“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.” -Jean Cocteau
THE GODDESS OF PERSUASION: PEITO
Magic of the word in the myth
"The task of formulating in words is even more important than one thinks. [...] Language is primarily a magical power, this power is inherent" in its very semantic constitution ", [...] is the voice that actualizes in words "the sacred breath"; and has the faculty to heal because it is 'eo ipso' and a priori sacred. [...] " --James Hillman
THE GODDESS OF PERSUASION: PEITO
Magic of the word in the myth
"The task of formulating in words is even more important than one thinks. [...] Language is primarily a magical power, this power is inherent" in its very semantic constitution ", [...] is the voice that actualizes in words "the sacred breath"; and has the faculty to heal because it is 'eo ipso' and a priori sacred. [...] " --James Hillman
CONNECTED BY PSYCHOLOGY, MYTHOLOGY. NON-RATIONAL AESTHETIC TRUTH, IN-TENTIONALITY
"When we make the move, following Jung, from mandala as circle to mandala as integration, the move from an image of roundness to the idea of wholeness, we shall have to bear in mind the shadow of death that is implicated in the mandala. ... Defensiveness is in the very nature of the circle itself. It easily becomes a paranoid closure of meaning, which by including everything in its wholeness, keeps at bay the very underworld that it presents. As the Tibetan mandala is a meditative mode that protects the soul from capture by demons, so the Self as an all-embracing wholeness keeps the demonic nature of psychic events from getting through to the soul. Roundness, whether in mandala or Self, is protective, a temenos that always offers most protection to our paranoid tendencies."
—James Hillman. (1979). The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row, p. 160.
Luigi Zoja says: "If the story is more important than the interpretation ... then the story of pain constructed by the narrative is different from the real biography: not because it falsifies it, but because it is the deepening of it through images and myths. It isn't the simple catalog of life and pathology, because it connects them to the meaning of existence and pain. It does not matter that it is literal truth, as long as is psychological truth, like the imaginal one that moves the inner world." -ES
THE BEAUTY OF PERSEPHONE
′′ Hillman points out to us that the supreme 'Beauty' is not that of Aphrodite, but of Persephone, the Queen of Underworld. To say that there can't be true Beauty [of the soul] if you don't know ' death ', depression, loneliness, despair that bring depth, awareness and humanity to the gaze. She's an inferior beauty, the one Psyche will bring back from her dark journey. It's the last extreme test: knowledge of the absolute specular of life: death [as a transformation, certainly not its literalism] that not even Aphrodite, the goddess of life, can contrast. [...] But you don't believe that this brings ' eros s' in psychic content is something abstract, a psychic issue that can regardless of concrete life. Something that can happen without involvement and relational mess, and mistakes and continuous falls. Of course you don't. Hillman points out that emotional involvement is necessary and that without it nothing would take place. Transformative soul fatigue begins with relationships you can't live without and torture, tear your heart apart and confuse your mind. Hillman writes: ′′ Soul torture seems inevitable in every intimate involvement. Despite everything that is done to avoid and ease suffering, it would seem that generating it is the very process that people are in, almost that a legendary necessity forces us to stage Psyche and Eros ". ′′
Carla Stroppa, The Soul's Look at Life, in James Hillman, Towards the Knowledge of the Soul.
· ·
The narration always precedes life, in some ways contains it, because it is the story that gives life to life, to deliver it to us, to make it psychological, understandable and shareable. The interpretation we give of it, is instead contingent on life itself, but it will always be the narration to show us the sense and significance of our happening, exactly as we perceive that it is not the soul that is in the body but the body that is in the soul. of our narrative, existential processes. We exist because we narrate. Our biography is not our life, it will still be the narration that will build the unraveling of its meaning, the track traveled and practicable. And it is above all in the narration that the textures of our healing and reparative processes are embodied ... (e.s.)
image: "Psyche honored by the people", Luca Giordano, (1692) Royal Collection (Windsor, United Kingdom) - taken from the post of George Viney -E.S.
BLUE FIRE
"I think there is a good deal of pain in this desire to “integrate” the different parts and activities of the self, to make it all fit into a perfect whole. To try and squeeze into the skin of a raven and fly when you need to be more down to earth, as Martin Shaw puts it nicely in one of his stories. It’s nothing other than a denial of the multiplicity of being human. James Hillman 's writing suggest that a secret violence can underly attempts at integration, and that in the depths of oneself, multiplicity always continues:
“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, A Blue Fire.
Spring Journal 74 has some deeply insightful essays on the lumen naturae, separatio, true imagination, and the alchemy of colour.
Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson's discussion, "Conflict as Creative Act: Psyche's knife, Separatio, and the Feeling Function", focuses on the image of the knife in the myth of Eros and Psyche. Nelson argues that the knife has been much neglected by analysis and artistic depictions of the tale, in favour of the lamp. Psyche is given the lamp and the knife by her sisters. They have convinced her she has married a monster - Eros. She creeps into his room at night to obtain a glimpse of his face - the lamp, to cast light on the suspected monster, the knife to kill him. As it turns out, Psyche is overwhelmed by the beauty of Eros, but Eros is betrayed. He has forbade her to look at him.
Nelson goes on to relate the knife with the separatio of alchemy and makes the assertion that,
"[w]hen we take up Psyche's knife as Psyche did, we make choices with our vulnerable emotional bodies and not simply with cool, unfeeling intellect. Little wonder that our pace in such times is slow rather than brisk, we feel confused long before we are clear, and even clarity is evanescent."
Our symbolic use of Psyche's knife is a means of becoming conscious through finer and finer discrimination. The awakening of Eros by Psyche is to relinquish puer aeternus, the perpetual child, a world of possibilities with no genuine existence at all.
"The individual is one who has sacrificed the puer dream of being all things to become something more humbling but infinitely more valuable: a 'real fragment'."
Nelson introduces the paradox that only by becoming a real fragment can we relate to the eternal whole. Aware of our unique personal combination - by definition, limited - we then have the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. "But only then", cautions Jung.
Taking her thesis to a conclusion Nelson argues boldly,
"Psyche's real guide is the cosmogonic Eros, the original, primordial force of love and desire who helped engender the cosmos... Even in agonizing confrontation, the soul's fate is always erotic in the largest sense of the word: dynamic, fluid and relational... Sometimes eros flows towards another person, our work, a cause, an object or a place... At other times, the flow of eros is inhibited..."
Our task she states, quoting James Hillman, is "to trust that the movements of eros in our lives are meaningful and right."
Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson's discussion, "Conflict as Creative Act: Psyche's knife, Separatio, and the Feeling Function", focuses on the image of the knife in the myth of Eros and Psyche. Nelson argues that the knife has been much neglected by analysis and artistic depictions of the tale, in favour of the lamp. Psyche is given the lamp and the knife by her sisters. They have convinced her she has married a monster - Eros. She creeps into his room at night to obtain a glimpse of his face - the lamp, to cast light on the suspected monster, the knife to kill him. As it turns out, Psyche is overwhelmed by the beauty of Eros, but Eros is betrayed. He has forbade her to look at him.
Nelson goes on to relate the knife with the separatio of alchemy and makes the assertion that,
"[w]hen we take up Psyche's knife as Psyche did, we make choices with our vulnerable emotional bodies and not simply with cool, unfeeling intellect. Little wonder that our pace in such times is slow rather than brisk, we feel confused long before we are clear, and even clarity is evanescent."
