritual qualities (arousing, awe-inspiring, mysterious, dreadful) suggest the presence of a divinity which appeals to the higher emotions or aesthetic sense, the poetic basis of the soul, thereby altering ego-based consciousness. Experiencing awe can lower stress levels, expand our perception of time, and improve social well-being.
Uniting the opposites, resonant aesthetic structures of the numinal and phenomenal realms are held in tension, converging in “flowering light.” The angel allows us see and to know, and encounter our spiritual essence. The demon lover results from failure to differentiate our anima or animus from the darkness of our shadow, of incarnation.
Archetypes are part of our common biological, cultural and personal heritage, rooted in matter and spirit. We grow from a magical, to mythic, to rational, and transcendent perspective over our lifetimes. https://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/
"First, what is an archetype? Archetypes can be understood and described in many ways, and in fact much of the history of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle onward has been concerned with this very question. But for our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects--impels, structures, permeates--the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. One can think of them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as James Hillman does. Archetypes (for example, Venus or Mars) seem to have a transcendent, mythic quality, yet they also have very specific psychological expressions--as in the desire for love and the experience of beauty (Venus), or the impulse toward forceful activity and aggression (Mars). Moreover, archetypes seem to work from both within and without, for they can express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, yet also as events and situations in the external world." (Richatd Tarnas)
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92)."
"So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? We find the past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment, and the distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent is expressed as an ongoing pattern in our lives. These behaviors live on and affect our life and soul, while also providing the archetypal meaning of this behavior.
Psyche engages our capacity for experiencing and living within soul/spirit awareness, for entering psychic space: the descent of the divine and the ascent of unconsciousness, and discovering destiny in the fullness of human and cosmic presence. Engagement is an archetypal and spiritual experience, worthy of our attention, dedication, and even awe.
Hillman argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggests the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Among psychological theories, only archetypal psychology continuously insists on a constant re-visioning of psychology’s own ideas with shimmering symbols of semantic depth with an eye toward the aesthetics of transformation and mystery.
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (JH, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
Forgotten myths weave reality in stories by changing perception of reality through the deconstruction of our current worldview, a radical reformation of the story lines that will shape the future.
"If fear is a potential given with the facts of the cosmos, then it is latently present anywhere, everywhere, “worlds are continually in dread.” When you or I or any creature suddenly feel the presence of fear, we are placed in unmediated connection with the cosmos, engaged by the truth of reality, the truth that all things change, all things pass away, and the reliability of nothing can be assured. The keys to security lie less in calculated predictability than in the small omens of fear. For we are consumers of and consumed by the great conflagration of existence, Heraclitus’s fire, riding the slow imperceptible tremors of a quaking earth. Consequently, platforms of security, appeals to moral courage, repressive combativeness to hold fear at bay sheer our wits away from the actual protective angel who keeps us, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, in “fear and trembling” — and in freedom!"
James Hillman, Philosophical Intimations; The Legitimation of Fear
James Hillman, Philosophical Intimations; The Legitimation of Fear
PSYCHE IS SOUL
Soul: refers to the deepening of events into experiences ... the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy - that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," ...Hillman, RVP
"On this point we take inspiration from the work of Jung: “The gods have become diseases.” Jung is indicating that the formal cause of our distress and our abnormalities is the mythic figure, our psychic diseases are not imaginary, but rather imaginal (Corbin). Better still they are psychic diseases of fantasy, the sufferings of fantasies, of mythic realities, the incarnation of archetypal events." --James Hillman
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor.
Religious soul, the liberation of consciousness from identity and form, is different than psychological soul, the living essence of embodiment beyond space and time. Essentially immortal, both the absolute/transcendent and the relative/immanent aspects of consciousness may be ultimately one and the same.
Word, metaphor, and epiphany fosters a relationship and engagement with soul, nonconscious processing, many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience. Are we all alters of universal consciousness?
Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another. There is a dialogue between experience and interpretation.
Hillman declares, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform. The soul “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Some of us are now wary of therapeutic scripting, whether in the Story-
centered approach of the jungians, or in the transcendent and shadowless goal of the humanists. Hillman condemns all existing forms of psychological practice for producing scripted behavior, "programs" for the Self which, he believes, insult the soul. "A discipline of the imagination does not have to become a program of the imagination." RVP
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
Archetypal psychology challenges orthodox psychological thinking by replacing its humanistic and scientific assumptions with a psychology founded in soul. Psyche is the word which Jung used to describe the totality of all our psychological processes. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.
Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. Whatever soul touches becomes numinous. In either approach to the numinous, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not.
Archetypes are real but invisible presences, the 'dark matter' of the soul. Psyche is the unconscious field. The voice of the psyche is unconscious communication. Entangled modes are superimposed, switchable interference patterns that always complement each other and together become invisible.
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92)."
"So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? We find the past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment, and the distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent is expressed as an ongoing pattern in our lives. These behaviors live on and affect our life and soul, while also providing the archetypal meaning of this behavior.
Psyche engages our capacity for experiencing and living within soul/spirit awareness, for entering psychic space: the descent of the divine and the ascent of unconsciousness, and discovering destiny in the fullness of human and cosmic presence. Engagement is an archetypal and spiritual experience, worthy of our attention, dedication, and even awe.
Hillman argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggests the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Among psychological theories, only archetypal psychology continuously insists on a constant re-visioning of psychology’s own ideas with shimmering symbols of semantic depth with an eye toward the aesthetics of transformation and mystery.
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (JH, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
Forgotten myths weave reality in stories by changing perception of reality through the deconstruction of our current worldview, a radical reformation of the story lines that will shape the future.
Soul
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." --James Hillman
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." --James Hillman
RVP, 117: "The soul's first habitual activity is reflection .... [and] reflection by means of experience. Otherwise we have had the events without experiencing them, and the experience of what happened comes only later when we gain an idea of it--when it can be envisioned by an archetypal idea [i.e., a mythical narrative]. Also, 128: "Through psychologizing [i.e., soulmaking] I change the idea of any literal action at all -- political, scientific, personal-- into a metaphorical enactment. I see the act and scene and stance I am in, and not only the action I am into ... entering all actions in the role of an idea."
Soul is a fluid psychic energy system. Soul is a 'root metaphor.' There is no escaping soul. There is psychological meaning in everything. Any psychical state then can be input to a psychological experience. For Hillman, even death is a metaphor, perhaps akin to the ego death of spontaneous regeneration or rebirth.
Soul doesn't understand things the way our egos do. "The soul is less an object of knowledge than it is a way of knowing the object, a way of knowing knowledge itself." (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 130-131.)
Hillman sought to shift "the focus of Jung's psychology from individuation to 'soul-making.''' It's not as if we can stop the natural process of individuation, even if we actively change our perspective, a continuous engagement with the riches of the imagination; an upwelling, not an image but a shaping tendency, a rhythm of events and responses.
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Soul is less like a religious concept than an idea about the nature of the imagination: "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," Hillman asserts.
" For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths. In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
http://mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html
The soul is the 'friend' or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart, experiential understanding. The emotion we have when we are open and motivated to explore the unknown is a positive emotion -- openness to ideas and creativity, the aspiration for a metamythical life.
Psyche as Ontological Metaphor
Psyche is an ontological metaphor, imaginal yet real. Psyche is image is soul is ensouled world is Imaginal realm is psyche... No one sees what we see even if they see it, too. Most critically about Hillman’s notion of metaphor leads to an ontology of image that purports to “undo” the metaphysics of temporal priority. Here the literal and 'as if' metaphorical reverberate against each other.
Hillman insists on using the “as-if ” prefix to remind us that the certainty of every idea, every belief, every concept, everything that is immediately present to us in constituting our world, is metaphorical in nature (RV, p. 157). By “sticking to the image” through metaphorical analogy,
Hillman is able to amplify the meaning of one’s life, to deepen and complexify the nature of one’s relationship to self and others and dreams. Hillman argues against translating the significance of the dream into the dreamer’s life: which is to say that we should make no suppositions about the dream in order to resolve a problem, or fulfill a wish, or find the right interpretation to make sense of situations in our waking life.
Hillman claims that metaphor is “particularly psychological because, as it were, it sees through itself. The binary opposition (Levi-Strauss on myth and Harald Weinrich on metaphor), contained within it is contained by it. . . At one and the same time it says something and sees through what it says” (RVP, p.156).
For Hillman it is in realizing the paradoxical presence of two or more meanings in a single image that we discover the timeless and enigmatic nature of personified archetypes. ontological metaphor finds meaning in an analogizing process that uses “as-if ” fictions to transform reality into mythic consciousness.
"By virtue of their inconceivability, their enigmatic and ambiguous
nature, these metaphorical premises elude every literalness, so that the
primary urge of seeing through everything fixed, posited, and defined
begins archetypally in these fictional premises themselves. Here I am
seeking to ground possibility in the impossible, searching for a new
way to account for the unknown in the still more unknown, ignotum
per ignotius. Rather than explain I would complicate, rather than
define I would compound, rather than resolve I would confirm the
enigma” (RVP,p. 152).
Hillman
means here that the psychological must be found in the middle ground
between the hearing of what is said and the “seeing through” to its image.
Yet such disclosure of the middle ground is only possible when critical
work leads to spatial relations being “unhinged” from the concept of time,
which, on another level, is why Hillman insists that psychology always
finds itself somewhere in time. Time in this context refers to something
like temporality, which, in Kantian parlance, is the condition of possibility
for the understanding of psyche and not a transcendent notion that would
seek to keep psyche in her place7.
“Seeing through,” then, is the term Hillman uses when describing
the metaphorical method of archetypal psychology. This method provides
a space for temporality that would be otherwise suppressed by a concept
of time that adheres to the law of contradiction, (Olson; Pomo)
...the
act of “seeing through” presupposes a self-critical movement that not only
recognizes the literal meaning expressed in an utterance, but also discloses
the metaphor that is concealed or overlooked in its presence when the focus
of the method remains purely on the image itself. Accordingly, things are
“freed” from the logic of conceptual time to succeed one another in various
times or to occur just as easily at one and the same time. From this point of
view things happen to appear in flux and often share space in contradictory
or paradoxical ways. The paradox of “seeing through” is that Hillman’s
archetypal psychology, which on the face of it appears postmodern, lays
bare the Greek mythos from ancient times as it shines through the “here”
and “now” presence of our everyday lives.
To have “literal” knowledge of an object means that
we must forget that its foundation will always have been a metaphor, a
certain fiction; and the moment the subject of knowledge becomes critical
enough in its thinking to “see through” the relationship to its objects
and acknowledges that fact, the foundation of singular meaning turns
to something like quicksand, a morass of signifying possibility. Here the
boundary being traversed is the difference between the rational and the
imaginal, the metaphysical and the metaphorical, where the unquestioned
presence of a conjunctive “crisscross” is disclosed as the complex “originary”
structure at the center of Hillman’s view of metaphor. In granting priority
to the imaginal, Hillman is led to a theory of metaphor in which the locus
of meaning is found less in a figure of speech and more in the everyday
experience of human existence (RV, p. 156).
Hillman
proposes an ontological view of metaphor that borrows from the work of
GiambattistaVico who takes metaphor to be a “mini-myth” or a “fable in
brief ” (RV, p. 156). Hillman realizes that Vico’s conflation of metaphor
and myth as a form of personifying or mythologizing allows his notion
of image to have currency in the extra-linguistic world. “Metaphors,” he
writes, “are more than ways of speaking; they are ways of perceiving, feeling,
and existing” (RV, p. 156). Indeed, it is through “recognizing our concrete
existence as metaphors, as mythic enactments” that we are able to enter the
myths that permit us to understand our relation to the Gods, because in
myth is where the Gods are. So if, as Hillman claims, metaphor refers to
the Gods in us, then “myths are the traditional narratives of the interaction
of Gods and humans, a dramatic account ‘of deeds of the daimones’” (RV, p. 157).
http://www.janushead.org/13-2/olson.pdf
Images and metaphor's are 'as if' fictions. Metaphor is important because if we can't say what a thing is "like," we are held in its thrall unable to incorporate it as an experience. In other words, when you are 'in it', you can't 'see it'. As well as a mirror the soul has also been likened to symbolic metaphors of a journey or quest, a stream of consciousness, a vast ocean of energy, and a deep cave of eternity containing the treasure of all mankind.
The 'inner journey' is a primary metaphor:
"The psyche is not an object, a thing; it is a process. Motion is its essence. Just as the outer landscape flows by when we travel, so before the inward eye images succeed one another in a constant motion picture. It is these which we tune in on when we shut our eyes to outer things and step into our chariots for a voyage within." (Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey)
Metaphor is a pervasive field of imagery intimately linked to self-narrative and internal descriptions of what our experience 'is like.' Everyday language is full of tacit metaphors that shape the way we think, act, characterize and interpret our experience -- alternative accounts beyond objective truth. It is fundamental to our conceptual system and frameworks, including worldview.
Lakoff’s (1988) definition of metaphor is a schema, “a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground.” His central thesis is that metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which new information may be accommodated, forming a cognitive map. (Metaphors We Live By)
Self-knowledge and awareness helps us navigate our way through our suffering. Psyche or soul is a root metaphor of the self-deepening reflective process, reflexive mirroring with its infinite re-valuing and re-visioning. In imagery self-reflectivity is expressed as repetition: recurrent references, intrinsic circularity, reflexive epistemology.
The mirror motif suggests the emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness -- being aware of being aware of being. Soul's reflective perspective is a reflexive, self-reflecting, or feedback-based model of self-consciousness.
Hillman's psychology is grounded in myth and archetype. Hillman uses 'archetypal' as an adjective, rather than noun such as Jung's reified agency of a 'collective unconscious,' a supraordinate, autonomous transpersonal psyche that remains the source, ground, and wellspring from which all unconscious and conscious manifestations derive.
Archetypal psychology likens itself to polytheistic mythology that attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses. The images themselves can be imagined as originating in the Anima Mundi, in the world’s soul. Hillman notes "that is a move that hardly anybody makes, but of course that is what’s so.”
‘Archetypal psychology is not a psychology of archetypes. Its primary activity is not matching themes in mythology and art to similar themes in life. Rather, the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry.’ (The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (p. 15). Taylor and Francis. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. Therefore, for Hillman, the Anima Mundi (World Soul) is necessary.
Hillman says, the underworld is the psyche. An experience of it radically alters our experience of life. He describes a calling to descent into psychological darkness with no specific metaphysical objective. The world itself has a ''soul.'' ''Recognition that the soul is also in the world, not just in people,'' Hillman said, ''can awaken us from the psychotherapeutic trance."
Jung said, "The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises." Hillman countered, "In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."
Descent tends to coincide with a psychological or physical crisis. Stressful conditions precipitate the descent, during which the patterns that give “shape and significance” to our lives and works are revealed. Hillman outlined the relation between Hades and eidola, those “ideas that form and shape life.”
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." (James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20)
Psyche stands alone as having value and purpose apart from any metaphysical system. Soul is a self-creating song from which a mythos is developed.
Hillman called ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
''Psychology,'' Hillman wrote in Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper & Row), his major critique of the field, ''has been unconcerned with myth and imagination, and has shown little care for history, beauty, sensuality or eloquence - the Renaissance themes. Its pragmatism, whether in the clinic or in the laboratory, kills fantasy or subverts it into the service of practical goals.''
In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
A polytheistic perspective reflects the myriad possibilities of the human psyche, imagined as gods and goddesses, myths and metaphors whose polymorphous nature speak for the instincts that shape our thoughts and actions.
The ideology of archetypal psychology insists on a psychology guided by aesthetic concerns and polytheistic imagining. Hillman warned against the reductive tendencies of interpretation and theoretical speculation. He advocated "sticking to the image", whose often indistinct or paradoxical language speaks, he argued, with more authenticity than verbal discourse.
Underworld
In psychological terms, the descent and ascent motif is a metaphor for ego-consciousness contacting the unconscious and enduring the dark moments of human life. Soul has an intimate connection with death that binds psyche together with the underworld and dreams. We explore the psychological importance of engaging with the underworld through a myriad of archetypal styles of consciousness.
Entering the underworld, the land of soul, is a shift from a material to psychical and aesthetic perspective. Anyone who has experienced their own underworld will relate to archetypal psychology. Resemblance and reversion are bridges to an image and its event. It validates and gives voice to those personal and cultural experiences of descent that are marginalized and suppressed in a western culture that privileges optimism, objective science, consumerism and protestantism.
Soul: refers to the deepening of events into experiences ... the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy - that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," ...Hillman, RVP
"On this point we take inspiration from the work of Jung: “The gods have become diseases.” Jung is indicating that the formal cause of our distress and our abnormalities is the mythic figure, our psychic diseases are not imaginary, but rather imaginal (Corbin). Better still they are psychic diseases of fantasy, the sufferings of fantasies, of mythic realities, the incarnation of archetypal events." --James Hillman
Hillman's archetypal psychology is rooted in the "poetic basis of mind", aesthetics, and imagination. If everything is poetry, the literalisms dissolve into depth of experience rather than scientific philosophy or practice. This brings back soul to the process through imagination, fantasy, myth, and metaphor.
Religious soul, the liberation of consciousness from identity and form, is different than psychological soul, the living essence of embodiment beyond space and time. Essentially immortal, both the absolute/transcendent and the relative/immanent aspects of consciousness may be ultimately one and the same.
Word, metaphor, and epiphany fosters a relationship and engagement with soul, nonconscious processing, many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience. Are we all alters of universal consciousness?
Hillman realized, “The Spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.” Spirit views soul as vague and inferior but Hillman imagines them balancing one another. There is a dialogue between experience and interpretation.
Hillman declares, “The deepest subjectivity is not personal.” (Lament of the Dead) Even if we use therapeutic means from ancient philosophies or traditions, we don't have to drive ourselves toward a well-being target, psychologically or spiritually. Ancient wisdom can help us flourish and transform. The soul “sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience” (Hillman, 1975, p. 69).
Some of us are now wary of therapeutic scripting, whether in the Story-
centered approach of the jungians, or in the transcendent and shadowless goal of the humanists. Hillman condemns all existing forms of psychological practice for producing scripted behavior, "programs" for the Self which, he believes, insult the soul. "A discipline of the imagination does not have to become a program of the imagination." RVP
Hillman said, "Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination." (RVP)
"In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."--James Hillman, Senex and Puer, Spring Publications, 2005
For Hillman, "the purpose of a metaphysic is to provide meaningful, soulful, and beautiful order to the world we live in, complete with all the facets of life that we experience in our day to day lives. ...Knowledge becomes gnosis when things and experiences, by virtue of their being known, suggest their subtle bodies in the Anima Mundi. Rather than abstracting us from the world, knowing takes us more directly into its soul as aesthetic presentation."
Archetypal psychology challenges orthodox psychological thinking by replacing its humanistic and scientific assumptions with a psychology founded in soul. Psyche is the word which Jung used to describe the totality of all our psychological processes. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.
Hillman diverges from Jung by adopting a multi-centered approach to natural and 'divine' phenomena. Whatever soul touches becomes numinous. In either approach to the numinous, this personified relationship is at the core of our self-exploration, whether we 'believe' in God or not.
Archetypes are real but invisible presences, the 'dark matter' of the soul. Psyche is the unconscious field. The voice of the psyche is unconscious communication. Entangled modes are superimposed, switchable interference patterns that always complement each other and together become invisible.
Eldo Stellucci reminds us that, "The INVISIBLE is the "connecting network" and in which we experience our authentic existence if, as Heraclitus says, "the hidden plot is stronger than the manifested one" (fr.55 / A 20), adding that "the true constitution of each what is it used to hide "(fr 123 / A92)."
"So it will be the surprising and numinous encounter with the invisible to make the "VISIBLE" significant of that ulteriority of meaning that really nourishes our psychological life. The invisible opens the visible to the Mystery that lives there. But what is this "invisible"? What is this network that connects? How do we experience it and where do we meet it? What happens really and psychologically on the border between the visible and the invisible?"
Hillman says, "Reflective insights may arise like the lotus from the still lake of meditation, while creative insights come at the raw and tender edge of confrontation at the borderlines where we are most sensitive and exposed - and curiously most alone. To meet you, I must risk myself as I am. The naked human is challenged. It would be safer reflecting alone than confronting you. And even the favorite dictum of reflective psychology - a psychology which has consciousness rather than love as its main goal - 'Know thyself'' will be insufficient for a creative psychology. Not 'Know thyself' through reflection, but 'Reveal thyself', which is the same as the commandment to love, since nowhere are we more revealed than in our loving."
Is it possible that regaining our own interiority correlates with rediscovering infolded dimensions of nature and time? We find the past, present, and future collapse into a timeless moment, and the distinctions between conscious and unconscious intent is expressed as an ongoing pattern in our lives. These behaviors live on and affect our life and soul, while also providing the archetypal meaning of this behavior.
Psyche engages our capacity for experiencing and living within soul/spirit awareness, for entering psychic space: the descent of the divine and the ascent of unconsciousness, and discovering destiny in the fullness of human and cosmic presence. Engagement is an archetypal and spiritual experience, worthy of our attention, dedication, and even awe.
Hillman argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggests the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, that draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Among psychological theories, only archetypal psychology continuously insists on a constant re-visioning of psychology’s own ideas with shimmering symbols of semantic depth with an eye toward the aesthetics of transformation and mystery.
“Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen… We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (JH, Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 101-2).”
Forgotten myths weave reality in stories by changing perception of reality through the deconstruction of our current worldview, a radical reformation of the story lines that will shape the future.
Soul
"The soul of the world is that particular spark of soul, that germinal image that offers itself in transparency in everything in its visible form. The soul is the archetype of life: in all of us, the soul is all the faces of our being, our style of doing, the direction of our self." --James Hillman
"The recall of the soul is convincing; it is a seduction that leads to psychological faith, a faith in images and in thought of the heart, leading to an animation of the world. Soul creates attachments and ties. Makes us fall in love." --James Hillman
RVP, 117: "The soul's first habitual activity is reflection .... [and] reflection by means of experience. Otherwise we have had the events without experiencing them, and the experience of what happened comes only later when we gain an idea of it--when it can be envisioned by an archetypal idea [i.e., a mythical narrative]. Also, 128: "Through psychologizing [i.e., soulmaking] I change the idea of any literal action at all -- political, scientific, personal-- into a metaphorical enactment. I see the act and scene and stance I am in, and not only the action I am into ... entering all actions in the role of an idea."
Soul is a fluid psychic energy system. Soul is a 'root metaphor.' There is no escaping soul. There is psychological meaning in everything. Any psychical state then can be input to a psychological experience. For Hillman, even death is a metaphor, perhaps akin to the ego death of spontaneous regeneration or rebirth.
Soul doesn't understand things the way our egos do. "The soul is less an object of knowledge than it is a way of knowing the object, a way of knowing knowledge itself." (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 130-131.)
Hillman sought to shift "the focus of Jung's psychology from individuation to 'soul-making.''' It's not as if we can stop the natural process of individuation, even if we actively change our perspective, a continuous engagement with the riches of the imagination; an upwelling, not an image but a shaping tendency, a rhythm of events and responses.
"In other words, only when imagination is recognized as an engagement at the borders of the human and a work in relationships with mythic dominants can this articulation of images be considered a psycho-poesis (David Miller) or soul-making." (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.)
Soul is less like a religious concept than an idea about the nature of the imagination: "To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy," Hillman asserts.
" For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths. In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
http://mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html
The soul is the 'friend' or the heart of the beloved that gives us generosity, moderateness, and eloquence -- the opening heart, experiential understanding. The emotion we have when we are open and motivated to explore the unknown is a positive emotion -- openness to ideas and creativity, the aspiration for a metamythical life.
Psyche as Ontological Metaphor
Psyche is an ontological metaphor, imaginal yet real. Psyche is image is soul is ensouled world is Imaginal realm is psyche... No one sees what we see even if they see it, too. Most critically about Hillman’s notion of metaphor leads to an ontology of image that purports to “undo” the metaphysics of temporal priority. Here the literal and 'as if' metaphorical reverberate against each other.
Hillman insists on using the “as-if ” prefix to remind us that the certainty of every idea, every belief, every concept, everything that is immediately present to us in constituting our world, is metaphorical in nature (RV, p. 157). By “sticking to the image” through metaphorical analogy,
Hillman is able to amplify the meaning of one’s life, to deepen and complexify the nature of one’s relationship to self and others and dreams. Hillman argues against translating the significance of the dream into the dreamer’s life: which is to say that we should make no suppositions about the dream in order to resolve a problem, or fulfill a wish, or find the right interpretation to make sense of situations in our waking life.
Hillman claims that metaphor is “particularly psychological because, as it were, it sees through itself. The binary opposition (Levi-Strauss on myth and Harald Weinrich on metaphor), contained within it is contained by it. . . At one and the same time it says something and sees through what it says” (RVP, p.156).
For Hillman it is in realizing the paradoxical presence of two or more meanings in a single image that we discover the timeless and enigmatic nature of personified archetypes. ontological metaphor finds meaning in an analogizing process that uses “as-if ” fictions to transform reality into mythic consciousness.
"By virtue of their inconceivability, their enigmatic and ambiguous
nature, these metaphorical premises elude every literalness, so that the
primary urge of seeing through everything fixed, posited, and defined
begins archetypally in these fictional premises themselves. Here I am
seeking to ground possibility in the impossible, searching for a new
way to account for the unknown in the still more unknown, ignotum
per ignotius. Rather than explain I would complicate, rather than
define I would compound, rather than resolve I would confirm the
enigma” (RVP,p. 152).
Hillman
means here that the psychological must be found in the middle ground
between the hearing of what is said and the “seeing through” to its image.
Yet such disclosure of the middle ground is only possible when critical
work leads to spatial relations being “unhinged” from the concept of time,
which, on another level, is why Hillman insists that psychology always
finds itself somewhere in time. Time in this context refers to something
like temporality, which, in Kantian parlance, is the condition of possibility
for the understanding of psyche and not a transcendent notion that would
seek to keep psyche in her place7.
“Seeing through,” then, is the term Hillman uses when describing
the metaphorical method of archetypal psychology. This method provides
a space for temporality that would be otherwise suppressed by a concept
of time that adheres to the law of contradiction, (Olson; Pomo)
...the
act of “seeing through” presupposes a self-critical movement that not only
recognizes the literal meaning expressed in an utterance, but also discloses
the metaphor that is concealed or overlooked in its presence when the focus
of the method remains purely on the image itself. Accordingly, things are
“freed” from the logic of conceptual time to succeed one another in various
times or to occur just as easily at one and the same time. From this point of
view things happen to appear in flux and often share space in contradictory
or paradoxical ways. The paradox of “seeing through” is that Hillman’s
archetypal psychology, which on the face of it appears postmodern, lays
bare the Greek mythos from ancient times as it shines through the “here”
and “now” presence of our everyday lives.
To have “literal” knowledge of an object means that
we must forget that its foundation will always have been a metaphor, a
certain fiction; and the moment the subject of knowledge becomes critical
enough in its thinking to “see through” the relationship to its objects
and acknowledges that fact, the foundation of singular meaning turns
to something like quicksand, a morass of signifying possibility. Here the
boundary being traversed is the difference between the rational and the
imaginal, the metaphysical and the metaphorical, where the unquestioned
presence of a conjunctive “crisscross” is disclosed as the complex “originary”
structure at the center of Hillman’s view of metaphor. In granting priority
to the imaginal, Hillman is led to a theory of metaphor in which the locus
of meaning is found less in a figure of speech and more in the everyday
experience of human existence (RV, p. 156).
Hillman
proposes an ontological view of metaphor that borrows from the work of
GiambattistaVico who takes metaphor to be a “mini-myth” or a “fable in
brief ” (RV, p. 156). Hillman realizes that Vico’s conflation of metaphor
and myth as a form of personifying or mythologizing allows his notion
of image to have currency in the extra-linguistic world. “Metaphors,” he
writes, “are more than ways of speaking; they are ways of perceiving, feeling,
and existing” (RV, p. 156). Indeed, it is through “recognizing our concrete
existence as metaphors, as mythic enactments” that we are able to enter the
myths that permit us to understand our relation to the Gods, because in
myth is where the Gods are. So if, as Hillman claims, metaphor refers to
the Gods in us, then “myths are the traditional narratives of the interaction
of Gods and humans, a dramatic account ‘of deeds of the daimones’” (RV, p. 157).
http://www.janushead.org/13-2/olson.pdf
Images and metaphor's are 'as if' fictions. Metaphor is important because if we can't say what a thing is "like," we are held in its thrall unable to incorporate it as an experience. In other words, when you are 'in it', you can't 'see it'. As well as a mirror the soul has also been likened to symbolic metaphors of a journey or quest, a stream of consciousness, a vast ocean of energy, and a deep cave of eternity containing the treasure of all mankind.
The 'inner journey' is a primary metaphor:
"The psyche is not an object, a thing; it is a process. Motion is its essence. Just as the outer landscape flows by when we travel, so before the inward eye images succeed one another in a constant motion picture. It is these which we tune in on when we shut our eyes to outer things and step into our chariots for a voyage within." (Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey)
Metaphor is a pervasive field of imagery intimately linked to self-narrative and internal descriptions of what our experience 'is like.' Everyday language is full of tacit metaphors that shape the way we think, act, characterize and interpret our experience -- alternative accounts beyond objective truth. It is fundamental to our conceptual system and frameworks, including worldview.
Lakoff’s (1988) definition of metaphor is a schema, “a unifying framework that links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground.” His central thesis is that metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which new information may be accommodated, forming a cognitive map. (Metaphors We Live By)
Self-knowledge and awareness helps us navigate our way through our suffering. Psyche or soul is a root metaphor of the self-deepening reflective process, reflexive mirroring with its infinite re-valuing and re-visioning. In imagery self-reflectivity is expressed as repetition: recurrent references, intrinsic circularity, reflexive epistemology.
The mirror motif suggests the emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness -- being aware of being aware of being. Soul's reflective perspective is a reflexive, self-reflecting, or feedback-based model of self-consciousness.
Hillman's psychology is grounded in myth and archetype. Hillman uses 'archetypal' as an adjective, rather than noun such as Jung's reified agency of a 'collective unconscious,' a supraordinate, autonomous transpersonal psyche that remains the source, ground, and wellspring from which all unconscious and conscious manifestations derive.
Archetypal psychology likens itself to polytheistic mythology that attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses. The images themselves can be imagined as originating in the Anima Mundi, in the world’s soul. Hillman notes "that is a move that hardly anybody makes, but of course that is what’s so.”
‘Archetypal psychology is not a psychology of archetypes. Its primary activity is not matching themes in mythology and art to similar themes in life. Rather, the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry.’ (The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (p. 15). Taylor and Francis. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. Therefore, for Hillman, the Anima Mundi (World Soul) is necessary.
Hillman says, the underworld is the psyche. An experience of it radically alters our experience of life. He describes a calling to descent into psychological darkness with no specific metaphysical objective. The world itself has a ''soul.'' ''Recognition that the soul is also in the world, not just in people,'' Hillman said, ''can awaken us from the psychotherapeutic trance."
Jung said, "The unconscious is the matrix of all metaphysical statements, of all mythology, of all philosophy, and of all expressions of life that are based on psychological premises." Hillman countered, "In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'. [...] The archetypal neuros is collective and affects all with the metaphysical affliction."
Descent tends to coincide with a psychological or physical crisis. Stressful conditions precipitate the descent, during which the patterns that give “shape and significance” to our lives and works are revealed. Hillman outlined the relation between Hades and eidola, those “ideas that form and shape life.”
"Even if the recollection of mythology is perhaps the single most characteristic move shared by all 'archetypalists', the myths themselves are understood as metaphors—never as transcendental metaphysics whose categories are divine figures. ... Myths do not ground, they open." (James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Dallas: Spring, 1983, p. 20)
Psyche stands alone as having value and purpose apart from any metaphysical system. Soul is a self-creating song from which a mythos is developed.
Hillman called ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
''Psychology,'' Hillman wrote in Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper & Row), his major critique of the field, ''has been unconcerned with myth and imagination, and has shown little care for history, beauty, sensuality or eloquence - the Renaissance themes. Its pragmatism, whether in the clinic or in the laboratory, kills fantasy or subverts it into the service of practical goals.''
In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
A polytheistic perspective reflects the myriad possibilities of the human psyche, imagined as gods and goddesses, myths and metaphors whose polymorphous nature speak for the instincts that shape our thoughts and actions.
The ideology of archetypal psychology insists on a psychology guided by aesthetic concerns and polytheistic imagining. Hillman warned against the reductive tendencies of interpretation and theoretical speculation. He advocated "sticking to the image", whose often indistinct or paradoxical language speaks, he argued, with more authenticity than verbal discourse.
Underworld
In psychological terms, the descent and ascent motif is a metaphor for ego-consciousness contacting the unconscious and enduring the dark moments of human life. Soul has an intimate connection with death that binds psyche together with the underworld and dreams. We explore the psychological importance of engaging with the underworld through a myriad of archetypal styles of consciousness.