Our symbolic use of Psyche's knife is a means of becoming conscious through finer and finer discrimination. The awakening of Eros by Psyche is to relinquish puer aeternus, the perpetual child, a world of possibilities with no genuine existence at all.
"The individual is one who has sacrificed the puer dream of being all things to become something more humbling but infinitely more valuable: a 'real fragment'."
Nelson introduces the paradox that only by becoming a real fragment can we relate to the eternal whole. Aware of our unique personal combination - by definition, limited - we then have the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. "But only then", cautions Jung.
Taking her thesis to a conclusion Nelson argues boldly,
"Psyche's real guide is the cosmogonic Eros, the original, primordial force of love and desire who helped engender the cosmos... Even in agonizing confrontation, the soul's fate is always erotic in the largest sense of the word: dynamic, fluid and relational... Sometimes eros flows towards another person, our work, a cause, an object or a place... At other times, the flow of eros is inhibited..."
Our task she states, quoting James Hillman, is "to trust that the movements of eros in our lives are meaningful and right."
Hillman claims no systematic metatheory for his thought.
" The symptom, the altered, the suffering, the rejected become the cornerstone of the temple." -James Hillman
When James Hillman tells us that the Psyche is not unconscious but we are the ones who are unconscious, he helps us make the nature of the Soul as a psychic reality easier to accept. The reality of the soul, capable of expressing "intelligible" statements does not mean" understandable ".
Understanding is the virtual place where the infinite hermeneutics come into play and interface. The image instead characterizes the nature of the soul, (the image is Soul), it is already intelligible in itself because is the language with which the soul weaves the web of existence, welcomes it and expresses itself. This is why Hillman still tells us that the images are not "ours", instead we belong to them. (e.s.)
TERTIUM DATUR EST
′′Love is not a phenomenon of the person, it is a phenomenon of the spirit that excites the soul and generates imagination. [...] I have come to the conclusion that the ′′ third ′′ is the problem, the difficulty, the pathology itself. The third seems to pre-exist the relationship and seems to be governing it. Why do we focus so much on our problems? Why are we attracted to it? They have the magnetism of love: we somehow crave our problems; we're in love with them no less than we want to get rid of them, and they seem there even before the relationship started. Now if the problem contains a strange, fascinating third party, then this is an erotic object, or a place where love hides. Which means that problems are secret blessings, or, if we want, that are not so much problems as emblems - like the Renaissance emblems consisting of terrible, impossible entanglements of images that seem meaningless but instead are the motto, the coat of arms, The family sign raised to the dignity of the emblem that sustains ".
James Hillman, The Language of Life, pp. 238-239
gs, then the caelum expands skyward, the senses awakened to the presence of the whole wide world. . .. Blue initiates “the birth of the aesthetic sense.” ‘ (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology)
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
mANDALA: iO aRT
On Paranoia, here is 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
So, without attempting a summary interpretation of the essay, which is broad and detailed and covers both personal and political ground in various sections, I would simply say that the 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. As such, I think we see them in play in a wide variety of ways, particularly in the States, where absolutism, nationalism, fundamentalism, and fanaticism have been amplified to an alarming degree by the oligarchy.
" The symptom, the altered, the suffering, the rejected become the cornerstone of the temple." -James Hillman
When James Hillman tells us that the Psyche is not unconscious but we are the ones who are unconscious, he helps us make the nature of the Soul as a psychic reality easier to accept. The reality of the soul, capable of expressing "intelligible" statements does not mean" understandable ".
Understanding is the virtual place where the infinite hermeneutics come into play and interface. The image instead characterizes the nature of the soul, (the image is Soul), it is already intelligible in itself because is the language with which the soul weaves the web of existence, welcomes it and expresses itself. This is why Hillman still tells us that the images are not "ours", instead we belong to them. (e.s.)
TERTIUM DATUR EST
′′Love is not a phenomenon of the person, it is a phenomenon of the spirit that excites the soul and generates imagination. [...] I have come to the conclusion that the ′′ third ′′ is the problem, the difficulty, the pathology itself. The third seems to pre-exist the relationship and seems to be governing it. Why do we focus so much on our problems? Why are we attracted to it? They have the magnetism of love: we somehow crave our problems; we're in love with them no less than we want to get rid of them, and they seem there even before the relationship started. Now if the problem contains a strange, fascinating third party, then this is an erotic object, or a place where love hides. Which means that problems are secret blessings, or, if we want, that are not so much problems as emblems - like the Renaissance emblems consisting of terrible, impossible entanglements of images that seem meaningless but instead are the motto, the coat of arms, The family sign raised to the dignity of the emblem that sustains ".
James Hillman, The Language of Life, pp. 238-239
gs, then the caelum expands skyward, the senses awakened to the presence of the whole wide world. . .. Blue initiates “the birth of the aesthetic sense.” ‘ (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology)
"If we could reoriginate psychology at its Western source in Florence, a way might open again toward a meta-psychology that is a cosmology, a poetic vision of the cosmos which fulfills the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things.” –James Hillman, Anima Mundi
Aesthetic perception is a catalyst for metaphor. The proximity and availability of our aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of soul-making, witnessing “that immediate thing as image, its smile, a joy, a joy that makes ‘forever’” (Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Pub., p. 49)
mANDALA: iO aRT
On Paranoia, here is 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
So, without attempting a summary interpretation of the essay, which is broad and detailed and covers both personal and political ground in various sections, I would simply say that the 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. As such, I think we see them in play in a wide variety of ways, particularly in the States, where absolutism, nationalism, fundamentalism, and fanaticism have been amplified to an alarming degree by the oligarchy.
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 psychologyArchetypal psychology, ArchetypeArchetypal 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.
[edit]Psyche or soulPsyche (psychology), SoulHillman 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.
[edit]Dream analysisDream analysisBecause 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 CodeHillman'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.
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/James_Hillman
Bibliography
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 psychologyArchetypal psychology, ArchetypeArchetypal 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.
[edit]Psyche or soulPsyche (psychology), SoulHillman 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.
[edit]Dream analysisDream analysisBecause 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 CodeHillman'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.
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/James_Hillman
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.academia.edu/2241941/What_is_archetypal_psychology
John White June 2, 2008
WHAT IS ARCHETYPAL PSCYHOLOGY?
My explicit contribution is to articulate what ‘archetypal psychology’ is, that type and style of psychological thinking that James Hillman dedicated a substantial part of his long career to defining, developing and defending. A fairly schematic level discusses aspects which appear relevant for illuminating The Soul’s Code.
John White June 2, 2008
WHAT IS ARCHETYPAL PSCYHOLOGY?
My explicit contribution is to articulate what ‘archetypal psychology’ is, that type and style of psychological thinking that James Hillman dedicated a substantial part of his long career to defining, developing and defending. A fairly schematic level discusses aspects which appear relevant for illuminating The Soul’s Code.
Hillman’s book, Re-Visioning Psychology (NewYork: Harper Colophon Books, 1977) (1975). Hillman tells the reader his book “is about soulmaking, an attempt, Hillman says,“a psychology of soul ...re-visioning psychology from the point of view of soul.”“the soul cannot be understood through psychology alone....”