Entering the underworld, the land of soul, is a shift from a material to psychical and aesthetic perspective. Anyone who has experienced their own underworld will relate to archetypal psychology. Resemblance and reversion are bridges to an image and its event. It validates and gives voice to those personal and cultural experiences of descent that are marginalized and suppressed in a western culture that privileges optimism, objective science, consumerism and protestantism.
CHIRON PUBLICATIONS
https://chironpublications.com/
CONVERSING WITH JAMES HILLMAN
The Conversing with James Hillman volumes collect together articles presented at each annual James Hillman Symposium; selected, innovative essays on Hillman; and original work by Hillman himself. The volumes fulfill the mission of the Symposium to encourage conversations about Hillman’s major ideas and concepts in conjunction with psychological as well as cultural topics and pay tribute to his life and career.
https://jameshillmansymposium.com/publications/
https://chironpublications.com/
CONVERSING WITH JAMES HILLMAN
The Conversing with James Hillman volumes collect together articles presented at each annual James Hillman Symposium; selected, innovative essays on Hillman; and original work by Hillman himself. The volumes fulfill the mission of the Symposium to encourage conversations about Hillman’s major ideas and concepts in conjunction with psychological as well as cultural topics and pay tribute to his life and career.
https://jameshillmansymposium.com/publications/
"What you do to your face has societal implications. Your face is the Other for everyone else. If it no longer bares its essential vulnerability, then the grounds for caring, the demand for honesty, the call to respond on which societal cohesion rests have lost their originating source." pg. 150, Force of Character, James Hillman
INTRO
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jhbs.21945
https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1890&context=etd
Archetypal psychology was developed by James Hillman in the second half of the 20th century. It is in the Jungian tradition and most directly related to Analytical psychology and contemporary neo-Platonics by a superposition of interactive gods. Jung saw that "In the depths is human history, and figures and creatures and scenes and landscapes and voices and instruction and an extraordinary world, that’s the depth of personality."
Our purpose comes with us into the world (Hillman's acorn theory). Knowing this comes from experientially knowing self, others, and world or kosmos -- an opportunity to look at yourself, rethink life and death, taking care of yourself and others. Psyche is the imaginal 'middle ground' between the physical and spiritual.
What is the Psychè, the soul? Jung says Soul is the archetype of Life itself. Post-Jungian, James Hillman suggests that the soul is not a concept but a symbol. He describes it as a perspective, as deepening, noticing, penetrating, and insight. How do we embrace the essentially unknowable?
Virgil suggests that “in medio tutissimus ibis” we go safely by the middle course; this echoes the Middle Pillar of the Tree-of-Life whose own balanced middle is Tiphareth, the expression of our collective psyche “which is the Man, and the Beauty and Harmony of Things, and the Gold in the Kingdom of Metals, and the Sun among the Planets.”
We want to call all of the gods to be present during this lifelong process of soulmaking. We may find archetypal resonance in stories, but we do not require the presence of archetypes to ensoul. We can develop a moral vision based on awakening the anima mundi, not pathologizing or diagnostics.
Joseph Campbell suggests the polarities that bracket the middle or metaphorical way of psyche: “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
Greg Nixon counters, "gods – otherwise known as archetypes: deep constellations of formative psychic patterns – really do exist. Yes, such words could be metaphors, but since these formative patterns have real effects in our daily world and do respond to our creative interactions with them, they are real powers, more than metaphor abstractions."
The ancients lived immersed in an animate world and did not experience a division between ideas in what we now call “the mind” and “things” in the world. Aristotle for instance could say “the soul (psyche) is, somehow, all things.” The continuity between world and soul, world and body was the primary fact; this body was continuous with the world.
Archetypal Psychology departs radically from ego and developmental psychologies by changing perceptions, the development of a ''sense of soul,'' and the ''cultivation of imagination,'' "Whatness" finally emerges as more important than "deepening" as Hillman refocuses away from the human being to the actual world in which we live to the "whatness" that surrounds us.
Soul moves outward, into the world. This shift toward the world is the critical step toward aesthetic activity than a science. We recover the Soul from its alienation through some dramatic, story-centered method.
We experience ourselves in varied and culture-specific ways. The field of infinite meanings creates metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things as new expressive forms arise of their own accord.
Hillman suggests an escape from subjectivity through relationship with the trans-human psyche, the movement of the soul into the world. On our underworld descent, we encounteer the objective psyche, the interiority of the external world. The mythic dimension is only a small step from the experience of a numen.'' Whatever soul touches becomes numinous.
We discover that the inside is actually outside - that the subjective is objective. Jung said “the psyche creates reality everyday.” But the psyche is not in us - we are in the psyche. When Jung tells us that psyche is image what he means is that reality is image. All of it. We are in the world of imagination because there simply is nothing else.
https://www.academia.edu/38590621/The_Escape_from_Subjectivity_in_Jung_Corbin_and_Hillman?source=swp_share&fbclid=IwAR22y6KEAaDkW4JSdrOJpoK5CiX8FYYaMTLchEUgQJg7bfEsMw6ltBPQ52M
Alchemy
Alchemy suggests that the soul may go through substantial change in its very essence. It is an ancient art; so is alchemical psychology. The aesthetic approach of art is as inseparable from alchemy as its experimental nature.
Alchemy is the soulful language of transformation and transmutation, a way of life rooted in eternal cycles. It is a personal experience of the Laws of Nature that invites the materialization of Wisdom. Energy is matter in volatile form and the natural mechanism of creation. Matter and mankind pass through archetypal transitional states. Alchemy amplifies this process, changing our fundamental psychophysical makeup. Even our failures have value.
Alchemy itself is a prescription for the Nigredo depression, the modern malaise of dark futures and consumer conformity. It defines a perennial frontier where eccentricity elbows out enough room to thrive in unconventional ways of thinking, acting and being, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Alchemy leads us to experiment, break boundaries and transcend categories, including those of science, art and belief. Intuitively knowing more than we know we know, some navigational part of ourselves functions as Mercurial guide.
This magical art connects private consciousness with the unified global field of awareness. The world is animated and all things are interconnected. The spiritual technology of today’s alchemy offsets the alienating effects of modern technology and helps create a totally new environment in the same sense that great art does – a development in the pattern of human experience. Alchemical media widens our experiential field. It offers the perennial promise of rebirth at an enhanced level of functional adaptability.
"Hillman in The Seduction of Black observes that black dissolves meaning and the hope for meaning. It “breaks the paradigm, it dissolves whatever we rely upon as real and dear.” He says that “its negative force deprives consciousness of its dependable and comforting notions of goodness.” If knowledge was considered to be good, then “black confuses it with clouds of unknowing,” if life be good, then “black stands for death,” and if moral virtues be good, then “black means evil.” When an individual is in the nigredo, the soul is said to descend to the underworld and to generate images specific to that stage which include rot, decomposition, skeletons, putrefaction, decay, death, graves, corpses, Sol niger (the black sun) and these images are experienced in the form of dreams, visions, emotions, and even in symptoms of the body. But when they manifest literally in the events of the world, it is as if the world soul itself has descended into the Underworld. And in our horror, our souls too descend, as if our soul were required to take this journey together with the world soul. And as the world soul in its descent knows to “abandon hope,” the horrific circumstances in the world persist for a time, for the world soul has much work to do in the Underworld. (Robert Juliano)
Archetypes
Stuck behind and within the personal inner voices and images, Jung discovered “the gods.” These impersonal forces and energies of massive dimension and of both primitive and sophisticated quality are not only disturbers of consciousness, however; they are also the carriers of culture, of spiritual values passed down through generations, and of patterns of instinct and imagination that can be found in all cultures and at all times of human history. Ultimately, their images embody and represent humankind’s experience of the divine on the one hand, and of the instincts (such as sexuality, hunger, creativity, etc.) on the other. (Stein)
In 'The animistic archetypal nature of the unconscious,' Mats Winther claims, "The concept of the archetype in modern psychology has its roots in animistic mythological thinking, part and parcel of our unconscious psychology. The unconscious constantly produces animistic motifs. Platonism and Jungian psychology are indebted to animism. The archetype is an expression of the animistic economy of the unconscious. It explains the success of the archetypal notion in understanding the unconscious. It is justified regardless of the nature of the archetype. Its ontological (metaphysical) status is therefore not an urgent issue. The archetype resides as an entity of mind in the unconscious psyche, which is the objective psyche. Such a layer of psyche is suggestive of a “divine” unconscious realm, where autonomous processes of volition and ideation are slowly brewing. The backside is that the Platonic paradigm may trigger a polytheistic regress, exemplified by naive New Age notions. The trinitarian tradition of mysticism could provide a way out for gone astray Jungians and New Agers. The path known as ‘via negativa’ means to gear down, to accomplish a withdrawal from the world. It provides the necessary complement that makes individuation complete."
https://www.academia.edu/6577097/The_animistic_archetypal_nature_of_the_unconscious
Jung, Hillman, and Murry Stein agree archetypes are central to numinous experience, the real milestones where certain symbolic events are "characterized by a strong emotional tone." Even diseases can take on a numinous character. ...Numinous experience creates a convincing link to the transcendent, and this may well lead to the feeling that character flaws or behavioral disorders are trivial by comparison with the grand visions imparted in the mystical state. The pathological symptom can be interpreted as an incitement to go on the spiritual quest, or even as a paradoxical doorway into transcendence, and this can donate meaning to the malady itself.
http://www.murraystein.com/articles.shtml
Memory Theatre
Memory theater provides a metaphor of the psyche as a theater of images, a "re-membering" of the fragmented world alienated from beauty. To witness is to be present as a reflector of meaning, to be present with the attention of soul. We are all far too good at making meanings
when what we need is to generate responses. We respond to the call of the aesthetic heart through a special kind of attention, or attending, to the thinking, imagining, speaking heart of the story. To "know" this story in an animal sense the aesthetic heart is filled with desire.
This "re-membering" is another gloss on the injunction to the bard to sing over the bones to revitalize the dead body, rejoining its members, not to be confused with literal theater. Literalization kills the soul. Literal action is not the language of soul. Mythical action is.
"Psychologizing [i.e., soul making] asks "What?" What happened? What do you feel? What do you want? This search for "whatness" or quiddity, the interior identity of an event, its essence, takes one into depth. It is a question from the soul of the questioner that quests for the soul of the
happening." RVP
Aesthetic Heart
'By "heart," Hillman does not mean the sentimental or interior locus of emotion. He means nothing so abstract or gooey. He certainly does not mean a humanist moralizing, transcendent vehicle for universal love. "I am not talking of body feelings in simplistic psychology--whatever I feel is good; deep down inside my heart, I'm okay; what comes from the heart is good per se."
Hillman is after a specific heart, located in a specific historical, intellectual tradition (the Italian Renaissance), to help him with his quest for psychology being effective in the world. ' We are speaking of an agent for soulmaking, which thinks, imagines, and desires. This new heart will apprehend the world, not just the Self, in a new way.
This aesthetic heart possesses a type of "intelligence" which allows the heart to apprehend the world, the "whatness," aesthetically. With this new, aesthetic heart attuned to beauty itself, soulmaking is reframed by Hillman as "a self-steering process through aesthetic reflexes." This aesthetic heart is our guide through soulmaking. H&S
Archetypal language, relational language, is one of soul, and the work of the archetypal psychologist is about soul making. Soul is an unknown component which shows itself through the reflective, imaginative possibility of our nature. Soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences.
Transcendence, numinosity, and archetypes play a role in all religious, metaphysical, and psychological interpretation. Mythic statements tell of profound truths that will not be denied. It may not be true but our myth is our truth.
Images are self-originating, self-revelatory, and self-referential. Even our theory is an image. Soul is a perspective, a liminal, polytheistic, metaphor-loving aspect of our being, which we dwell within as much as it dwells within us, and which resists all attempts to pin it down to serve pragmatism.
Archetypal psychology offers an approach that connects us to the imagistic, symbolic, and metaphorical. The dream as a fantasy does not ask to be concretized or literalized, but ensouled. Mythopoetic images require no validation by external events since imagination is the only ground they need. But myth can re-enchant the mundane world.
Both Jung and Hillman take 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. ...[they] are both raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p.xvii).
Archetypal psychology is mythical realism. Archetypal and imaginal psychology emphasize the phenomenology of images, process, and soul as a mode of perception which illuminates the dynamic and metaphorical nature of existence... experientially based openness and nonjudgmental attitude towards life. Healing is to be found in accepting life as it is.
Story awakens story. The language of the narrative imagination is the language of soul. "We are different at the end of the story because the soul has gone through a process during the telling."
"...mythical figures... provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.” We are, "deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination." (Hillman)
The symbol is not a material object, but an internal 'likeness,' the images of the gods in our souls. The divine names are regarded as “vocal images.” Hillman, who says: "The more we concentrate [the soul] inside and interpret the interiority in a literal sense as something that is within our person, the more we lose the sense of the soul as a psychic reality existing in all things."
Our mistakes, imperfections, improvisations, and sorrows are woven into the beauty of it all with a life-affirming 'yes.' Hillman concurs that imagination is not a mere faculty, but more akin to being and becoming, a process of deepening and re-visioning, ensoulment or soul-making, rather than any final destination.
"The claim that it is a faculty has been precisely what has deceived us most about imagination. We have considered it one function among others; whereas it may be essentially different from thinking, willing, believing, etc. Rather than an independent operation or place, it is more likely an operation that works within the others as a place which is found only through the others — (is it their ground?)." (Hillman, J. (1979), "Image-sense," Spring 1979, p. 133)
Hillman’s concept of healing fiction demonstrates how narratives that result from mythopoetic collusion between psychological fictions are believed as true. When applied retroactively, they are used to reframe historical personal and cultural experiences. Psyche becomes filled with the new meanings of experiences and the acquired sense of not only interpersonal connection but, ultimately, engagement and communion.
Hillman stated, “the deepest suffering in the human psyche derives from exile from the world soul.” He stresses the importance of a deep ecology. He suggests our concerns about the planet move our souls, “we must rediscover the love of the world ... to be drawn by its allures, to delight in it, wanting it to stay, like a lover, forever close.” This requires the awakening of the senses to its beauty. (“Every Moment, A New Beauty”. Rumi)
This psychology of soul is a psychology of image. Love of the image deepens it with analogies that enliven and refresh it. It takes a new way of thinking to read Hillman. Style and imagination are methods. It is a way of tending soul. To befriend is to tend. Psychic figures themselves have autonomous voices. These figures have an imaginal body. The figures of the dream constitute that dreaming psyche.
While we have fed the soul with beauty, and in our soul we feel this
nurturance, we recognize this ontological gift as our lives are rendered formally coherent and beautiful. We nurture the alienated soul
with beauty through imaginative acts. If we are to heal ourselves, then we must cease to use confession, the confessions of the interior, feeling heart as our method of healing. We must turn outward, recognizing that
emotions are not within us, but are all around us:
"Like afflictions, emotions put me in the center of things, giving importance and existential assurance to human beings. They seem so centrally mine. Yet they are external to the individual person. We share in emotions and hold them in common; they transcend history and locality; we read them in another's face beyond language and culture, feel them in the gestalt of landscapes and natural things, receive them from images buriedthousands of years ago and from the sounds and shapes and words of inorganic art objects. Grief, jealousy, comedy have their images that require no interpretive apparatus; they bear archetypal significance beyond your or my personal experiences of them."
Archetypal Nostalgia
Hillman's psychology is grounded in myth and archetype, providing a common connection between what goes on in individual souls and in all people, all places, all times. Psyche is prolific in creating order and disorder, suffering, illness and imagining life through those distorted and tortured perspectives.
Archetypal psychology engages the deepest needs of our souls: what is it soul requires? Soul makes meaning possible and transforms events into experiences. Hillman makes ancient myth and alchemy relevant today and encourages the stirring of the soul, not numbing or tuning out the world.
"Alchemical language points beyond what we have come to
imagine as “subject” and “object” and points to a mysterious and subtle dimension we are still trying to understand and have called many names. Alchemical language is filled as well with both the soul’s ambiguity and its concreteness. Alchemy engages the excitement of living nature and an animated cosmos teeming with life.
James Hillman writes: “The work of soul-making requires corrosive acids, heavy earth, ascending birds; there are sweating kings, dogs and bitches, stenches, urine and blood ... I know that I am not composed of sulfur and salt, burned in horse dung, putrefying or congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail biting serpent rising on wings. And yet I am! I cannot take any of this literally, even if it is all accurate, descriptively true.” What can it mean that I can’t take this literally and yet claim it is all accurate and descriptively true? (Stanton Marlan, 2007)
''For modern man, repression is not internal but rather of the external world.'' Hillman adds ''We are more aware of our inner lives than ever before, but we are anesthetized to the world we inhabit. At the end of analysis, a patient should be bothered more than ever - not by his own neurosis, but by the pathology of the world. Like an artist, he should have a heightened sensitivity to what is around him.''