From Hillman’s perspective, “the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.”, “[t]he job of psychology is to offer a way and find a place for soul within its own field. For this we need basic psychological ideals.” [Re-Visioning Psychology, at ix]
"Contrast favors an aesthetic mode of distinction, unlike the logical severity of opposition and contradiction, which are often insensitively applied to contrasting colors, as if black and white or green and red were warring opponents rather than radically differing co-relatives." (James Hillman's essay, "The Seduction of Black", footnote)
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.” [RVP] '
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."
“In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggested that the word refers to that unknown -component which makes meaning possible, [and] turns events into experiences . . . .”[Id.]
“By ‘soul’ I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures,the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.” [Id.]
Image and Fantasy: The“primary data of the psyche”is“fantasy images.” “Everything we know and feel and every statement we make a real fantasy-based, that is, they derive from psychic images. These are not merely the flotsam of memory, the reproduction of perceptions, rearranged leftovers from the input of our lives.
”Hillman finds in image “the basic givens of psychic life”; images are “self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organize in archetypal patterns. Fantasy-images are both the raw materials and finished products of psyche, and they are the privileged mode of access to knowledge of soul. Nothing is more primary."
Every notion in our minds, each perception of the world and sensation in ourselves must go through a psychic organization in order to‘happen’ at all.” Relating this idea of fantasy images as the primary date of the psyche to archetypal psychology, Hillman notes that this “psychology of soul... is based in a psychology of image.” [Id.at xi]
“Man is primarily an image maker 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 on.” [Id.at 23]
“Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately, and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither ‘inner’ nor ‘out.’.... [I]mages are in us and we live in the midst of them.” [Id.]
′′ THE WICKED SEED ′′
Watching Hitler so closely, we could let the devil who is beside us slip away. Every day, multinationals and faceless state apparatus make decisions that upset entire communities, ruin hundreds of families and destroy nature. There are psychopaths who get the favor of crazy people and win elections. The TV screen, with its chameleontic ability to show whatever it does audience, favors the spacing, indifference and charm of the facade, and just as shinning and well-oiled mechanisms of the success of the political, legal, religious and financial structure .. Anyone who rises high in a world that worships success should succeed in suspicion, because this is the age of psychopathy.
Today the psychopath doesn't sneak around like a sewer rat in dark alleys, like in the s ganster movies, but he parades in armored cars during state visits, administers entire nations, sends representatives to the United Nations.
Hitler, in a way, is old-fashioned and could distract us from seeing in transparency the demonic mask wears today and will wear tomorrow.
The demonic, who is out of time, yet enters the world dressed as contemporary, dressed to kill.
HILLMAN - Soul Code
Climax — “Jung, in his Seminar Notes, discusses at times the problem of fear, finding it a legitimate path to follow. He seems to mean that one goes where one is afraid, not as the Hero in order only to meet the Dragon and overcome it. But fear as an instinctual pattern of behaviour, as part of the “wisdom of the body” to use Cannon’s phrase, provides a connection with nature (Pan) equal to hunger, sexuality, or aggression.” “When Jung said that we need to learn to fear again, he picked up the thread from the Old Testament the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord and gave it a new twist. Now the wisdom is that of the body that comes into connection with the divine, as panic with Pan, with the same intensity as described in the sexual visions of Saints. For where panic is, there too is Pan.” Hillman (Pan and the Nightmare) Chapter on Panic
Irreversible — “So psychology is obliged to consider rape always as metaphorical, even yours and mine, even in the street. This premise is already a therapeutic act for it affirms the unity of fantasy and behaviour. Even in the street there is always ritual taking place in behaviour and something transhuman is always gong on in the profane.” Hillman (Pan and the Nightmare) Chapter on Rape
Enter the Void — “When cosmos is understood as the arrangement and expression of things, as the patterning order each event presents, embellishing each event with its own kind of time and fitting space, cosmos becomes the interiority things bring with them rather than the empty universal envelope into which the must be brought… Cosmos would be the shine in the display, the beauty attesting to the presence of soul, the face that claims (Levinas), the form that shapes, the tension that holds, the pathology that limits, and the immediacy afforded by the phenomena to one another, their intelligible truth. Here, truth too shifts from noetic and universal coherence to the inherence of behavior: remaining true to itself, true to form, true to its nature, in law abiding—truth and lay indistinguishable from beauty.” Hillman (Blue Fire) Chapter on The Divine Face of Things
Love — "When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity. And when we imagine strongly, we begin to fall in love with the images conjured before the heart's eye — as when starting a project, preparing a vacation trip, planning a new house in a different city, swelling with pregnancy. . . . Our imaginations draw us ever more fully into the venture. You can't leave the lab, can't stop buying equipment, reading brochures, imagining names. You are in love because of imagination." Hillman (The Soul's Code)
James Hillman in a response to a (postmodern) question about the importance of understanding indigenous faiths
“Yes, of course it’s important. The first step is making the clearing. Realizing our own stupidity before we start talking about how much better “they” are. They are better if you want, or they have these virtues that we’ve lost and so on but we can never grasp other things and other people until we see and really own our glasses and how loaded we are in our belief systems. Otherwise we simply adopt other people’s ideas, virtues, ceremonies, systems but we still remain 2000 years of Western Christianity in what we’re doing.
You cannot skip over your shadow. And your shadow is a mess and the mess is our actual Christianity, not Aramaic Christianity, it’s the Christianity that we got from Paul and Peter and all the boys ever since and up to Mr. Gibson. That’s the Christianity we have to understand and deal with. And that’s haunting us. And it’s not evil, it’s just we have to become aware of it. And we end up with new kinds of denial by trying to step outside of it by going to Buddhism or going to this or that or something else all of which are excellent things but what we do is carry baggage on our back until we know more and my job is opening the trunks.
I’m not out to show you how much more connected to the land the Navaho were or how the Iroquois had much better social systems and so on and so forth. That’s stuff you can read and you can get and you can join societies that do these things but all along you’re going to be carrying the shadow of Western culture. And it’s ugly because it’s repressed. That’s the problem. Our denial. You asked a question a little bit ago, “Why are we willing to believe in WMDs when there’s evidence to the contrary, why do we believe anything when there’s evidence to the contrary?” and that’s the problem, why we’re so anesthetized.”
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!
Freedom? How curious! We each know all too well that fear imprisons, paralyzes even the simplest movement as when we vainly call for help in a nightmare. Yet that frozen instant presents the first freedom: awareness of that complete negation humans have named “death” — that we are bound to nothing whatsoever except death, the unknowable unknown. This negation, “death,” is the only necessity; there is no ontological obligation whatsoever but to die. The awareness, the recognition that one’s ultimate obligation is negation by this universal “implacable given” is exemplified by the death-defying hero and the suicide bomber — figures of radical extremity. In other words, we meet the fear of terrorism and of catastrophe by understanding the psychology of freedom, the freedom tied to negation, bestowed by negation, and paradoxically freed from fear of negation, as Spinoza famously wrote: ”A free man thinks of death least of all things.” [13] And Kierkegaard proposed that one should live “as if one were already dead.” [14]
-James Hillman
Philosophical Intimations
Two Hillman Quotes on Imagination:
“Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.”
― James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse
"A terrorist is the product of our education that says that fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, a world that is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche." James Hillman
Excerpt from the essay "Senex and Puer" by James Hillman:
*The Puer.* Unlike the term senex, analytical psychology uses the concept of puer eternus widely and freely. It appears early in Jung’s work (1912) [30] and has been elaborated in various aspects by him and by many since then. [31] We are especially indebted to Marie-Louise von Franz for her work on this figure and the problem. [32] The single archetype tends to merge in one: the Hero, the Divine Child, the figures of Eros, the King’s Son, the Son of the Great Mother, the Psychopompos, Mercurius-Hermes, [33] Trickster, and the Messiah. In him, we see a mercurial range of these “personalities”: narcissistic, inspired, effeminate, phallic, inquisitive, inventive, pensive, passive, fiery, and capricious. Furthermore, a description of the puer will be complicated because archetypal background and neurotic foreground, positive and negative, are not clearly distinguished. Let us nevertheless sketch some main lines of a psychological phenomenology.
The concept puer eternus refers to that archetypal dominant, which personifies or is in special relation with transcendent spiritual powers. Puer figures can be regarded as avatars of the psyche’s spiritual aspect, and puer impulses as messages from the spirit or as calls to the spirit. When the collective unconscious in an individual life is represented mainly by parental figures, then puer attitudes and impulses will show personal taints of the mother’s boy or fils du papa, the perennial adolescence of the provisional life. Then the neurotic foreground obscures the archetypal background. One assumes that the negative and irksome adolescence, the lack of progress and reality, is all a puer problem, whereas it is the personal and parental in the neurotic foreground that is distorting the necessary connection to the spirit. Then the transcendent call is lived within the family complex, distorted into a transcendent function of the family problem, as an attempt to redeem the parents or be their Messiah. The true call does not come through, or is possible only through technical breakthroughs: drugs or death-defying adventure.
The parental complex, however, is not solely responsible for the crippling, laming, or castration of the archetypal puer figures. This laming refers to the especial weakness and helplessness at the beginning of any enterprise. Inherent in the one-sided vertical direction is the Icarus-Ganymede propensity of flying and falling. [34] It must be weak on earth, because it is not at home on earth. The beginnings of things are Einfälle; they fall in on one from above as gifts of the puer, or sprout up out of the ground as daktyls, as flowers. But there is difficulty at the beginning; the child is in danger, easily gives up. The horizontal world, the space-time continuum, which we call “reality,” is not its world. So the new dies easily because it is not born in the Diesseits, and this death confirms it in eternity. Death does not matter because the puer gives the feeling that it can come again another time, make another start. Mortality points to immortality; danger only heightens the unreality of “reality” and intensifies the vertical connection.
Because of this vertical direct access to the spirit, this immediacy where vision of goal and goal itself are one, winged speed, haste - even the short cut - are imperative. The puer cannot do with indirection, with timing and patience. It knows little of the seasons and of waiting. And when it must rest or withdraw from the scene, then it seems to be stuck in a timeless state, innocent of the passing years, out of tune with time. Its wandering is as the spirit wanders, without attachment and not as an odyssey of experience. It wanders to spend or to capture, and to ignite, to try its luck, but not with the aim of going home. No wife waits; it has no son in Ithaca. Like the senex, it cannot hear, does not learn. The puer therefore understands little of what is gained by repetition and consistency, that is, by work, or of the moving back and forth, left and right, in and out, which makes for subtlety in proceeding step by step through the labyrinthine complexity of the horizontal world. These teachings but cripple its winged heels, for there, from below and behind, it is particularly vulnerable. It is anyway not meant to walk, but to fly.
The direct connection to the spirit can be misdirected through or by the Great Mother. [35] Puer figures often have a special relationship with the Great Mother, who is in love with them as carriers of the spirit; incest with them inspires her - and them - to ecstatic excess and destruction. She feeds their fire with animal desire and fans their flame with promise of scope and conquest over the horizontal world, her world of matter. Whether as her hero-lover or heroslayer, the puer impulse is re-inforced by this entanglement with the Great Mother archetype, leading to those spiritual exaggerations we call neurotic. Primary among these exaggerations is the labile mood and the dependency of the spirit upon moods. Again, they are described in vertical language (heights and depths, glory and despair) and we hear echoes of the festivals for Attis called tristia and hilaria. [36]
The eternal spirit is sufficient unto itself and contains all possibilities. As the senex is perfected through time, the puer is primordially perfect. Therefore there is no development; development means devolution, a loss and fall and restriction of possibilities. So for all its changeability the puer, like the senex, at core resists development. This self-perfection, this aura of knowing all and needing nothing, is the true background of the self-containment and isolation of any complex, reflected for instance in the ego’s narcissistic attitudes, that angelic hermaphroditic quality where masculine and feminine are so perfectly joined that nothing else is needed. There is therefore no need for relationship or woman, unless it be some magical puella or some mother-figure who can admiringly reflect and not disturb this exclusive hermaphroditic unity of oneself with one’s archetypal essence. The feeling of distance and coldness, of impermanence, of Don Juan’s ithyphallic sexuality, of homosexuality, can all be seen as derivatives of this privileged archetypal connection with the spirit, which may burn with a blue and ideal fire, but in a human relationship it may show the icy penis and chilling seed of a satanic incubus.
Because eternity is changeless, that which is governed only by the puer does not age. So, too, it has no maturing organic face that shows the bite of time. Its face is universal, given by the archetype, and so it cannot be faced, confronted in personal confrontation. It has a pose - phallic cavalier, pensive poet, messenger - but not a persona of adaptation. The revelations of the spirit have no personal locus in personality; they are eternally valid statements, good forever.
Yet, in this faceless form it captures psyche. [37] It is to the puer that psyche succumbs, and just because it is psyche’s opposite; the puer spirit is the least psychological, has the least soul. Its “sensitive soulfulness” is rather pseudopsychological, and a derivative of the hermaphroditic effeminacy. It can search and risk; it has insight, aesthetic intuition, spiritual ambition - all but not psychology, for psychology requires time, femininity of soul, and the entanglement of relationships. Instead of psychology, the puer attitude displays an aesthetic point of view: the world as beautiful images or as vast scenario. Life becomes literature, an adventure of intellect or science, or of religion or action, but always unreflected and unrelated and therefore unpsychological. It is the puer in a complex that “unrelates” it, that volatilizes it out of the vessel - that would act it out, call it off and away from the psychological - and thus is the principle that uncoagulates and disintegrates. What is unreflected tends to become compulsive, or greedy. The puer in any complex gives it drive and drivenness, makes it move too fast, want too much, go too far, not only because of the oral hunger and omnipotence fantasies of the childish, but archetypally because the world can never satisfy the demands of the spirit or match its ideal beauty. Hungering for eternal experience makes one a consumer of profane events. When the puer spirit falls into the public arena, it hurries history along.
And finally, as Henry Corbin has often pointed out, the puer eternus figure is the vision of our own first nature, our primordial golden shadow, our affinity to beauty, our angelic essence as messenger of the divine, as divine message. [38] 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.
So the puer personifies that moist spark within any complex or attitude that is the original dynamic seed of spirit. It is the call of a thing to the perfection of itself, the call of a person to his or her daimon, to be true to itself. The puer offers direct connection with spirit. Break this vertical connection and it falls with broken wings. When it falls we lose the urgent burning purpose and instead commence the long processional march through the halls of power towards the heart-hardened sick old king who is often cloaked and indistinguishable from the sick wise old man or woman.