Soul-making is 'an image to conjure with,' an adventure lived fully and deeply, rather than an attempt at curing or healing. Symptoms are manifestations of soul that lead us to soul, like the medieval notion of viniculum that links spirit and body. For Hillman, soul and spirit are different orders of experience. Soul is the locus of all experience, be it 'bone tired,' 'abysmal fear,' or 'transcendent hope.'
Daimon
The daimon is a worldwide myth in which each person comes into the world with something to do and to be. It has affinities with myth. As a mythical being, it thinks in mythical patterns. (TSC, p.39) We enter the world with a calling.
Hillman has an archetypal view when he suggests that the daimon becomes personified when it encounters the conscious ego, although it remains a shape-shifter. He explains that the daimon helps us reveal what the acorn contains. We hear its voice when we turn inward.
The daimon stimulates, it ‘disturbs the heart, it bursts out in a temper....it excites, calls, demands–but rarely does it offer a grand purpose’ (Hillman, 1996, p197). The purpose probably unfolds as we make choices and forge our character as Necessity arises.
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Plato, in his Myth of Er, called this our paradeigma, meaning a basic form that encompasses our entire destinies. The myth itself claims the soul chose our particular parents, and so they are part of our destiny, whether we experienced a lack of parenting, peculiar parenting, single parenting, or adoptive parenting. But that's not the be-all and end-all of existence.
This accompanying image shadowing our lives is our bearer of fate and fortune with huge implications. In Hillman's The Soul's Code, the acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. The myth says that the roots of the soul are in the heavens, and the human grows downward into life. A little child enters the world as a stranger, and brings a special gift into the world. The task of life is to grow down into this world.
The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world, that is particular to us, which is connected to our "daimon," a word rarely used in our culture. The Greek word was daimon, the Roman word was genius, and the Christian word is guardian angel. They are all a little bit different, yet each expresses something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are. The daimon is embodied, just as our soul is embodied and makes us who we are.
That's the belief of the myth, and we have to make it clear that this is a myth, not a truth. It doesn't have to be believed, and it's not a theory that has to be proven. It's a worldwide myth, and it's a way of thinking or reflecting about life. It's something you entertain to see what the story does for you. Plato said that those who think this way may find that their lives will prosper, meaning it's not a bad way to think. (Hillman)
“The acorn’s eye reads the story backward. (Hillman/SC/212)”
Hillman links the daimon to the necessary, rather than a fate. “Ananke’s chains are both visible and invisible. When the “couldn’t be otherwise” occurs, then the most plausible account of how life works and why things happen as they do is the acorn theory. (Hillman/SC/212)”
Fate is not sealed, it is “signified.” (Hillman/SC/202)”
“The acorn acts less as a personal guide with a sure long-term direction than as a moving style, an inner dynamic that gives the feeling of purpose to occasions. You get the feeling of importance: This supposedly trivial moment is significant, while this supposedly major event doesn’t matter that much. (Hillman/SC/203)”
"...our lives are already significant before we even understand them, before we explain them. Or rather, our lives become significant when we recognize a model of imagination in the midst of chaos. Every chaos is an invention of imagination." (James Hillman)
Hillman’s focus is on the archetypal dimension of the daimon, and its subsequent influence on an individual life. Daimons are closely related to the soul. They are not souls, for instance the souls of the departed. Daimons are of another essence. They are ethereal beings that may be attached to an incarnated human beings but are not defined by that incarnated attachment.
Daimons are myths or archetypal soul-images. As myths, daimons manifest externally and take the form of apparitions or otherworldly creatures; as archetypes, daimons cross the threshold between unconscious and consciousness to instil dreams or desires into our personal psyche.
For Hillman, a daimon is an ‘individualized soul-image’ (1996, p.10). It seems the daimon connects with us best through the soul, perhaps reflects the soul as carrier of archetypes in Jung’s tradition. The daimon is also ‘chthonic ’, that is, a spirit of the earth with dual qualities: creation and animation of the human, or evil deeds and ruthless destruction (Jung, 1953/1968, par.539). Hillman (1996) views the daimon as that which calls us, that which manifests as vocational commitment and further shapes the character of a person.
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling....The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life–and it prefers them."
http://www.cecilerozuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CRozuel_DaimonPsyche_IJJS.pdf
Social Artistry
Hillman’s deconstruction of psychological theory and his critique of humanistic psychology are considered his foundational ideas: the deepening of the soul, personification and the “world soul,” image, and myth as the language of the psyche, the function of narrative, honoring psychopathology, psychological polytheism, and the deconstruction of the ego.
Unlike other critics of conventional approaches to mental illness, he was not "anti" anything, considering opposition a fantasy that drew us away from meaning and from life. He preferred to deconstruct, often playfully. He called for depth psychology to move beyond the consulting room to engage the larger cultural, political, historical, and ecological issues of our time, as well as deepening relationship to the gods.
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on the psyche, or soul, itself and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Life breaks down and re-assembles into new forms.
“Soul is the bridge that leads us across the river between the trees, both in the mud and in quicksand, making what is known more and more unknown. The deeper we come from, the more the consciousness becomes opaque. So, in order to be able to follow it, we must like, explicitly stating that understanding is moving from what is known to what is unknown, in a epistemology based on the motto ‘ Ignotum for ignotius’…. Soul obfuscates, produces puzzles puzzles, prefers Esoteric and occult, where she can stay hidden: she wants uncertainty at all costs. Stripping everything that is known from its solid ground, brings every problem into deeper waters; and this is also a way of making a soul. The deeper we follow soul, the more amazing becomes the conscience.” (Hillman, soul, p. 171)
“Desire is not enough: in reality, the ignorant desire disappoints itself or is consumed and extinguished, because desire is fulfilled, because Opus reaches its fruit – in Art, in love, in any process – learn everything possible on his Fire: its splendor, its flickering instability, its heat and its fury … […] Mastering the art of fire and possessing the key to alchemy means learning to warm up, excite, to light, to inspire the material we are working on, which is also the state of our nature, in order to activate it to move on to a further state. ” (Hillman)
Narrative
"All modern therapies which claim that action is more curative than words (Moreno) and which seek techniques other than talk (rather than in addition to it) are repressing the most human of all faculties --the telling of the tales of our souls...I mean an unceasing attention to imagination from the first story told a child to the last conversations of old age. I mean the recovery of lost psychic space for containing and of lost mirrors for reflecting." James Hillman
Hillman's idea of psychology as "soulmaking" gives us a vocabulary which frees us to describe ourselves as awakening the aesthetic heart to ensoul the world, It releases us from the false conflict of "therapy" and "art" and challenges us to expand our healing parameters beyond the self to include the world.
Archetypal psychology finds a place for the aesthetic appreciation of a life story. James Hillman, especially in his text Healing Fiction, explores the use of archetypal narratives and how they allow us to intuit them for use in understanding. Looking at our lives metaphorically or mythologically funds life with both poetic beauty and imaginal meaning.
No particular narrative can ever hold the full measure of the soul. Using imagination we grasp a truer, more meaningful reality given by soul. Soul is our breadth and depth, the light of the animated body, the flow of divine energy. The essence of soul is connectedness which thrives on relationship and reflexive awareness.
Hillman says: "[Phantasy images are] both the raw materials and finished products of the psyche, and are the privileged mode of access — to knowledge of the soul. Nothing is more primary. (Hillman, 1992a, xi.)
[The] soul is constituted of images, [and] the soul is primarily an imagining activity…" (Hillman, 1997, p.14)
'The stories that myths tell cannot be documented in histories; the gods and goddesses, and the heroes and their enemies, are told about in stories inscribed in clay and carved in statues, but have they ever been physically seen? The fabulous places of myth are not in this world — all invented, just fables. The long-lasting and ever-renewing vitality of myths has nothing factual behind it." (Hillman, 1996, p.95)
Archetypal storytelling approaches deepen the structural elements of traditional storytelling. Archetypal technique is a development tool, applied after laying the basic narrative down. We develop narrative elements that are symbolic vs. structural. The archetypal narrative structure is important to the meaning of the overall story, extending the functional into the symbolic.
This model asks about the symbolic function of each act. As we penetrate the magical world, it penetrates us. Our approach is Arts-based, emphasizing the importance of cosmological thinking and the need to ground in a metaphysical, philosophical framework. It treats the necessity for symbol and myth, the nature of the spirit, and language as a metaphorical vehicle of thought. Our destination remains open-ended without fixating on anything. Images lead nowhere because they are always here and now.
All narratives have intertextual elements by which we recognize story patterns and symbolic associations. Storytelling is the most important activity in our lives -- how and why we tell ourselves stories, tell others stories about ourselves, and make up stories to make sense of the world around us.
Form is secondary to the importance of the message of the universal themes about the internal struggle of individuals against themselves. The stagnant individual doesn't act as much as react against the environment encountered without convictions. It is escapist -- premature transcendental escape.
We reinterpret archetypes like a musician or singer interprets musical works. There are endless possibilities of multiple interpretations and multiple stories from multiple viewpoints, each with their own tone, color, arc, and nuance.
Archetypal strategies develop the detail and illuminate the web- like pattern of connections between initiatory structural elements. Articulating these patterns, the depth of the meaning of story becomes visible. Schafer says the cognitive unconscious has "access to multidimensional cognitive fields [patterns of cognitive meaning]" providing "infinite potential for self-realization and the discovery of meaning."
Deep understanding facilitates re-write by adding the texture, detail, and richness of this development work onto the page. It functions as an unseen scaffolding, focusing on questions of world, theme, motif, image, and symbol. Archetypal storytelling kickstarts the process that drives storytelling strategy.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the universal journey pattern: "Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss."
Power
James Hillman contends the artful leader uses two dozen kinds of power with finesse and subtlety. Power has many faces, many different expressions. "Empowerment," he says, "comes from understanding the widest spectrum of possibilities for embracing power." They include: the language of power, control, influence, resistance, leadership, prestige, authority, exhibitionism, charisma, ambition, reputation, fearsomeness, tyranny, purism, subtle power, growth, decisiveness, and efficiency.
Hillman reconceptualizes power in terms of sustaining continuity, conserving, teaching, caring, bringing out the innate potential in each person or task. There is also power in personal and collective vision, power among us. The social construct is both a vertical and horizontal field of power; in fact, there are numerous interpenetrating or nested fields of power.
Power is something we seek or, more frequently, deny. We deny we want "power" for ourselves, and resist efforts at leadership as efforts to assert power over us. Freedom from desire's materialism and denial's formalism is found in the poetic, the fantastic, the numinous, where things are not "one way or the other." The concept of power extends beyond the political and material world into the regions of feeling, intellect and spirit that reach beyond the exercise of power by the human will.
As poet W. H. Auden observes, "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand. Its shadow then comes back to haunt us." As colleagues in spirit, we are finding ways to transcend the fixation for power (competition, domination, control, reward) and for the material goods that show that we have manifested power that we are a "success."
Hillman deconstructs the context that invites systematic theology and systematic paranoia in favor of the assertion that all delusion is revelatory and all revelation, delusional -- "an intelligible event which make all other events intelligible." The assumption that the Deity is hidden necessarily brings revelation to religion, and delusion as well.
Our culture has religious madness because the culture requires revelation for its religion. Each group yearns for its own Holy Grail. Evangelicals yearn for the Rapture, UFOlogists for Disclosure, tekkies for Singularity, and New Agers for Ascension.
Archetypal 'revelations' all represent a radical upgrade of society and the individual as well as collective. Without literal revelation from concealment to disclosure, the interplay of light and shadows make the world inherently intelligible in its aesthetic presentation, requiring no revelation for its divinity or hiddenness for its meaning. Soon, our very thoughts will be revealed to one another.
Follow Your Uncertainty
Confusion, symptoms, pathos, and complexes are the very things that connect us to soul, to core self-knowledge. Hillman called pathos, “the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit,” and considered it “the longing towards the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible.”
Pathos cannot be separated from soul. It is the emotional speech of our suffering soul — the soul’s suffering of meaning. Archetypal suffering is our experience of being buffeted by fate. Gravitas is the weight that holds us down to the world.
We all are wounded and suffering is universal. We are excruciatingly sensitized to what we perceive beyond our ordinary senses. It breaks open our hearts to self-compassion and the mythic dimension. The imagination is not natively binary but pluralist.
Images are not inherently dual but some impose a dualist grid exists in the duality of consciousness of an image. The notion of an encounter between consciousness and image is an unjustifiable. Hillman is among those like Bergson and Deleuze who get along quite well without presupposing it.
Universal knowledge is a natural function of consciousness. From the field of potentiality, we can all access a wordless knowing awareness of different potential ways of expressing ourselves. In a fugue of meaning, our self-critical faculty is checked; we may lose perspective.
Pathos is the quality or power in an actual life experience or in expressive arts. Art provides unique access to interior life. It becomes a conduit to intimate self-knowledge and knowledge of others, accessing meta-verbal ways of knowing.
Pathos is our passion of the moment – personal, political, spiritual, emotional, moral, relational or intellectual. Pathos refers to arousing the emotional responses to what we encounter in our environment. We can’t stop our intrinsic instinctual or visceral emotional responses anymore than we can voluntarily stop our heartbeat or breathing.
No Hero, No Journey
Metaphors bridge content and context, and sometimes imply constraining values. We cannot help using metaphors but Hillman resisted using hierarchical and monotheistic metaphysics, or mapping the psyche, or imposing a journey of individuation and life stages. We focus on image as emergent streams of inquiry.
Hillman's work in differentiation of character, the particular rather than generalized, delves into acausal spontaneity, specific personal stories, a valuation of depth in each of us. All causes are fictions. The calling and force of character touch mysteries we are born and live with -- life's adventure into passion, energy, and risk.
We participate in the archetypal culture we study from within and outside. One metaphor from Cultural Anthropology is perceptual shape-shifting (Emic Analysis).
Emic perspective is the perspective of the studied social group. In this approach, the perspectives, explanations, logic, meanings, beliefs and worldview of those studied are used to explain the particular values, beliefs or practices. This is the way the actual people understand what they do and think.
The role of the participant observer is understanding the cosmovision of humans and non-humans who live in different realities nearby. Nature is big enough to see from an infinite variety of perspectives.
Ginette Paris asks, "Who is visiting?" Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, that attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths -- gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals -- that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Monotheism emanates collective consciousness, beliefs, and faith; polytheism emanates repressed archetypal images.
“Anytime you’re going to grow, you’re going to lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.” (Hillman)
Hillman doesn't use archetype as a noun. "That's why it's "archetypal" psychology. I am talking about action, a movement, a process -- not about a set of fixed principles. The origins matter nothing to me. Think of what a different world this would be if we weren't trying to learn the origins of the universe. Can you imagine a more ridiculous undertaking?"
For Hillman, “psychological sickness is an enactment of pathologizing fantasy” (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 99). To examine pathologizing, Hillman uses epistrophe, or reversion, a method inspired by Plotinus that traces fantasies back to their archetypal origins: “Only in mythology does pathology receive an adequate mirror since myths speak with the same distorted, fantastic language” (RVP, p.99).
Thus “pathologizing is a way of mythologizing,” where soul is reminded of its mythical existence, to the distress of our egos, which tend to take myths literally: Mythical metaphors are perspectives toward events which shift the experience of events. They are likenesses to happenings, making them intelligible, but they do not themselves happen...We are those stories, and we illustrate them with our lives (RVP, pp. 101-2).
When we are governed by the Herculean lens, we experience, see and reflect in a manner consistent with our ego, we are all ego, all
conquerors of the id. Herculean-ego identification with will power creates a singular monotheistic consciousness that takes other fantasies literally, sees them as monstrous and wants to assert its dominance by destroying them.
Alchemical Psychology
Alchemical principles, like the Elements, were not substances. Sulfur was the cause of combustibility, structure and substance. Salt gave solidity and color. Vapor, and fluidity came from Mercury.
Western alchemy is filled with recurrent symbols, Sun and Moon headed humans, Kings, Queens, copulation, hermaphrodites, winged Mercuries, wolves, lions, birds and dragons, and recurrent uses of colors in particular green, black, white and red. When arranged as graphic emblems these symbols can become quite complex with many different elements in different patterns. It is not clear that these images and terms always refer to the same things between different texts or even within the same text.
Hillman places Anima Mundi as center of his psychological theory. This archetype of the psyche is inherent in the prima materia. It fosters the return of psychological subjectivity to the outer.