The spark extinguished by this “heroic overcoming” leaves behind sad regrets, bitterness and cynicism, the very emotions of the negative senex. By conquering the parental complexes in the neurotic foreground, we smother the archetypal background. The puer suffers an enantiodromia into senex; he switches Janus faces. Thus are we led to realize that there is no basic difference between the negative puer and negative senex, except for their difference in biological age. The critical time in this process that is represented by the midpoint of biological life is as well the midpoint of any attitude or psychological function that ages but does not change. The eros and idealism of the beginning succumb to success and power, to be refound, as we have seen from our examination of the senex, only at the end when power and success fail, when Saturn is in exile from the world - then eros as loyalty and friendship, and idealism as prophetic insight and contemplation of truth return.
In all this, the greatest damage is done to meaning, distorted from idealism into cynicism. As the spirit becomes meaning through senex order, so the puer is meaning’s other face. As archetypal structure, the puer is the inspiration of meaning and brings meaning as vision wherever he appears. A beginning is always meaningful and filled with the excitement of eros. Meaning expresses the invisible coincidence of the positive puer with the positive senex. The puer aspect of meaning is in the search, as the dynamus of the child’s eternal “why?”; the quest, or questioning, seeking, adventuring, which grips personality from behind and compels it forward. All things are uncertain, provisional, subject to question, thereby opening the way and leading the soul toward further questioning.
However, if persuaded into the temporal world by the negative senex, the puer loses connection with its own aspect of meaning and becomes the negative puer. Then it goes dead, and there is passivity, withdrawal, even physical death. These pueri are only flower people like Hyacinthus, Narcissus, Crocus, whose tears are but wind-flowers, anemones of the goddess, and whose blood gives only Adonis roses and Attis violets of regret. They are flower-people who are unable to carry their own meaning through to the end, and as flowers they must fade before fruit and seed. Eternal Becoming never realized in Being; possibility and promise only. Or the negative puer may become hyperactive and we find all the traits accentuated and materialized, but without inherent meaning.
When the falcon cannot hear the falconer, wingedness becomes mere haste and fanaticism, an unguided missile. A person is caught in the puer activities of social rebellion, intellectual technology, or physical adventure with redoubled energy and loss of goal. Everything new is worshipped because it gives promise of the original, while the historical is discarded because it is of the senex who is now enemy. Personal revelation is preferred to objective knowledge so that minor epiphanies weigh more than the classics of culture. Eventually meaning declines into a philosophy of the absurd, action into the acte gratuite or violence, or intoxication, or flight into the future; and the chaos returns, which the puer as archetype is itself called to oppose. By refusing history, by pushing it all down into the unconscious in order to fly above it, one is forced to repeat history unconsciously. In the unconscious the senex position builds up with a compulsive vengeance until with all the force of historical necessity it takes over in its turn, reducing new truths to old cliches again, switching the only-puer into an only-senex, split from the next generation.
The puer gives us connection to the spirit and is always concerned with the eternal aspect of ourselves and the world. However, when this concern becomes only puer, exclusive and negative, the world is itself in danger of dissolution into the otherworldly. This danger is especially present in the psyche and history of this fraction of our era. [39] Therefore it is of immense importance that the puer be recognized and valued, for it carries our future - positive or negative - not necessarily as the next step in time, but as the futurity within every complex, its prospective meaning, its way out and way forward, as a possibility of renewal through eros and as a call to meaning built on the eternities of spirit. Therefore it is of immense importance that we attempt the healing of the archetypal split, which divides puer from senex, turning them into a negative antithesis, hardening the heart against one’s own puer imagination, thereby demonizing one’s angel so that the new, which comes into being through the puer, is demonic. When the archetype is split, the dynamus works independently of the patterns of order. Then we have a too-familiar pattern: action that does not know and knowledge that does not act, fanatic versus cynic, commonly formulated as youth and age. This negative turn happens not only in young people or in the first half of life or in new movements.
We must therefore deny again the usual separation into first and second halves of life, as presented for example by Jacobi, Fordham, and Dunn. [40] It dangerously divides puer and senex. Always the puer is described from within the senex-puer duality and therefore comes out negatively, which also implies a positive senex view of itself.
Let us look at the usual recommendations for the “first half” of life, or “how to cure a puer”: analyze the unconscious, reduce the fantasies, dry the hysterics, confront the intuitions, bring down to earth and reality, turn the poetry into prose. The will is to direct sexuality into relationship; the crippling is to be overcome through the exercise of work; practicality, sacrifice, limits, hardening. The face is to be set, positions defended, the provisional overcome through the panacea of commitment. Concentration, responsibility, roots, historical continuity and identity: in a word, ego-strengthening. Note well: all these images are Saturnian.
Commitment as duty clips the wings and binds the feet, as Saturn is chained through his commitments. Ego-strengthening fosters a revolutionary unattached shadow that would smash all fetters, for the strong ego has the strong shadow, the brilliance makes its own blackness. This path of worldly commitment aims to sever the puer from its own vertical axis; it reflects a senex personality, which has not itself separated the parental from the archetypal and is thus threatened by its own child, its own phallus, and its own poetry.
However we conceive the tasks of youth, or of the beginning of things, they cannot be accomplished without the meaning given by the spiritual connection. Initiation into reality is not to take away the initiant’s relation with the primordial origins but only to separate these origins from the confusions of the personal and parental. Initiation is not a demythologizing into “hard” reality, but an affirmation of the mythical meaning within all reality. Initiation “softens” reality by filling in its background with layers of mythological perspective, providing the fantasy, which makes the “hardness” of reality meaningful and tolerable, and at the same time truly indestructible. The puer figure - Baldur, Tammuz, Jesus, Krishna - brings myth into reality, presents in himself the reality of myth that transcends history. His message is mythical, stating that he, the myth - so easily wounded, easily slain, yet always reborn - is the seminal substructure of all enterprise. Traditional initiation of the puer by the positive senex confirms this relation to the archetype. Some substitutes for initiation - and analysis can be one - may instead sever this relation.
Relation with any archetype involves the danger of possession, usually marked by inflation. This is particularly true of the puer because of its high-flights and mythical behavior. Of course, possession through the senex brings an equally dangerous set of moods and actions: depression, pessimism, and hardness of heart. Even a minimum of psychological awareness - that I am just what I am as I am - can spare complete archetypal possession. This awareness is made possible through the reflective, echoing function of the psyche. This function is the human psyche’s contribution to spirit and to meaning, which noble as they may be can also be, without psyche, runaway destructive possessions. So the main puer problem is not lack of worldly reality but lack of psychic reality. Rather than commitment to the order of the world the puer needs to be wedded to psyche, to which the puer is anyway naturally drawn. Rather than historical continuity and roots in the horizontal, he needs devotion to the anima. First psyche, then world; or through the psyche to the world. The anima has the thread and knows the step-by-step dance that can lead through the labyrinth, and can teach the puer the subtleties of left hand/right hand, opening and closing, accustoming and refining vision to the half light of ambivalence.