Alchemy works in just this projective, animated manner with a deeper level of participation. Phenomenology is the art of dissolution, a natural alchemy, learning how to see again, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving. In this aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Gods and goddesses are an intrinsic part of Hillman's archetypal psychology, as they are in alchemy. In mythical perception, gods, metals, plants, minerals, animals, scents, colors, planets and more correspond with one another.
Depressive Realism
"We can begin to see – through a glass darkly – why the color black is condemned to be a “non-color.” It carries the meanings of the random and the formless. Like a black hole, it sucks into it and makes vanish the fundamental security structures of Western consciousness. By absenting color, black prevents phenomena from presenting their virtues. Black’s deconstruction of any positivity – experienced as doubt, negative thinking, suspicion, undoing, valuelessness – explains why the nigredo is necessary to every paradigm shift" (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology 1626).
A psychological approach to depression goes more deeply into it, whereas a spiritual approach tries to rise above it, whether from loss, failure, or lack of support. Hillman says, depression can be healthy for the soul, when "it brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness." Hillman’s remarkably states: “The true revolution begins
with the individual who can be true to his or her depression” (Hillman & Ventura,1992, p. 98).
We have to honor our depression, to be sad and upset about that depression in a sense is simple realism.. Depression makes us more aware.
The nihilistic breakdown of all meaning is an example of the nigredo. The soul brings one to this place of brokenness for a very good reason. In the blackest depths of the earth transformation is possible, generating a new anima consciousness, a new psychic grounding that must include underworld experiences of the anima itself: her deathly and perverse affinities.
The tortured and
symptomatic aspect of mortification—flaying oneself, pulverizing old structures,
decapitation of the headstrong will, the rat and rot in one’s personal cellar—give
way to depression. As even the darkest blue is not black, so even the deepest
depression is not the mortificatio which means death of soul. The mortificatio is
more driven, images locked compulsively in behavior, visibility zero, psyche
trapped in the inertia and extension of matter. A mortificatio is a time of
symptoms. These
laments hint of soul, of reflecting and distancing by imaginational expression.
Here we can see more why archetypal psychology has stressed depression as
the via regia in soulmaking. xixThe ascetic exercises that we call “symptoms”
(and their “treatments”), the guilty despairs and remorse as the nigredo decays,
reduce the old ego-personality, but this necessary reduction is only preparatory
to the sense of soul which appears first in the blued imagination of depression.
It is the element of depression, that raises deep doubts and high principles, wanting to settle things fundamentally and get them right in order to clarify them. These deep blues are inflations with
the impersonal, the hidden.
They do not feel high, but come across rather as ponderous philosophical thought, judgments about right and wrong, and the place of truth in analysis. Far away from matters at hand, what we are talking about “seems to recede from us” and “draws us after it” (Goethe) in the seductive manner of the anima. The animus of the anima is a psychic spirit attempting to enlighten the soul by deepening or raising it into impersonal truths.
The appearance of blue indicates where thought and image begin to coalesce. Images provide the medium for thoughts while reflections take an imaginative turn away from the dark and confined frustration of the nigredo and toward the wider horizon of mind. Blue deepens the idea of reflection beyond the single notion of mirroring, to the further notions of pondering, considering, meditating.
The blue foundation is the imaginal ground which allows the eye to see imaginatively, the event as image, creating at the same time a remoteness from real things (Cezanne), from the green of the actual world (Stevens), a remoteness felt in the nostalgia which blue brings.
Once the black turns blue, darkness can be penetrated (unlike the nigredo which absorbs all insights back into itself, compounding the darkness with negative introspections). recognizing “the essence of things and their abiding, inherent permanence.” Here is imaginal consciousness affirming its ground. When the eye becomes blue, that is, able to see through thoughts as imaginative forms and images as the ground of reality.
"The blue transit between black and white is like that -- sadness which emerges from despair as it proceeds towards reflection. Reflection here comes from or takes one into a blue distance, less a concentrated act that we do than something insinuating itself upon us as a cold, isolating inhibition. This vertical withdrawal is also like an emptying out, the creation of a negative capability, or a profound listening — already an intimation of silver (Spr. ‘80,pp. 41-44, silver and sound)." http://www.pantheatre.com/pdf/6-reading-list-JH-blue.pdf
Hillman argues that therapeutic attempts to eliminate depression echo the Christian theme of resurrection, but have the unfortunate effect of demonizing a soulful state of being. We can embrace 'depressive realism' over an over-positive view of self, leading to reappraisal, a framework restoring meaning and purpose.
"Jungian psychology is about attitude above all," Hillman contends. "So the whole business is grasping this attitude towards the psyche, or the soul. The question is: 'What is the psyche doing by presenting the patient with a depression?'"
In The Soul's Code, he suggests, "Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable. So you know it functions," Hillman explains.
Are you drawing a causal link here between the depression epidemic of late twentieth century and the lifestyle we have adopted in first-world industrial nations? "If history is merely a repeat of a story, then it is not necessarily causal In Jung's sense, causality is something more formal," he counters intuitively.
Consciousness is "one-sided" in Jung's psychology. This one-sided picture we hold of the world is complicated by the arrival of "other parts". Hillman continues, "ones left out of the main room, which come in the back door".
And what has come in, slipped past consciousness, is not there with the criminal intent of a typical back-door entrant, but has come to upset the one-sided program consciousness was intent on pursuing. This intruder is an agent of change in service of the search for meaning which goes beyond the meaning consciousness can offer us."
One of the key diagnostic criteria of depression, notes Hillman, is feeling depressed most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks.
"This is putting a chronic malady in the category of an acute category. We have to notice the manic nature of that diagnosis, that anything which lasts more than two weeks in our culture is too long" he says.
"This is a totally manic situation."
"What most Americans complain of is not enough time and not enough sleep. Manics don't need to sleep or to eat. We can sit at a computer all day long, disheveled, naked like a case in a locked ward. So, where does depression, slowness, fit in? How does Saturn enter, except by forcing its way in?"
Hillman's list of depressive correlates includes, "Dry hair, shallow breathing, frequent sighs a flat to diminished tone to everything, sleeplessness and facial pain which is different to anxiety, which has a seriousness to it. That is very important; Everything seems so weighty, heavy. The Romans called it gravitas, it belongs to Saturn."
Melancholy brings us to a place where we can see more clearly the essences of life. The soul knows about the chaos of the culture we're in. Somehow, if you're not in mourning, you are out of touch with the world.
So, underlying depression is an adaptation to the underlying condition of the world, Hillman explains. Every time somebody slips into depression everybody comes to resurrect them, and we find drugs and convulsive therapy to assist. In ordinary life, we just get out and moving again to avoid the depression.
Hillman's way is not a technique we are taught to apply. "It isn't that you hold out hope You keep the faith, and one of the ways of therapy that feels most useful is not that you do something, but that you keep contact. You are a consistent, chronic companion, rather than being a therapist who enacts something against the problem," he says, "What happens is that you become activated by the stillness or the drop."
ECT (electro convulsive therapy) is an aggressive treatment against the paralysis. "In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient."
"There is no reason why we shouldn't take advantage of medications. The important thing is what is your attitude to it, how you keep that demon in its place so that it doesn't possess you." The trick is to keep your focus on feeling, thinking, and imagining.
"I'm not out for finding ways of getting rid of depression. Depression brings slowness, a counter-move to the manic, inwardness. It opens the door to beauty of some kind. So there seems to be something in there besides the way you, the ego, see it," Hillman concludes.
https://www.newtherapist.com/hillman8.html
About symptom by James Hillman
" Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind-that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard."
THE GRAIL IS THE SOUL: "Recognizing that the Grail is the soul brings the puer consciousness back to itself. In the chalice of the wound is the soul. This means that the psyche is the purpose of our bleeding love, and that the wound is a grail. L 'Opus is not Jerusalem, it is right here, in our wounds." (Hillman)
Influences
Hillman was trained at the Jung Institute and was its Directory after graduation. The main influence on the development of Archetypal psychology is Carl Jung's Analytical psychology. It is strongly influenced by Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought.
Influential artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists include: Nietzsche, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for the psyche - the soul.
Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology, acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced (p. xvii), including the poets Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Bly.
Psyche, or Soul
Hillman was critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g. biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, ego/developmental psychology) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. Main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul.
Poets know archetypal imagination is therapeutic and opens to nature and trans-human continuities of life beyond individuality. Plumbing the depths restores the underworld. We discover the unknown by creating it with vast invisible resources.
Hillman’s oeuvre is an attempt to restore psyche to its proper place in psychology. He concluded that therapy needed to change the world rather than focus on people's inner lives. His cultural critique proposed an "archetypal" or "imaginal" psychology that would restore the psyche or soul to a discipline he believed to have been diminished by scientific and medical models.
Influenced by the French Islamist and Sufi Henry Corbin, the poetics of Gaston Bachelard and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he argued that reality is a construct of the imagination. Soul is at work in the stuff of myths, dreams, fantasies, images, and metaphor.
He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.
Hillman has a complex “definition” of soul. Primarily, he notes that soul is not a “thing,” not an entity. Nor is it something that is located “inside” a person. Rather, soul is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things… (it is) reflective; it mediates events and makes differences…”(1975).
Soul is not to be located in the brain or in the head, but human beings are in psyche. The world, in turn, is the anima mundi, or the world ensouled. Hillman often quotes a phrase coined by the Romantic poet John Keats: “call the world the vale of soul-making.”
Hillman (1975) observes soul:
"refers to the deepening of events into experiences." The significance soul makes possible, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. The imaginative possibility in our natures the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- is that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical. The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.”
Dream Analysis
In The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman notes that what the Greeks and Romans call the "underworld" psychoanalysts call the "unconscious." Hillman says, "To know the psyche at its basic depths, for a true depth psychology, one must go to the underworld" (1979: 46). Hades is a recluse, primordial irrational depths, a hidden source of being.
In this respect, Jung says: "The Nekyia is no aimless and purely destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful ...descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge" (CW 15: 139-40, par. 213). At the entrance to the underworld we find Grief, Cares, Diseases, Age, Dread, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, Sleep, War, and Discord. We also find Dreams. The dream is fundamentally image and symbol, and any attempt to literalize it through interpretation is to kill its vitality (the life hidden within death).
Robert Avens (1984) describes Hillman's opinion that much of humanity's suffering and disorder come from a refusal to remember the dead with a living relationship -- to live life "in the company of ghosts... ancestors, guides...the populace of the metaxy." Who are the dead? The imaginal body is inseparable from the reality of the soul as the site of visionary events.
Hades presides over the underworld: the darkest hours of life, depressions, anxieties, emotional dramas and unresolved grief. We become familiar with Hades when we descend into his world, a place which makes us feel cut off from reality, lonely, and depressed with no desire to feel the sunlight or closeness of other people. In life, as in mythology, some people can descend and return, some can accompany and guide other souls, and some come to know Hades’s realm very well, because they reside there.
A person who withdraws into seclusion, not caring or knowing what is going on in the world, is leading a Hades existence. They may lose whatever had meaning in the world, and now just go through the motions, depressed and lacking vitality or become paranoid because of isolation, but some prefer solitude. Depression and near death experiences are the usual initiations into the realm of Hades. The descent to the underworld is the single most important myth for this psychology.
Death brings people to Hades, the death of a relationship, the death of a certain facet of personality, or the death of hope, purpose, and meaning in life. The inevitability of physical death is an experience that takes us to the Underworld. The realm of Hades is in the personal and the collective unconscious, where much is repressed: memories, feelings, thoughts, everything too painful, shameful, or unacceptable to allow the visible world to see or know about these yearnings or dreams.
Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life, but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live (a la Jung).
Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”
The Soul's Code
Hillman's book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling outlines an "acorn theory of the soul". This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself. It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns. Instead the book suggests a reconnection with what is invisible within us. Our daimon or soul or acorn and its calling to the wider world of nature.
It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere—a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence.
Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self.
Hillman sees Jung as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try and grow properly. Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world.
In a book Senex and Puer: James Hillman Uniform Edition vol. 3, we read: “As the senex is perfected through time, the puer is primordially perfect.” At this time we take stock of our individual story. Have we fulfilled the promise of the primordially perfect puer that we met at the beginning of the previous year? What substance did senex give to the dreams and visions of the puer in the last year?“…the puer eternus figure is the vision of our own first nature, our primordial golden shadow, …, our angelic essence as messenger of the divine… From the puer we are given our sense of destiny and mission, of having a message and being meant as eternal cup-bearer to the divine, that our sap and overflow, our enthusiastic wetness of soul, is in service to the Gods, bringing eternal refreshment to the archetypal background of the universe…. A beginning is always meaningful and filled with the excitement of eros.”
Hillman rejects formal logic in favor of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul in question.
Select Bibliography
by James Hillman
- A Terrible Love of War, 2004
- The Force of Character, 2000
- The Myth of Analysis : Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1998, ISBN 0810116510
- The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling, 1997, ISBN 0446673714
- Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses, 1995
- Healing Fiction, 1994
- We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy (and the World's Getting Worse), (with Michael Ventura), 1993, ISBN 0062506617
- The Thought the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992
- Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1991, ISBN 0882143735
- Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985
- Inter Views (with Laura Pozzo), 1983
- The Dream and the Underworld, 1979
- Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology, 1975
- Re-Visioning Psychology (based on his Yale University Terry Lectures), 1975
- Hillman, J. & McLean, M. (1997). Dream animals. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
- Hillman, J., Pierson, J., & Miller, A. (2010). Instructor’s Manual for James Hillman on
https://www.academia.edu/26879610/James_Hillman_s_Tantric_Sadhana_An_Introduction_to_Notes_on_the_Meaning_of_Kali_Symbolism_?fbclid=IwAR1l_1KVghdbNvGSYQPRVljpU3IjgR0XjnsvRvNzWHIMeV_o-HodQbI_6eo
By other writers
- The Planets WithIn, Thomas Moore 1990
- Dark Eros, Thomas Moore
- Embracing the Daimon, Sandra Lee Dennis
- Pagan Grace, Ginnette Paris
- Pagan Meditations, Ginnette Paris
- The Power of Soul, Robert Sardello
- Archetypal Madicine, Alfred Ziegler
- Christs, David L. Miller
- Echo's Subtle Body, Patricia Berry 1982
- Hermes and His Children, Rafael Lopez Pedraza
- The Soul in Grief, Robert Romanyshyn
- Waking Dreams, Mary Watkins
- https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Archetypal_psychology
"Hades"
from Dream & the Underworld
by Dr. James Hillman
Harper Books ©1979 and used with permission
Hades was of course the God of depths, the God of invisibles. He is himself invisible, which could imply that the invisible connection is Hades, and that the essential "what" that holds things in their form is the secret of their death. And if, as Heraclitus said, Nature loves to hide, then nature loves Hades.
Hades is said to have had no temples or altars in the upperworld and his confrontation with it is experienced as a violence, a violation (Persephone's rape; the assaults on simple vegetative nymphs, Leuce and Minthe; and Iliad 5, 395 or Pindar Ol. 9, 33). He is so invisible in fact that the entire collection of Greek antique art shows no ideal portrait of Hades, such as we are familiar with of other Gods. He had no representative attributes, except an eagle, which brings out his shadowy affiliation with his brother, Zeus. He leaves no trace on earth, for no clan descends from him, no generations.
Hades' name was rarely used. At times he was referred to as "the unseen one," more often as Pluto ("wealth," "riches") or as Trophonios ("nourishing"). These disguises of Hades have been taken by some interpreters to be covering euphemisms for the fear of death, but then why this particular euphemism and not some other? Perhaps Pluto is a description of Hades, much as Plato understood this God. Then, Pluto refers to the hidden wealth or the riches of the invisible. Hence, we can understand one reason why there was no cult and no sacrifice to him-Hades was the wealthy one, the giver of nourishment to the soul. Sometimes, he was fused with Thanatos ("Death) of whom Aeschylus wrote, "Death is the only God who loves not gifts and cares not for sacrifices or libation, who has no altars and receives no hymns..." (frg. Niobe). On vase paintings when Hades is shown, he may have his face averted, as if he were not even characterized by a specific physiognomy. All this 'negative' evidence does coalesce to form a definite image of a void, an interiority or depth that is unknown but nameable, there and felt even if not seen. Hades is not an absence, but a hidden presence-even an invisible fullness.