Let us not mistakenly take this as Lebensphilosophie or a psychological prescription for “cure” - i.e., only involvement with a real woman leads a man out of his mother-bound adolescent compulsions. We are discussing rather an archetypal structure, not “how to be.” Each “hot idea,” at whatever time of life in whomever, wherever, requires psychization. It needs first to be contained within the relationship to psyche, given the soul connection. Each complex needs realization and connection within the psyche, taming the puer’s hot compulsions with the common salt of the soul. This salt makes things last and brings out their true flavor. The young and burning sulphur needs union with the elusive quicksilver of psychic reality before it becomes fixed and weighty.
This turning to the soul means taking in our complexes out of the world, out of the realm of senex power and system. Only this can slow the speed of history and technology and the acceleration of particle-men into bits of information without souls. It means that the search and questing be 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. This alone makes human the puer’s message, at the same time reddening the soul into life. [41] It is in this realm of the soul that the gifts of the puer are first needed.-jh
Excerpt from *Insearch: Psychology and Religion* by James Hillman:
The unconscious also shows itself in symptoms; not only in the symptoms of affect, of split personality, or of forgetting and slips of the tongue, not only in the psychological symptoms, but in physical symptoms where there is no ground in the organic system, no mark or trace or logical cause. Even more, there are the symptoms which are organically demonstrable but called psychogenic. These of course are not caused by the conscious personality, not by what we will, but by the unconscious personality.
That these symptoms can lead to discovery of the soul is no longer a remarkable statement. And I do not mean Reader’s Digest miracles like “How My Headaches Led Me to God.” But a prolonged occupation with suffering, with the incarnation of oneself in flesh which is tormented for apparently no reason, to be afflicted like Job in spite of being godly to the best of one’s ability, is a humiliating, soulawakening experience. Symptoms humiliate; they relativize the ego. They bring it down. Cure of symptoms may but restore the ego to its former ruling position. The humiliation of symptoms is one of the ways we grow humble—the traditional mark of the soul. We talk much of humility, but we say little about how it comes about. Humility cannot be turned on, since it is not an ego act. There is however such a thing as positive humiliation, which is not a rejection, not masochistic, not breaking, but which may be as near religious humility as we may ever know.
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. So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home.
The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its lustre: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.
But the main way in which we stumble upon the unconscious, that via regia as Freud called it, is the dream. The dream itself is a symbol; that is, it joins in itself the conscious and the unconscious, bringing together incommensurables and opposites. On the one hand, nature: natural, spontaneous, unwilled, objective psychic contents and processes. On the other hand, mind: words, images, feelings, patterns and structures. It is a senseless order, or a structured disorder. Every night the bridge is thrown up by the unconscious side of the psyche. Every morning for a moment or two while we are still in the dream we are living the symbol, living it in, united in an existential reality, true to life as we are at that moment. This state is hard to maintain. The press of the day pulls the ego away. The conscious pole of the psyche lets go its end of the bridge. We stumble upon our dreams—too often only to kick them aside.
The classical Jungian attitude toward the dream is expressed very well by a term I would borrow from existential analysis. (The existentialists have a way with words and can often give something all analysts have been doing for decades a turn and flourish that effects the thrill of a new discovery.) This term is: to “befriend” the dream. To participate in it, to enter into its imagery and mood, to want to know more about it, to understand, play with, live with, carry, and become familiar with—as one would do with a friend. As I grow familiar with my dreams I grow familiar with my inner world. Who lives in me? What inscapes are mine? What is recurrent and therefore what keeps coming back to reside in me? These are the animals and people, places and concerns, that want me to pay attention to them, to become friendly and familiar with them. They want to be known as a friend would. They want to be cared for and cared about. This familiarity after some time produces in one a sense of at-homeness and at-oneness with an inner family which is nothing else than kinship and community with oneself, a deep level of what can also be called “the blood soul.’’ In other words, the inner connection to the unconscious again leads to a sense of soul, an experience of an inner life, a place where meanings home. As those pieces and parts that before lived unconnected are laced together, are deepened and extended, that habitable dwelling place for religious life about which we spoke at the beginning begins to form itself.
The habit of looking at one’s dreams which makes the inner world habitable can begin right within the family. At the breakfast table—as well as talking of what’s happening in school today or reading cereal boxes or ’phoning—one can mention a dream image or fragment, in order to allow the unconscious a place within the family, openly, in simplicity. There is no need to interpret a child’s dream, or even to explain to everybody why one dreamed this or that. It is enough that the dream is brought into contact with daily existence, that the subjective reality of the dream is admitted, allowed, valued, in the objective world of the family. Interpretations and explanations are too often rationalizations; and why should a child be made to feel ashamed of his dreams, that they are crazy, weird, naughty?
The meanings which grow from the dream cannot be the meanings given by the ego’s mind. If that is all there were to it, there would be no growth, there would only be aggrandizement of the ego, a new pax romana to which all strange and alien elements must submit. Nowhere is the old saw that “a little learning is a dangerous thing” more appropriate than in regard to dream interpretation. Pastoral counselors seem instinctively to recognize this and say again and again that they “leave dreams alone,” as if they were too deep, too difficult, requiring special knowledge and training for interpretation. This is certainly true; yet if the minister is to be a shepherd of souls, how can he ignore this essential voice from the soul, regarding it as a message fit only for Freudians or psychiatrists or Jungian experts to understand? Therefore we must come at the dream in another way, a way which is not for experts alone, a simple practical approach valid at the breakfast table or in parish work.
Let us first realize that we shall not be following the dictum of Freud: where id was there shall be ego. To give a dream the meanings of the rational mind is just to replace the id with ego. Dream interpretation then becomes a kind of dredging up and hauling all the material from one side of the bridge to the other. It is an attitude of wanting from the unconscious, using it to gain information, power, energy, exploiting it for the sake of the ego: make it mine, make it mine. This attitude breaks apart the symbol, which is a joining of the two sides of the psyche. It would translate the dream into something known, a sign or label. (This is a mother substitute; that animal is your sex drive; those hills and valleys are a screen for your childhood home and infantile wishes.) These rationalizing interpretations, by attempting to replace the id with the ego, actually work to drain the unconscious, to reduce its size, to empty it out—all of which are hostile acts. This is not befriending the dream. The dream, when split into irrational content and rationalized meaning, becomes the psyche split. The dream which every morning offers the opportunity for healing our house divided is violated and our wounds stay open, ever-new wet disorder below, ever-new dry order above. Then the unconscious becomes mine enemy which must be worked on or propitiated with analytical techniques, or observed and watched from clever vantage points. But above all it must be depotentiated. Indeed, there are situations which the dreams will reflect as an overgrown swamp, a panic of animals, a sea in storm, a messy kitchen, where rational clarifications and clearheadedness are called for. But what counts most is the relation to the dream stemming in part from the attitude toward the dream.