Etymological investigations into the root word for death demon show it to mean "hider." To grasp better the ways in which Hades hides invisibly in things, let us take apart this concept, listening for the hidden connections, the metaphors, within the word hidden itself: (1) buried, shrouded, concealed from eyesight, whether a corpse or a mysterium: (2) occult, esoteric, concealed in the sense of secret; (3) that which per se cannot be seen: non-visible as non-spatial, non-extended; (4) without light: dark, black; (5) that which cannot be seen on inspection; i.e. blocked, censored, forbidden, or obscured; (6) hidden, as contained within (interior) or as contained below (inferior), where the Latin cella ("subterranean storeroom") is cognate with the Old Irish cuile ("cellar") and cel ("death"), again cognate with our hell; (7) that which is experienced with dread and terror, a void, a nothing; (8) that which is experienced as hiding, e.g., withdrawing, turning away from life; (9) stealth, surreptitiousness, deceit, such as the hidden motives and unseen connections of Hermes. In short, Hades, the hidden hider, presides over both the crypt and cryptic, which gives to Heraclitus' phrase (frg. 123): "Nature loves to hide" (physis kryptesthai philei), a subtle and multiple-implication indeed.
Some say that the cap or helmet Hades wears belongs primarily to Hermes and may have little or nothing to do with Hades. This hat is a curious phenomenon: Hermes wears it, Hades wears it: Athene puts it on to beat Ares, and Perseus to overcome the Gorgon. It makes its wearer invisible. Evidently the explicit image of connection between Hermes and Hades (announced in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes") is the headdress. Hermes and Hades share a certain style of covering their heads that both hides their thoughts and perceives hidden thoughts. It is their intentions that become invisible. We cannot perceive where their 'heads are at,' though we may have the sense of a hidden watch over inmost thoughts. Because we can never discover what their covert minds intend, we consider them deceptive, unpredictable, frightening—or wise.
When we consider the House of Hades, we must remember that the myths—and Freud, too—tell us that there is no time in the underworld. There is no decay, no progress, no change of any sort. Because time has nothing to do with the underworld, we may not conceive the underworld as "after" life, except as the afterthoughts within life. The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later. It is not a far-off place of judgment over our actions but provides that place of judging now, and within, the inhibiting reflection interior to our actions.
This simultaneity of the underworld with the daily world is imaged by Hades, coinciding indistinguishably with Zeus, or identical with Zeus chthonios. The brother hood of Zeus and Hades says that upper and lower worlds are the same; only the perspectives differ. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother's view sees it from above and through the light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades' realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelganger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.
Because his realm was conceived as the final end of each soul, Hades is the final cause, the purpose, the very telos of every soul and every soul process. If so, then all psychic events have a Hades aspect, and not merely the sadistic or destructive events that Freud attributed to Thanatos. All soul processes, everything in the psyche, moves towards Hades. As the finis is Hades, so the telos is Hades. Everything would become deeper, moving from the visible connections to the invisible ones, dying out of life. When we search for the most revelatory meaning in an experience, we get it most starkly by letting it go to Hades, asking what has this to do with 'my' death. Then essence stands out.
Here too Hades has bearing on psychological theory. A psychology that emphasizes the final point of view—Jung's, for instance, and Adler's—is restating the Hades perspective, even if these psychologies do not go right to the end of their ends. I mean by this the finalism of psychology seems to shy away from the full consequences of mythology, in which the finalism is not a theory only but is the experience in soul of its call to Hades.
Now hold here a moment. Let us beware of taking this call as literal death, of which so much is spoken and written today, that we begin to believe we know all about what we know nothing about. Literal death is becoming a clichéd mystery, that is, we have best-seller evidence about the unknowable.
Rather, by the call to Hades I am referring to the sense of purpose that enters whenever we talk about soul. What does it want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individuation process going? If we stare these questions in the face, of course we know where our individuation process is going-to death. This unknowable goal is the one absolutely sure event of the human condition. Hades is the unseen one and yet absolutely present.
The call to Hades suggests that all aspects of the process of the soul must be read finally, not only as part of the general human process toward death, but as particular events of and in that death. Each facet then is a finished image in itself, completing its purpose that is at the same time unending, not literally unending in time but limitless in depth. In other words, we can stop nowhere—and anywhere—because the end is not in time but in death, where death means the telos or fulfillment of anything, or, we can stop anywhere, because from the final point of view everything is an end in itself. The goal is always now.
A true finalistic psychology will show its ends in its means. We will be able to see its end goal of death in the methods it uses to work towards it. Therefore, to live fully into the consequences of the finalistic view means to be the perspective of Hades and the underworld toward each psychic event. We ask: what is the purpose of this event for my soul, for my death? Such questions extend the dimension of depth without limit, and again psychology is pushed by Hades into an imperialism of soul, reflecting the imperialisms of his kingdom and the radical dominion of death.
from Dream & the Underworld
by Dr. James Hillman
Harper Books ©1979 and used with permission
Hades was of course the God of depths, the God of invisibles. He is himself invisible, which could imply that the invisible connection is Hades, and that the essential "what" that holds things in their form is the secret of their death. And if, as Heraclitus said, Nature loves to hide, then nature loves Hades.
Hades is said to have had no temples or altars in the upperworld and his confrontation with it is experienced as a violence, a violation (Persephone's rape; the assaults on simple vegetative nymphs, Leuce and Minthe; and Iliad 5, 395 or Pindar Ol. 9, 33). He is so invisible in fact that the entire collection of Greek antique art shows no ideal portrait of Hades, such as we are familiar with of other Gods. He had no representative attributes, except an eagle, which brings out his shadowy affiliation with his brother, Zeus. He leaves no trace on earth, for no clan descends from him, no generations.
Hades' name was rarely used. At times he was referred to as "the unseen one," more often as Pluto ("wealth," "riches") or as Trophonios ("nourishing"). These disguises of Hades have been taken by some interpreters to be covering euphemisms for the fear of death, but then why this particular euphemism and not some other? Perhaps Pluto is a description of Hades, much as Plato understood this God. Then, Pluto refers to the hidden wealth or the riches of the invisible. Hence, we can understand one reason why there was no cult and no sacrifice to him-Hades was the wealthy one, the giver of nourishment to the soul. Sometimes, he was fused with Thanatos ("Death) of whom Aeschylus wrote, "Death is the only God who loves not gifts and cares not for sacrifices or libation, who has no altars and receives no hymns..." (frg. Niobe). On vase paintings when Hades is shown, he may have his face averted, as if he were not even characterized by a specific physiognomy. All this 'negative' evidence does coalesce to form a definite image of a void, an interiority or depth that is unknown but nameable, there and felt even if not seen. Hades is not an absence, but a hidden presence-even an invisible fullness.
Etymological investigations into the root word for death demon show it to mean "hider." To grasp better the ways in which Hades hides invisibly in things, let us take apart this concept, listening for the hidden connections, the metaphors, within the word hidden itself: (1) buried, shrouded, concealed from eyesight, whether a corpse or a mysterium: (2) occult, esoteric, concealed in the sense of secret; (3) that which per se cannot be seen: non-visible as non-spatial, non-extended; (4) without light: dark, black; (5) that which cannot be seen on inspection; i.e. blocked, censored, forbidden, or obscured; (6) hidden, as contained within (interior) or as contained below (inferior), where the Latin cella ("subterranean storeroom") is cognate with the Old Irish cuile ("cellar") and cel ("death"), again cognate with our hell; (7) that which is experienced with dread and terror, a void, a nothing; (8) that which is experienced as hiding, e.g., withdrawing, turning away from life; (9) stealth, surreptitiousness, deceit, such as the hidden motives and unseen connections of Hermes. In short, Hades, the hidden hider, presides over both the crypt and cryptic, which gives to Heraclitus' phrase (frg. 123): "Nature loves to hide" (physis kryptesthai philei), a subtle and multiple-implication indeed.
Some say that the cap or helmet Hades wears belongs primarily to Hermes and may have little or nothing to do with Hades. This hat is a curious phenomenon: Hermes wears it, Hades wears it: Athene puts it on to beat Ares, and Perseus to overcome the Gorgon. It makes its wearer invisible. Evidently the explicit image of connection between Hermes and Hades (announced in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes") is the headdress. Hermes and Hades share a certain style of covering their heads that both hides their thoughts and perceives hidden thoughts. It is their intentions that become invisible. We cannot perceive where their 'heads are at,' though we may have the sense of a hidden watch over inmost thoughts. Because we can never discover what their covert minds intend, we consider them deceptive, unpredictable, frightening—or wise.
When we consider the House of Hades, we must remember that the myths—and Freud, too—tell us that there is no time in the underworld. There is no decay, no progress, no change of any sort. Because time has nothing to do with the underworld, we may not conceive the underworld as "after" life, except as the afterthoughts within life. The House of Hades is a psychological realm now, not an eschatological realm later. It is not a far-off place of judgment over our actions but provides that place of judging now, and within, the inhibiting reflection interior to our actions.
This simultaneity of the underworld with the daily world is imaged by Hades, coinciding indistinguishably with Zeus, or identical with Zeus chthonios. The brother hood of Zeus and Hades says that upper and lower worlds are the same; only the perspectives differ. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, but one brother's view sees it from above and through the light, the other from below and into its darkness. Hades' realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (Doppelganger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.
Because his realm was conceived as the final end of each soul, Hades is the final cause, the purpose, the very telos of every soul and every soul process. If so, then all psychic events have a Hades aspect, and not merely the sadistic or destructive events that Freud attributed to Thanatos. All soul processes, everything in the psyche, moves towards Hades. As the finis is Hades, so the telos is Hades. Everything would become deeper, moving from the visible connections to the invisible ones, dying out of life. When we search for the most revelatory meaning in an experience, we get it most starkly by letting it go to Hades, asking what has this to do with 'my' death. Then essence stands out.
Here too Hades has bearing on psychological theory. A psychology that emphasizes the final point of view—Jung's, for instance, and Adler's—is restating the Hades perspective, even if these psychologies do not go right to the end of their ends. I mean by this the finalism of psychology seems to shy away from the full consequences of mythology, in which the finalism is not a theory only but is the experience in soul of its call to Hades.
Now hold here a moment. Let us beware of taking this call as literal death, of which so much is spoken and written today, that we begin to believe we know all about what we know nothing about. Literal death is becoming a clichéd mystery, that is, we have best-seller evidence about the unknowable.
Rather, by the call to Hades I am referring to the sense of purpose that enters whenever we talk about soul. What does it want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individuation process going? If we stare these questions in the face, of course we know where our individuation process is going-to death. This unknowable goal is the one absolutely sure event of the human condition. Hades is the unseen one and yet absolutely present.
The call to Hades suggests that all aspects of the process of the soul must be read finally, not only as part of the general human process toward death, but as particular events of and in that death. Each facet then is a finished image in itself, completing its purpose that is at the same time unending, not literally unending in time but limitless in depth. In other words, we can stop nowhere—and anywhere—because the end is not in time but in death, where death means the telos or fulfillment of anything, or, we can stop anywhere, because from the final point of view everything is an end in itself. The goal is always now.
A true finalistic psychology will show its ends in its means. We will be able to see its end goal of death in the methods it uses to work towards it. Therefore, to live fully into the consequences of the finalistic view means to be the perspective of Hades and the underworld toward each psychic event. We ask: what is the purpose of this event for my soul, for my death? Such questions extend the dimension of depth without limit, and again psychology is pushed by Hades into an imperialism of soul, reflecting the imperialisms of his kingdom and the radical dominion of death.
Jung admonishes us, "My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart." (The Red Book, Page 232)
Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of get the most and pay the least.
The term “archetypal,” is in contrast to “analytical,” the usual term for Jung’s psychology. 'Archetypal' reflects “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b). We are artistially oriented in our approach to inquiry.
Archetypal psychology is deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. "Archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics. But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart.
Traditionally, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
We are all in psyche, living through the lens of fantasy, personifying archetypal patterns that speak through us. The primary, and irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths. These can therefore be understood as the most fundamental patterns of human existence.
To study human nature at its most basic level, we must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed. The full implication of this move away from biochemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman and other neo-Jungians as “the poetic basis of mind."
Hillman appeals to us to accept living with ambiguity, fluidity, metaphor, and desire that is not resolved by the finality of any state of being such as wholeness, individuation and salvation might suggest. The image is primal and universal.
"An archetypal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance."
"An image always seems more profound (archetypal), more powerful (potential), and more beautiful (theophanic) than the comprehension of it, hence the feeling, while recording a dream, of seeing through a glass darkly. Hence, too, the driving necessity in the arts, for they provide complicated disciplines that can actualize the complex virtuality of the image."
“Archetypal psychology axiomatically assumes imagistic universals, com- parable to the universali fantastici of Vico (Scienza Nuova, par. 381), that is, mythical figures that provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.”
“An arche-typal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance.
"And, the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance.”
“Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11: 889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees.”
"Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary.”
Hillman, James (2013-09-18). Archetypal Psychology
(Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman). Spring Publications.
Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps 'evil.' Yet predatory commerce ("the free market" as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of get the most and pay the least.
The term “archetypal,” is in contrast to “analytical,” the usual term for Jung’s psychology. 'Archetypal' reflects “the deepened theory of Jung’s later work that attempts to solve psychological problems beyond scientific models” (Hillman 1970 b). We are artistially oriented in our approach to inquiry.
Archetypal psychology is deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. "Archetypal” belongs to all culture, all forms of human activity, and not only to professional practitioners of modern therapeutics. But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart.
Traditionally, archetypes are the primary forms that govern the psyche. But they cannot be contained only by the psyche, since they manifest as well in physical, social, linguistic, aesthetic, and spiritual modes. Thus, archetypal psychology’s first links are with culture and imagination rather than with medical and empirical psychologies, which tend to confine psychology to the positivistic manifestations of the nineteenth-century condition of the soul.
We are all in psyche, living through the lens of fantasy, personifying archetypal patterns that speak through us. The primary, and irreducible, language of these archetypal patterns is the metaphorical discourse of myths. These can therefore be understood as the most fundamental patterns of human existence.
To study human nature at its most basic level, we must turn to culture (mythology, religion, art, architecture, epic, drama, ritual) where these patterns are portrayed. The full implication of this move away from biochemical, socio-historical, and personal-behavioristic bases for human nature toward the imaginative has been articulated by Hillman and other neo-Jungians as “the poetic basis of mind."
Hillman appeals to us to accept living with ambiguity, fluidity, metaphor, and desire that is not resolved by the finality of any state of being such as wholeness, individuation and salvation might suggest. The image is primal and universal.
"An archetypal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance."
"An image always seems more profound (archetypal), more powerful (potential), and more beautiful (theophanic) than the comprehension of it, hence the feeling, while recording a dream, of seeing through a glass darkly. Hence, too, the driving necessity in the arts, for they provide complicated disciplines that can actualize the complex virtuality of the image."
“Archetypal psychology axiomatically assumes imagistic universals, com- parable to the universali fantastici of Vico (Scienza Nuova, par. 381), that is, mythical figures that provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena.”
“An arche-typal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance.
"And, the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance.”
“Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11: 889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees.”
"Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary.”
Hillman, James (2013-09-18). Archetypal Psychology
(Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman). Spring Publications.
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nightworld" of dream should not play second fiddle to the "dayworld" of waking life, because in the soul as on earth, day and night are equally essential, and equally real. To reduce a dream to a message or interpretation is to fail the dream. In order for dreams to do their work on us, says Hillman, we must cease to regard them as hallucinations, mere metaphors, epiphenomena, or illusions, and instead see them as the imaginal other life we all must live. Every night, for Hillman, each of us descends into the underworld to encounter those forces that shape us and our surroundings. The way down is the way up. https://www.weirdstudies.com/68?fbclid=IwAR0r-EmiGNsjlpVda-tlKJPGMu-T46f4wGAtfZrtwWDHLoUDhZSXkyDu-YI
ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
Archetypal psychology is a powerful way of getting to know and understand your psyche. Archetypal psychology likens itself to a polytheistic mythology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals – that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. They are given the dignity of truth. Images are the basis of psychic life. Soul begins again to populate the stilled realms with figures and fantasies born of the imaginative heart.
Hillman's aim is "to restore psychology to the widest, richest, deepest volume so that it would resonate with the soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative and necessary." For Hillman, it is not necessary to "get it all together," to integrate it all, or to find "some ultimate blending of the many impulses and directions." It is rather essential to find "vitality in tension, learn from paradox, getting wisdom by straddling ambivalence and gain confidence in trusting the confusion that naturally arises with multiplicity.”
It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. It is not a warped neurotic "self-deifying" new age belief system, or idealogy for those who claim to "like art," or content that 'validates' their own overcompensating neurosis.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, neo-Jungian James Hillman explains:
"We are no longer single beings in the image of a single God, but are always constituted of multiple parts: impish child, hero or heroine, supervising authority, asocial psychopath, and so on."
Archetypal psychology bases its therapeutic proposal on the exploration of images rather than on their explanation. It talks about being aware and attentive to these images until they're as clear as they can be and contemplating them carefully until our observation creates a meaning.
Archetypal psychology is a switch from science to metaphor, from concepts to engagement. Archetypes are universal prototypes. Soul makes fantasy images we embody, consciously or unconsciously.
Healing Fiction
Myths are healing fictions. Retelling of the past with a story of the present is the crux of healing fiction, tales of psychological possibilities.
The power of the imagination in creating healing fiction is found in “The Thought of the Heart.” Hillman notes that even when they are in
the imagination, figures are believed to be real, which helps to explain the
healing potential mythology.
According to Hillman, the power of the imagination in creating meaning and truth relies on tying it in with a historical perspective, as well as with the personal and collective memory that makes such a perspective true. He says: “. . . this remembering-what-never-happened must rightly be
called imagining, and this sort of memory is imagination . . . the only difference between remembering and imagining was that memory images were those to which a sense of time had been added, that curious conviction that they had once happened” (Healing 41).
"Cut free from having-to-have-happened, from the need to be historical,
memories become pre-historical images, that is, archetypal
. . . mythical in the Platonist sense of never having happened yet which always are. Theyare eternally present—not forgotten,not past, they are present now. Memory infuses images with memorability, making the images more ‘real’ to us by adding to them the sense of the time past, giving them historical reality. But the historical reality is only a cover for soul
significance, only a way of adapting the archetypal sense of mystery and
importance to a consciousness engrossed in historical facts. If the image
doesn’t come as history, we might not take it for real." (Hillman,
Healing41-2)
The fact that the psyche historicizes means that through the memory and the imagination, “The psyche itself makes ‘history’ that is altogether fictional” (Hillman,Healing43). The result of this creative imagining is important to the nature of that which is historicized.
As Hillman points out, historicizing makes events seem real, even though they are not necessary identifiable chronologically. The narrative is of a time that is “Neither here and now, nor once upon a time, but halfway between,” (Healing 44), or in essence, sacred, mythical time.
What has been mythologized has also been historicized. The idea of the validity of the myth is “theological rather than historical.” The importance of rediscovering awe, imagination, and myth in the collective cultural psyche improves contemporary life.
Bachofen surmised: "There are two roads to knowledge—the longer, slower, more arduous road of rational combination and the shorter path of the imagination, traversed with the force and swiftness of electricity. Aroused by direct contact with the ancient remains, the imagination grasps the truth at one stroke, without intermediary links. The knowledge acquired in this second way isultimately more living and colorful than the products of the understanding." (“My Life”11-12)
Soul-making approximates what it means to be “in soul,” esse in anima, immersed in both an internal and external process of transmutation. It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground.
Imagination is related to the transhuman and physical world. Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology that attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths- gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals.
Archetypal psychology takes us beyond the conventional systematized categories of cognitive and even Jungian psychology and beckons us toward more open, less ossified thinking, to following out uncertainty which opens a new way, an emergent way. It invites us into the realm of the gods, living presences which shape and inform our behavior, feelings, thoughts, and aspirations, beyond the buzzword categories of cognitive psychologies.
It asks us to see-through conventional categories such as 'dysfunction' to these informing roots to develop an engaged relationship with what informs the phenomena - conditioning spacetime, memory, and consciousness. Rather than staying concerned with what is conceptually wrong, judging it, and trying to fix, bypass, or transcend it. This inclusive aesthetic approach is naturally enriching and inherent, not contrived nor interpretive meaning flows through it as self-generative images.
"If in individuation the method is to attend to what comes to us from the unconscious, in soul-making the method is extended beyond the special circumstances of self-reflection, dreaming and active imagination into all aspects of life that generate imaginative sparks of a certain magnitude."says Hillman.
Psyche is an interaction and communication with images and symbols that deeply affect us. Images reveal our depth perception. Global emphasis on urgent ecological awareness implies a reflowering of the Neo-Platonic and alchemical notion of ANIMA MUNDI the Soul of the World. Anima Mundi is not an archetype, but an archetypal way of seeing--seeing through the world. Emphasizes soul and Anima Mundi, with a mythopoetic approach that prioritizes imagery and soul-making.
Our obstinate problems provide deeper communication with the psyche. This is engagement with self-arising inherent impulses of the psyche, even chance, surprise, accident, or illness. "The world and the gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls." (James Hillman)
It is the process of making psyche matter, of making the World Soul – the Anima Mundi – through image, phenomena and pathologizing. It is not limited to so-called spiritual matters, but spiritualizes the whole sociopolitical field of human endeavors so that it all “matters.” Imagination is stimulated by mythical fiction, which generates mythological imagination and speculative freedom of the soul. Wisdom transcends theoretical fixations and collective parroting.
Meaning is inherent so interpretation is not required. “To propose a psychology of Anima Mundi is to invite oneself to a relationship of intimacy with the soul of the world and its objects…From this point of view, the psychic reality of the world’s soul becomes available from the images."
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego with multiple perspectives and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Soul or psyche is not a fact, but a dynamic movement toward the realization of value.
Self is not the main archetype of the collective unconscious as Jung thought; each polysemous archetype is of equal value, even if the Self contains or is suffused by all other archetypes, each giving life to the other. There is no way to engage in soul-making if we keep ourselves attached exclusively to the Self. Process work stresses awareness of the many-voiced "unconscious" as an ongoing flow of experience. This approach expands Jung's work beyond verbal individual therapy to include body experience, an ensouled world, altered states as well as multicultural approaches.
Linking the material and spiritual realms, myth is always involved with Mystery, our hidden relations to the ultimately unknown. Mythopoetics, self exploration, Know Thyself, relies more on recognizing the way in which ideas have to fit together to reveal hidden or divine patterns. An art-centered paradigm that is all about what is happening.
There is no single, fixed meaning to the autonomous ways of images. All these threads together may not produce a coherent and true narrative. This ideal eternal history is one in which truth is attained by imaginatively linking different elements together to reveal the hidden order, the metaphysical truth to history. Rather than adding art to the environment, it creates its own environment.
The ethic is one of engagement, participation, and co-creation. moving deeper into love. There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. We need to uncover collaborations with new spaces and the healing power of narrative history. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass. Images with coherent resonance can be dynamically structured with drama, narrative, compensation, contextuality, and self-organization.
The psyche is composed of conscious and unconscious spheres, the latter being the larger and more powerful of the two. Indeed, Jung thought that the conscious sphere is surrounded on all sides by the unconscious in the same way that a lit candle in a dark room is surrounded on all sides by impenetrable darkness. Yet this mysterious and humongous surrounding space is dynamic and alive.
In its fathomless depths, amorphous numinous entities—psychological energy patterns—roam and rule. These archetypes carry specific programs which affect the way we live our lives since they can powerfully influence our consciousness. Intrinsically unknowable, the archetypes appear through symbolic images in myths, dreams, and fantasies so that a personified and recognizable narrative alerts us to the hidden workings of the deep psyche.
The gods and goddesses thus exhibit these psychological systems at work in the collective unconscious and show us how they are actively influencing our day to day lives. If we can understand the patterns of behavior that reflect these inner psychic workings, we can better comprehend the deeper and often hidden significance of life events, rites of passage, big ideas such as love and hate, massive social affairs like war catastrophe, and peace, and, of course, the deepest mysteries of the human soul.
The movements of goddesses and gods and the movements of the psyche are one and the same thing so that when I study these divinities I am in effect studying myself. Not myself in a personal sense but rather the self in me which is psyche—the parts of “me” that are rooted in and informed by broader spheres of consciousness, which are, in fact, all of me since it has been made abundantly clear by almost all mystical wisdom traditions that the experience of a separate self is just a trick of the mind. In this labyrinthine way, the study of archetypal divinities becomes a moving spiral stairwell (heading in both directions simultaneously) which leads to self-knowledge.
Look deeply into the often ambivalent and contradictory nature of archetypal images, particularly as they are embodied in the characters from Greek mythology. I’ve learned that archetypal spaces and locations are also “persons" and that all mythical narratives can best be understood through the use of metaphor and simile. Above all else, for me, there is tremendous value in understanding the workings of the psyche so that I can touch the deeper dimensions of life, particularly its divine nature—which is to say, the coursework this term has brought me closer to an understanding of what it means to face the gods.
Archetypal psychology is a powerful way of getting to know and understand your psyche. Archetypal psychology likens itself to a polytheistic mythology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals – that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. They are given the dignity of truth. Images are the basis of psychic life. Soul begins again to populate the stilled realms with figures and fantasies born of the imaginative heart.
Hillman's aim is "to restore psychology to the widest, richest, deepest volume so that it would resonate with the soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative and necessary." For Hillman, it is not necessary to "get it all together," to integrate it all, or to find "some ultimate blending of the many impulses and directions." It is rather essential to find "vitality in tension, learn from paradox, getting wisdom by straddling ambivalence and gain confidence in trusting the confusion that naturally arises with multiplicity.”
It is a psychology deliberately affiliated with the arts, culture, and the history of ideas, arising as they do from the imagination. It is not a warped neurotic "self-deifying" new age belief system, or idealogy for those who claim to "like art," or content that 'validates' their own overcompensating neurosis.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, neo-Jungian James Hillman explains:
"We are no longer single beings in the image of a single God, but are always constituted of multiple parts: impish child, hero or heroine, supervising authority, asocial psychopath, and so on."
Archetypal psychology bases its therapeutic proposal on the exploration of images rather than on their explanation. It talks about being aware and attentive to these images until they're as clear as they can be and contemplating them carefully until our observation creates a meaning.
Archetypal psychology is a switch from science to metaphor, from concepts to engagement. Archetypes are universal prototypes. Soul makes fantasy images we embody, consciously or unconsciously.
Healing Fiction
Myths are healing fictions. Retelling of the past with a story of the present is the crux of healing fiction, tales of psychological possibilities.
The power of the imagination in creating healing fiction is found in “The Thought of the Heart.” Hillman notes that even when they are in
the imagination, figures are believed to be real, which helps to explain the
healing potential mythology.
According to Hillman, the power of the imagination in creating meaning and truth relies on tying it in with a historical perspective, as well as with the personal and collective memory that makes such a perspective true. He says: “. . . this remembering-what-never-happened must rightly be
called imagining, and this sort of memory is imagination . . . the only difference between remembering and imagining was that memory images were those to which a sense of time had been added, that curious conviction that they had once happened” (Healing 41).
"Cut free from having-to-have-happened, from the need to be historical,
memories become pre-historical images, that is, archetypal
. . . mythical in the Platonist sense of never having happened yet which always are. Theyare eternally present—not forgotten,not past, they are present now. Memory infuses images with memorability, making the images more ‘real’ to us by adding to them the sense of the time past, giving them historical reality. But the historical reality is only a cover for soul
significance, only a way of adapting the archetypal sense of mystery and
importance to a consciousness engrossed in historical facts. If the image
doesn’t come as history, we might not take it for real." (Hillman,
Healing41-2)
The fact that the psyche historicizes means that through the memory and the imagination, “The psyche itself makes ‘history’ that is altogether fictional” (Hillman,Healing43). The result of this creative imagining is important to the nature of that which is historicized.
As Hillman points out, historicizing makes events seem real, even though they are not necessary identifiable chronologically. The narrative is of a time that is “Neither here and now, nor once upon a time, but halfway between,” (Healing 44), or in essence, sacred, mythical time.
What has been mythologized has also been historicized. The idea of the validity of the myth is “theological rather than historical.” The importance of rediscovering awe, imagination, and myth in the collective cultural psyche improves contemporary life.
Bachofen surmised: "There are two roads to knowledge—the longer, slower, more arduous road of rational combination and the shorter path of the imagination, traversed with the force and swiftness of electricity. Aroused by direct contact with the ancient remains, the imagination grasps the truth at one stroke, without intermediary links. The knowledge acquired in this second way isultimately more living and colorful than the products of the understanding." (“My Life”11-12)
Soul-making approximates what it means to be “in soul,” esse in anima, immersed in both an internal and external process of transmutation. It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground.
Imagination is related to the transhuman and physical world. Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology that attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths- gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals.
Archetypal psychology takes us beyond the conventional systematized categories of cognitive and even Jungian psychology and beckons us toward more open, less ossified thinking, to following out uncertainty which opens a new way, an emergent way. It invites us into the realm of the gods, living presences which shape and inform our behavior, feelings, thoughts, and aspirations, beyond the buzzword categories of cognitive psychologies.
It asks us to see-through conventional categories such as 'dysfunction' to these informing roots to develop an engaged relationship with what informs the phenomena - conditioning spacetime, memory, and consciousness. Rather than staying concerned with what is conceptually wrong, judging it, and trying to fix, bypass, or transcend it. This inclusive aesthetic approach is naturally enriching and inherent, not contrived nor interpretive meaning flows through it as self-generative images.
"If in individuation the method is to attend to what comes to us from the unconscious, in soul-making the method is extended beyond the special circumstances of self-reflection, dreaming and active imagination into all aspects of life that generate imaginative sparks of a certain magnitude."says Hillman.
Psyche is an interaction and communication with images and symbols that deeply affect us. Images reveal our depth perception. Global emphasis on urgent ecological awareness implies a reflowering of the Neo-Platonic and alchemical notion of ANIMA MUNDI the Soul of the World. Anima Mundi is not an archetype, but an archetypal way of seeing--seeing through the world. Emphasizes soul and Anima Mundi, with a mythopoetic approach that prioritizes imagery and soul-making.
Our obstinate problems provide deeper communication with the psyche. This is engagement with self-arising inherent impulses of the psyche, even chance, surprise, accident, or illness. "The world and the gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls." (James Hillman)
It is the process of making psyche matter, of making the World Soul – the Anima Mundi – through image, phenomena and pathologizing. It is not limited to so-called spiritual matters, but spiritualizes the whole sociopolitical field of human endeavors so that it all “matters.” Imagination is stimulated by mythical fiction, which generates mythological imagination and speculative freedom of the soul. Wisdom transcends theoretical fixations and collective parroting.
Meaning is inherent so interpretation is not required. “To propose a psychology of Anima Mundi is to invite oneself to a relationship of intimacy with the soul of the world and its objects…From this point of view, the psychic reality of the world’s soul becomes available from the images."
Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego with multiple perspectives and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Soul or psyche is not a fact, but a dynamic movement toward the realization of value.
Self is not the main archetype of the collective unconscious as Jung thought; each polysemous archetype is of equal value, even if the Self contains or is suffused by all other archetypes, each giving life to the other. There is no way to engage in soul-making if we keep ourselves attached exclusively to the Self. Process work stresses awareness of the many-voiced "unconscious" as an ongoing flow of experience. This approach expands Jung's work beyond verbal individual therapy to include body experience, an ensouled world, altered states as well as multicultural approaches.
Linking the material and spiritual realms, myth is always involved with Mystery, our hidden relations to the ultimately unknown. Mythopoetics, self exploration, Know Thyself, relies more on recognizing the way in which ideas have to fit together to reveal hidden or divine patterns. An art-centered paradigm that is all about what is happening.
There is no single, fixed meaning to the autonomous ways of images. All these threads together may not produce a coherent and true narrative. This ideal eternal history is one in which truth is attained by imaginatively linking different elements together to reveal the hidden order, the metaphysical truth to history. Rather than adding art to the environment, it creates its own environment.
The ethic is one of engagement, participation, and co-creation. moving deeper into love. There may be a missing dimension in our worldview. We need to uncover collaborations with new spaces and the healing power of narrative history. All reality has rhythmic, musical, and artistic correspondences. Perceived through the heart, the beauty and ugliness of the world resets our moral compass. Images with coherent resonance can be dynamically structured with drama, narrative, compensation, contextuality, and self-organization.
The psyche is composed of conscious and unconscious spheres, the latter being the larger and more powerful of the two. Indeed, Jung thought that the conscious sphere is surrounded on all sides by the unconscious in the same way that a lit candle in a dark room is surrounded on all sides by impenetrable darkness. Yet this mysterious and humongous surrounding space is dynamic and alive.
In its fathomless depths, amorphous numinous entities—psychological energy patterns—roam and rule. These archetypes carry specific programs which affect the way we live our lives since they can powerfully influence our consciousness. Intrinsically unknowable, the archetypes appear through symbolic images in myths, dreams, and fantasies so that a personified and recognizable narrative alerts us to the hidden workings of the deep psyche.
The gods and goddesses thus exhibit these psychological systems at work in the collective unconscious and show us how they are actively influencing our day to day lives. If we can understand the patterns of behavior that reflect these inner psychic workings, we can better comprehend the deeper and often hidden significance of life events, rites of passage, big ideas such as love and hate, massive social affairs like war catastrophe, and peace, and, of course, the deepest mysteries of the human soul.