Friendship wants to keep the connection open and flowing. The first thing, then, in this non-interpretive approach to the dream is that we give time and patience to it, jumping to no conclusions, fixing it in no solutions. Befriending the dream begins with a plain attempt to listen to the dream, to set down on paper or in a dream diary in its own words just what it says. One takes especial note of the feeling-tone of the dream, the mood upon waking, the emotional reactions of the dreamer in the dream, the delight or fear or surprise. Befriending is the feeling approach to the dream, and so one takes care receiving the dream’s feelings, as with a living person with whom we begin a relationship. Then there is to be noted just what the friend is saying, whom he is talking about, and where it all takes place. Dream scenes are usually confined to a few figures, frequently four in all, and therefore it is only this specific message that is being transmitted. If for a few nights mainly men come into my dreams, I know that something is going on with the masculine side of myself, that these figures are all different ways to be a man, that each embodies a special set of characteristics, a complexity representing one salient feature of my own personality. One is particularly ambitious, another is a football hero with a powerful body, a third is indistinct and shifty-eyed. These are all possibilities open to me, parts of myself, as complexes that belong to my nature and influence my behavior. My dreams may elevate me to royal company, have me in airports ready to fly off and away at any moment, find me in impersonal hotel rooms neither here nor there, or take me skimming over ski-slopes, bright and frozen on my metaled tracks. Always the dream is saying: “Look where you are, whom you are with.” And the more repetitive the motifs, the places, the people, the more the dream insists that it be attended. Does one ignore a friend?
And the story a friend tells begins somewhere, has a middle, and comes to an end, like all stories and dramas. So I listen to just where the dream begins, for this sets out the opening statement of the concern of this dream, just as the time and place is printed in the theater program: in the morning of a childhood day, at night in the office after everyone has left and only I and the office remain, in my marriage bedroom. I notice as well the way in which the dream builds its involvements to reach a climax, sometimes indicated by the word “suddenly”; and then it ends somewhere, sharply or trailing off, or I awaken.
Although it takes years of familiarity to interpret dreams well since it is truly a specialist’s work, a craft as well as an art, it takes no great cleverness or special knowledge to befriend a dream. We can always let this friend ramble on in reverie, spinning the dream along, and then the observer may ramble on too, associating and amplifying, remembering incidents, plays on words, parallels from the Bible and mythology and films. I let it speak and I speak to it—rather than analyze or interpret it. By speaking to the dream, one addresses its mood and images and encourages the dream to go on telling its tale. Here it is necessary to take care throughout that the atmosphere of the dream is respected and the images given validity and dignity, which may be given best by courageous reactions to the dreams, as one must react courageously in a friendship. By encouraging the dream to tell its tale, I give it a chance to present its true message, its mythical theme, and thus get closer to the myths which are operating in me, my real story, the story of my life from within, rather than my case history observed from without. I become my own mythologist, which means originally “teller of tales.”
In this way surely the pastoral counselor can begin to listen to dreams as well as to other stories in his work. The dream story is simply the inner aspect of the outer story. As the counselor listens to dreams, his ear for them, like the ear of the storyteller or joke-maker, grows acute. Thus did Joseph and Daniel listen; yet the pastoral counselor may listen better if he foregoes identification with those Biblical dreamanalysts, which means not yielding to the temptation of giving authoritative interpretations.
This approach is not amateur psychology, because dreams do not belong to the province of psychology alone. Once they were taken to holy men for interpretation. They belong as much to the man of religion as to the man of psychology, since they are “God’s Forgotten Language,” as the Rev. John Sanford has called them in a book by that name. Amateur it would be to approach dreams with psychological tools that have not been mastered. Amateur it would be to attempt analytical interpretations without having that devotion to the dream, that responsibility to the unconscious, and that knowledge of objective symbolic material which is the context of dream-formation and is the science of the art. Because the dream has universally been considered an important message, sometimes even from the divine, the interpreter had to be a man set apart in order to handle the powers released through revelation. This has not fundamentally changed despite all serious scientific studies on dreaming; nor will simply befriending the dream resolve its dark language and perplexities. Fate continues to be announced through dreams and sometimes it is doom that is presaged and very little can be unraveled. In spite of all the riddles, it is still less amateur, less dilettantish, to befriend, play with, and fantasy the dream along, since this kind of exploration meets the dream on its own imaginative ground and gives it a chance to reveal itself further. Dreams are part of common humanity and are best approached with common humanity before resorting to special techniques. When the modern minister begins to listen to them, he takes up again one more part of his pastoral task in caring for souls. Caring for souls today means caring for the unconscious. The minister can do this according to his own archetypal background in his own way without having to borrow the clinical methods and psychopathological language of psychology.
If a choice is forced upon the counselor between being himself the amateur with dreams or sending the person to a psychiatrist for “professional help,” then let him be bold enough to play. Play may keep the soul alive. The amateur who knows he is playing, is conscious of his ignorance, and trusts the dream to guide him, may well do less harm than that professional who tends to disregard the dream—and the soul—in favor of psychodynamics and drugs. As long as the counselor listens to the dreams he is at least giving ear to the person’s soul, even though he may not be able to give in professional language an account of what is going on. The pastoral counselor who feels himself an amateur may take comfort that the dream is by nature an enigma, obscure, oracular, ridiculous, which demands of him who would attempt its meaning a highly unprofessional naïveté. The psychological amateur, or “lover of the psyche,” just because of his openly unknowing and humble attitude toward the dream has the opportunity of affirming its value, of giving recognition to its importance regardless of the dream’s content. Through his attitude alone he can affirm and recognize this product of the soul, thereby giving value and importance to the soul itself, to its creative, symbolic, awe-inspiring function. Is this not to bless the soul, for what a blessing this is for the psyche and its dream—and for the dreamer—to be affirmed and recognized in this way.
In the startling dreams of terror, of ugly images, and cruelties, we often forget that the unconscious shows the face which we show it. It is like a mirror. If I flee, it pursues. If I am high up, it is an abyss below. If I am too noble, it sends me nasty dreams. And if I turn my back, it attracts and tempts me to turn and look with seductive images. The gulf between consciousness and the unconscious narrows as we are able to feel for it and give to it, as we are able to live with it as a friend. The continued absorption with one’s own inner world leads to experiences within that world, in and for that world. These experiences may have little or no connection with outer life, or with ideational life. That is, they may not immediately lead to a new project or idea, or the solving of a marriage or a job problem. They are experiences about events of one’s own life. They are in fact a renewal of the capacity to have experiences, to be an experiencing being. Kicks and thrills and the chase for them fade. As the capacity to experience and to love life as it is grows, one needs fewer events because one has more experiences. This growth is growth of soul as I described soul—that is, it makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.
Images "in dreams want our good, support us and encourage us to go further, understand us more deeply than ourselves, expand our sensuality and spirit, are continually creating new data to offer us - and this feeling of being loved by images ... call it imaginal love ". This experience of the image as a messenger - and the blessed sensation that an image can bring - recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images such as 'daimones' and angels (messengers). "Maybe - who knows? - these eternal images are what men mean by destiny" Hillman / Jung% 3D
BY SCOTT BECKER
A prospective editor of Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology once commented that it would “set psychology back 300 years!” I find this reaction both hilarious and revealing. It’s not surprising that Hillman remembered it four decades later. In fact, he could have used it as the tagline or slogan for the archetypal perspective: "Setting psychology back 300 years!"
The editor was expressing the attitude shared by mainstream academic psychologists of the latter half of the twentieth century, rooted in empiricism, rationalism, and a fantasy of progress that was not merely scientistic, but American (i.e. rooted in a fear of history and the ancestors, and of all things Contintental, as a defense against our adolescent ignorance and our shallow approach to knowledge as information and pragmatic know-how and our loss of intuition and wisdom).