The movements of goddesses and gods and the movements of the psyche are one and the same thing so that when I study these divinities I am in effect studying myself. Not myself in a personal sense but rather the self in me which is psyche—the parts of “me” that are rooted in and informed by broader spheres of consciousness, which are, in fact, all of me since it has been made abundantly clear by almost all mystical wisdom traditions that the experience of a separate self is just a trick of the mind. In this labyrinthine way, the study of archetypal divinities becomes a moving spiral stairwell (heading in both directions simultaneously) which leads to self-knowledge.
Look deeply into the often ambivalent and contradictory nature of archetypal images, particularly as they are embodied in the characters from Greek mythology. I’ve learned that archetypal spaces and locations are also “persons" and that all mythical narratives can best be understood through the use of metaphor and simile. Above all else, for me, there is tremendous value in understanding the workings of the psyche so that I can touch the deeper dimensions of life, particularly its divine nature—which is to say, the coursework this term has brought me closer to an understanding of what it means to face the gods.
FEELING FUNCTION
"Feelings are not only personal; they reflect historical and universal phenomena." Feelings are working in our unconscious, structures of behavior and feeling by the names of vivifying divinities is that this strategy accurately identifies the nature of the ancient mythology. Every archetypal image has its own insights, excess and intensity. With the feeling function we reduce intellectual speculation to matters close at hand, personal issues of food and nature. During the creative process, our own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials by an alchemical function because they transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing. Hillman notes that "the feeling function on a more primitive level is mainly a reaction of yes and no, like and dislike, acceptance and rejection..." Rage... jealously... lying... resentment... blaming... greed... These forbidden feelings and behaviors arise from the dark, denied part of ourselves - the personal shadow. Psyche itself in its own imaginative visibility is irreducible.
Animals were symbols for the nature of the movement of the gods in the sky.
During the creative process, the artist's own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials they ... an alchemical function because they transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing for the artist and also the spectator.
structures of behavior and feeling by the names of divinities is that this strategy accurately identifies the nature of the ... James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," in Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Jung's Typology (New York: Spring ...
See James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," in Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Lectures on Jung's Typology.
"Feelings are not only personal; they reflect historical and universal phenomena." Feelings are working in our unconscious, structures of behavior and feeling by the names of vivifying divinities is that this strategy accurately identifies the nature of the ancient mythology. Every archetypal image has its own insights, excess and intensity. With the feeling function we reduce intellectual speculation to matters close at hand, personal issues of food and nature. During the creative process, our own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials by an alchemical function because they transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing. Hillman notes that "the feeling function on a more primitive level is mainly a reaction of yes and no, like and dislike, acceptance and rejection..." Rage... jealously... lying... resentment... blaming... greed... These forbidden feelings and behaviors arise from the dark, denied part of ourselves - the personal shadow. Psyche itself in its own imaginative visibility is irreducible.
Animals were symbols for the nature of the movement of the gods in the sky.
During the creative process, the artist's own attributes, states, feelings and emotions are transferred onto the materials they ... an alchemical function because they transform into an affect of nourishment that provides a regenerative sensibility which is healing for the artist and also the spectator.
structures of behavior and feeling by the names of divinities is that this strategy accurately identifies the nature of the ... James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," in Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Jung's Typology (New York: Spring ...
See James Hillman, "The Feeling Function," in Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Lectures on Jung's Typology.
“Where instead we are less capable, what makes us most suffer, that which most anesthetizes us, what we most dismiss with earplugs, latches, alcohol, technology, internet, coffee and shopping, is the world out there, the polis. We remove psyche from the polis and we become unconscious of it being there: the polis is the unconscious. We have become hyperconscious patients and analysts, deeply aware individuals, introspective with great subtlety and very unconscious citizens” James Hillman
“The world does not ask us to believe in it; it asks us to notice it, that we appreciate it, and that we pay attention and care for it” James Hillman
“The most important thing is that depression is a collective endemic affection and we feel it and think it’s in our brain. ‘In. . .my family, in my marriage, in my work, in my economy’. . .We have placed all of this inside a ‘me’. Instead, if there is an Anima Mundi, if there is an Anima of the World—and we are part of the Anima of the World—then what happens in the external Anima also happens to me and I feel the extinction of the plants, animals, culture, languages, costumes, trades, stories. . .they are all disappearing. No wonder my Anima experiences a sense of loss, loneliness, isolation, grief and nostalgia and sadness: It’s a reflection in me of a real condition. And if I don’t feel depressed then Yes I am crazy! This is the real disease! I would be completely excluded from the reality of what is happening in the world, ecological destruction” James Hillman
The Soul of the places
“In ancient Greece, places such as crossroads, springs, wells, woods and the like, had specific qualities and specific personifications: gods, demons, nymphs, daimons and if someone lacked the awareness about all of this, was careless about the figures who lived at the crossroad or in the wood, was insensitive toward places, he or she could be in serious danger and could become possessed by them. Let’s consider, for example, nymphomania: the nymphs or Pan could overcome the traveller. Therefore it was necessary to be aware of what was happening, of what spirit, what sensibility or what imagination was overseeing a particular place, or how psyche, the soul,
resonated with the place where one was.
It’s important to become aware of what places “contained”, held-inside,
hat they were in-habited by. Each place had an intimate, peculiar quality.
This in, the inner reality of the place, is the soul of the place”
James Hillman, Carlo Truppi, “L’anima dei luoghi”, ed. Rizzoli
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"I think the soul wants to be made. After all, why so much worry over our dreams, our poems, and our paintings, getting them right, making them “work,” fussing over how they fit into our lives, other lives, the world. Isn’t the psyche itself causing this obsessiveness, urging us to articulate our images for its sake, as if the psyche desires to fit in somewhere, find a context for its continuous production of fantasies, thoughts, feelings, and baroque inventions? The psyche seems to want the mind to suppose and speculate, the hands to craft, and so it gives with each image some significant detail to catch our notice and draw us in. And that’s the job of our art, whether artists, scientists, or therapists— to pick up on the significant detail.
But now I better conclude: By context I mean the psychological entanglement within a mood and scene. I could call this entanglement “resonance,” “implication,” or “depth.” Whatever the term, I mean something more than just tying bits of mood and parts of scene or even their full interrelation as a unity. Entangled in an image is its implication whose depth amplifies into the wide world. Hidden, obscure, suggested only, nonetheless these implications suppose that the ultimate context of an image is the anima mundi, the soul of the world." (James Hillman, From Types to Images)
"The image amplifies itself without the act of amplification; that is, its volume increases through what Berry calls “restatement.” [7] In alchemical terms, what we have been doing is an iteratio of the prima materia: going over and over again the same opaque “unpsychological” stuff, giving more and more possibility for connections to appear and psychic patterns to emerge. Psyche emerges, but not in straight messages given by interpretative meanings. Rather, psyche emerges as we merge with or get lost in the labyrinth of the image.
Restatement and iteratio are also a mode of admitting one’s lostness in front of the image, which in turn heightens the value of the image. If this had been your dream in therapy, one analogy after another would have struck home in regard to your fantasies and behaviors, your ambitions, your styles of reflection and sexuality, attitudes toward yourself, life, old women, boys, growth, and shit. The dream would have gathered value, that all-encompassing sense of importance we tend to call archetypal.
“Archetypal” now is the result of an operation, given not with the image but with what happens with the image—a function of making rather than a function of being. The image grows in worth, becomes more profound and involving, that is, it becomes more archetypal as its patterning is elaborated.
We are following Jung here quite strictly: Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning (CW 8: 402). It portrays. It makes a picture of its own meaning—not one supposed by interpretation. As shape emerges, meaning emerges. Image-making = meaning. And all this without our usual interpretative moves."
James Hillman, From Types to Images
Mythical images are the psyche, or as Jung succinctly put it, “image is psyche” (Jung, 1929/1967, p. 54, CW13 para. 75). This means that an image of a god or goddess, together with any and all imaginal accouterments they carry or are adorned by as well as the events and dramas of their lives are all psyche. These images are not some separate reality that we study from a position outside of psyche. Both the images and our interactions with them (whether these interactions are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. So when we study the gods and goddesses, as in this course, for example, those from the Greek pantheon, we are studying psyche itself. The gods and goddesses and the dramatic narratives of their lives thus portray the life of the psyche—its way of living (Rossi, 2019).
James Hillman said, ” . . . dying is an integral part of the rebirth fantasy.” When things fall apart, they open new meaning. Experience of ego obliteration is not mediated by the human self, but by the metaphysical Reality itself—the human ego is simply the recipient of obliteration. Soul-making is ultimately accomplished by the archetypal gods behind the myths which work in and on the human personality.
"growing in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to him, requires it to descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources. They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche ". (James Hillman)
But now I better conclude: By context I mean the psychological entanglement within a mood and scene. I could call this entanglement “resonance,” “implication,” or “depth.” Whatever the term, I mean something more than just tying bits of mood and parts of scene or even their full interrelation as a unity. Entangled in an image is its implication whose depth amplifies into the wide world. Hidden, obscure, suggested only, nonetheless these implications suppose that the ultimate context of an image is the anima mundi, the soul of the world." (James Hillman, From Types to Images)
"The image amplifies itself without the act of amplification; that is, its volume increases through what Berry calls “restatement.” [7] In alchemical terms, what we have been doing is an iteratio of the prima materia: going over and over again the same opaque “unpsychological” stuff, giving more and more possibility for connections to appear and psychic patterns to emerge. Psyche emerges, but not in straight messages given by interpretative meanings. Rather, psyche emerges as we merge with or get lost in the labyrinth of the image.
Restatement and iteratio are also a mode of admitting one’s lostness in front of the image, which in turn heightens the value of the image. If this had been your dream in therapy, one analogy after another would have struck home in regard to your fantasies and behaviors, your ambitions, your styles of reflection and sexuality, attitudes toward yourself, life, old women, boys, growth, and shit. The dream would have gathered value, that all-encompassing sense of importance we tend to call archetypal.
“Archetypal” now is the result of an operation, given not with the image but with what happens with the image—a function of making rather than a function of being. The image grows in worth, becomes more profound and involving, that is, it becomes more archetypal as its patterning is elaborated.
We are following Jung here quite strictly: Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning (CW 8: 402). It portrays. It makes a picture of its own meaning—not one supposed by interpretation. As shape emerges, meaning emerges. Image-making = meaning. And all this without our usual interpretative moves."
James Hillman, From Types to Images
Mythical images are the psyche, or as Jung succinctly put it, “image is psyche” (Jung, 1929/1967, p. 54, CW13 para. 75). This means that an image of a god or goddess, together with any and all imaginal accouterments they carry or are adorned by as well as the events and dramas of their lives are all psyche. These images are not some separate reality that we study from a position outside of psyche. Both the images and our interactions with them (whether these interactions are scholarly, mythopoetic, ritualistic, or actively imaginal) are psyche. So when we study the gods and goddesses, as in this course, for example, those from the Greek pantheon, we are studying psyche itself. The gods and goddesses and the dramatic narratives of their lives thus portray the life of the psyche—its way of living (Rossi, 2019).
James Hillman said, ” . . . dying is an integral part of the rebirth fantasy.” When things fall apart, they open new meaning. Experience of ego obliteration is not mediated by the human self, but by the metaphysical Reality itself—the human ego is simply the recipient of obliteration. Soul-making is ultimately accomplished by the archetypal gods behind the myths which work in and on the human personality.
"growing in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to him, requires it to descend into the world that is under the world. In order to be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor, you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained by the dead (from the past, which have become invisible and yet continue to reinvigorate our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "is", by offering a deeper knowledge and support. They have already fallen, they know the sinkhole; their extraordinary resources. They do not need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything that tends to take us down, on any occasion we do not live up to. They are the gravitational force of the psyche ". (James Hillman)
“[Archetypes are] the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, like the roots of the soul that determine the perspectives through which we see ourselves and the world. They are the axiomatic images that psychic life continuously returns to and the theories that we formulate about it.” --Hillman, “Re-visioning psychology”
For Hillman psychology is not a separate science, completely distinct from literature, art, philosophy, politics, religion, natural science, and the daily affairs of the street. Psychology, as its own name implies, must be concerned with psyche, the soul, and not only the soul of humanity but the soul which is at the core of all meaningfulness whatsoever. For Hillman, psychology must be considered a foundational and even supreme discipline, because "the psyche is prior and must appear within every human undertaking" (Hillman 1977, p. 130).
The ultimate goal of psychology, however, is not to find answers and solutions to problems, but, rather, to deepen our experience of the problems themselves. The classical problems of mind/body, nature/nurture, free will/determinism are, according to Hillman, essentially contestable, and can only be resolved within the context of a particular system of thought (Hillman 1977, p. 148). But the psyche is much broader than any of the perspectives it can take upon itself and is at bottom far more interested in the play of its own ideas than in the solution to psychological problems.
The same can be said about the particular problems of each human individual, how to love, why to live, what to do with respect to money, family, sexuality, religion, etc. None are soluble, but rather the very fact that we ask them prompts us to go deeper into the caring of our soul. "The purpose of these eternal psychological problems" is, as we have seen, "to provide the base of soul-making." Psychological ideas, for Hillman, are in essence, food for the soul.
Polytheism
Polytheistic myths can provide psychological insight. Archetypal psychology is an introduction to polytheism, Greek mythology, the soul-spirit distinction, anima mundi, psychopathology, soul-making, imagination, and therapeutic practice.
For Hillman a recognition of this fragmentation is absolutely necessary in psychology. He sees, "the psychic fragmentation supposedly typical of our times as the return of the repressed, bringing a return of psychological polytheism" (Hillman, 1981, p. 115). For Hillman, the psyche is inherently multiple, and requires a psychology that insists neither upon integration nor a unified subject.
The soul has many sources of meaning, direction and value, and, as Thomas Moore puts it:
"The psyche is not only multiple, it is a communion of many persons, each with specific needs, fears, longings, style and language. The many persons echo the many gods who define the worlds that underlie what appear to be a unified human being." (Moore 1991, p. 36)
The "therapeutic" implications of Hillman's views on polytheism are simple but far-reaching. Once we have abandoned the notion of a unitary, integrated self we are able to give ourselves and our patients much more room to be who we truly are, individuals with varied, off again, on again, motives, desires, passions and interests, whose lives will not correspond to a single theme but will rather constitute a tapestry of many, often contradictory, stories and directions.
Hillman himself tells us that therapy is most helpful when it enables individuals to place their lives simultaneously within a variety of fictional genres; the epic, comic, detective, realistic, picaresque, etc., without having to choose one against the other:
"For even while one part of me knows the soul goes to death in tragedy, another is living a picaresque fantasy, and a third is engaged in the heroic fantasy of improvement." (Hillman, 1989, p. 81) http://www.newkabbalah.com/hil2.html
In psychological polytheism, the gods infuse personality, politics, economics, science, aesthetics, metaphysics, and other expressions of culture confirmed at an experiential and symbolic level. Hillman notes ..."[t]he plurality of archetypal forms reflects the pagan level of things and what might be called a polytheistic psychology."
This hybrid form rejects scientific materialism, its mechanical universe, and conventional devaluation of nature. It finds hierarchical structures of power distasteful. Hillman clarifies his approach: "In our metaphysics we declare our fantasies about the physical and its transcendence. A metaphysical statement can be seen as a psychological fancy about the relationship between 'matter and spirit'."
This Metamodern view is deconstructive, aesthetic, and Romantic. This radical pluralism of a polytheistic metapsychology theorizes about the structure of psychological theorizing itself. They share reconstruction, collaboration, interdisciplinary, transmedia work, generative paradox and ambiguity, simultaneity, and engagement rather than exhibitionism. Overlapping different identities only empowers all of them. Mystery, as living presence and the movement toward favoring the irrational, becomes 'my story.'
The psychological value and insights of polytheistic myth is a major theorem of archetypal psychology. Neopagan religions are usually polytheistic, nature-oriented, non dogmatic. They facilitate relationship and direct engagement with the Gods and Goddesses. Pagans, poets and artists use mythic characters and tropes to express contemporary metaphors and images found in every dream, drama, ceremony, gesture, and passionate act.
Hillman argues that the images and language of alchemy provide a much more valid, less abstract picture of human nature. With its colors and minerals, alchemy teaches, in Hillman’s words, “an aesthetic psychology.”
"A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word -- and angel means originally "emissary," "message bearer" -- how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? . . . We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects." --James Hillman, "A Blue Fire," Thomas Moore, Ed. (Harper Perennial), pg. 28.