Behaviorists and the neuropsychologists in the States were working on a reductive model for psychology grounded in materialism--what's real is what's physical--and an attempt to match an already-outdated Newtonian physics (ironically failing to keep up with the actual thinking in the quantum physics of that time, which was much more in keeping with Jung's focus on archetypal patterns and a non-dualistic understanding of the unity of subject and object, mind and matter. (Some readers may already be familiar with Jung's letters with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, that reveal how limited the Americans actually were.) I see mainstream American psychology as a series of reactions against the abstract and the non-rational, beginning with Freud (the rationalist), who was rejecting spirituality, to the humanists, who were rejecting the unconscious, to the behaviorists, who were rejecting the mind altogether.
Basically, the long arc of this reductionism was tracked in Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, beginning with Aristotle, through Kant, Descartes and the Enlightenment, where knowledge could no longer be derived from direct knowledge of the divine, so reason replaced it for several centuries, followed by the distrust of reason and the recourse to empirical data.
The overarching move was from spirit to psyche to mind (including emotion) to body, with each step being a fearful retreat from knowledge that could no longer be trusted. American psychology was following the final two steps, having long ago rejected spirit and psyche as legitimate objects of study.
Seen in this way, the circularity of Hillman's approach (images can only be understood through imagination) harkens back several steps to a time when psyche was not only legitimate as an object of study but was understood to be the only way we can know anything.
As Plotinus said, “No eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like, nor can a soul see beauty without becoming beautiful.” Knower and known, subject and object, had to adopt a similar form to make deep knowledge possible, and the form that they adopted was within the soul (as a non-dualistic field rather than as something contained within the individual).
With this history in mind, illustrating the loss of soul in American psychology, Hillman was not only setting the field back several hundred years; he was doing so quite deliberately. His style of rhetoric in his doctoral dissertation, Emotion, is Aristotelian: he talks about formal causes, uses categorical thinking and logical analysis, so the classical ideas are evoked not only in the content but in the style and process.
The most telling part of the book, however, comes at the end, when he evokes the image of the centaur as a metaphor for the relationship between mind and body, thought and emotion, human and animal. Without naming the myth, he is in effect talking about Chiron, the wounded healer, who embodies the integration - or rather the original, primordial unity - in which healer and patient, reason and emotion, are not necessary distinctions. In this sense, the book is not actually about emotion per se; it’s about walking backwards through the door of emotion to a time when emotion wasn’t split off from the mind.
Hillman’s move, made well before he carved out archetypal psychology as a distinct perspective, reversed what American psychology had been doing, ostensibly using logic to analyze emotion, but returning to the imagination. This return was not a synthesis or integration, but a demonstration of primal unity that was understood long before the Aristotelian/Cartesian/modern split. We can therefore confirm that Re-Visioning Psychology was absolutely the threat the editor feared; but of course the editor failed to recognize that going back a few hundred years would have been a step in the right direction.
In understanding this set-back that is actually a re-visioning and a return to ancient sources, another line of thinking comes to mind, and it could be summed up in a comment that Hillman shared in a public lecture while explaining various influences on his thinking (which included Gestalt psychology, personal construct theory a la George Kelly, and the theory of affordances). In addition to these sources, Hillman quoted Ezekiel, “I prophecy against my people.”
The implication is that the whole project, his entire life’s work, was not intended to be helpful or constructive in the usual sense, but rather subversive, deconstructive, and opposed to all our thinking and acting, because everything in our culture is based on faulty assumptions, false oppositions, unnecessary dualisms, and absurd literalisms (not only in the form of religious beliefs but also in the form of rationalistic methods and practices). We might say that Hillman was in the ultimate bind in which all truly divergent, original thinkers find themselves: if he had been fully understood, he would have been completely rejected. Even today, it’s possible that the deep implications of Hillman’s thought remain somewhat obscure. Simply put, it’s extremely difficult to ‘get it’.
The deep irony is that once the reader does ‘get it’, there is a realization of an underlying simplicity, or better, unity: everything is an image—thoughts, emotions, objects, ideas, the gods, all of it—and all that’s left is “play” (a term that Hillman did not use and frankly resisted, given that it derives from Heidegger’s late work on Earth and Sky, Gods and Mortals).
So we might say, when we overcome subjective dualisms, we are left with cosmological unity and the interplay of images in the psyche. The real challenge, however, is that in order to get to this state of “play”, one must first fall part, go bugs, fall down the deepest well, or like an Innuit shaman, get eaten by a polar bear. One must “die.” Even though this is a metaphorical, imaginal death, it is just as terrifying and impossible when seen from the side of “life.”
Hillman says this in many different places (e.g. “the imaginal ego at home in the dark” in The Dream and the Underworld), but because he is not a guru or a preacher, the full implications of what he’s saying have sometimes been missed. Hillman did not overtly lead people through the process on a personal, experiential level, although a close reading of his work did have that effect, which I have argued in my introduction to Inhuman Relations (volume 7 of the Uniform Edition of Hillman’s essays). And really, who can blame any reader for missing the initiatory aspect of his work?
Without a container (for example, a therapist or a shaman, a mentor or a wise old person), how many of us are actually willing to go through a “death” experience, to fall utterly apart when no one is there to pick up the pieces? Or, said differently, how many of us are willing to continue to live in total uncertainty, in Keats’ “negative capability,” with nothing other than images themselves as the ground of our experience? All the religious traditions point toward it in their own way, but consistently, the idea gets turned into a belief rather than the way out of belief.
For all of Hillman’s humility, he is actually saying the same things that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tsu were saying; but this is missed because he has already seen through his own message. No one has been able to mistake his work for a religious system. As the saying goes, If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him; but if you meet Hillman on the road, there is no need to kill him, because he’s already killed himself. It’s quite remarkable, actually, that he’s managed to accomplish this move – in the abstract, refusing to be codified, canonized, or in a more practical sense, turned into a school of thought or a formal training institute. Even Jung had followers, despite the fact that he was ambivalent about it: “Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian.”
Somehow Hillman managed to avoid the unwanted prospect of Hillmanians. (There are some "Hillmaniacs,” but they are a very different, less orthodox group...) I occasionally asked Hillman, where is the next generation who will pick up his work, or where is the next great mind, and he consistently indicated that he didn’t think the question was framed properly. I suspect that was because he knew that anyone who officially carried on in his name would have completely missed the point. The ironies abound…
A prospective editor of Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology once commented that it would “set psychology back 300 years!” I find this reaction both hilarious and revealing. It’s not surprising that Hillman remembered it four decades later. In fact, he could have used it as the tagline or slogan for the archetypal perspective: "Setting psychology back 300 years!"
The editor was expressing the attitude shared by mainstream academic psychologists of the latter half of the twentieth century, rooted in empiricism, rationalism, and a fantasy of progress that was not merely scientistic, but American (i.e. rooted in a fear of history and the ancestors, and of all things Contintental, as a defense against our adolescent ignorance and our shallow approach to knowledge as information and pragmatic know-how and our loss of intuition and wisdom).
Behaviorists and the neuropsychologists in the States were working on a reductive model for psychology grounded in materialism--what's real is what's physical--and an attempt to match an already-outdated Newtonian physics (ironically failing to keep up with the actual thinking in the quantum physics of that time, which was much more in keeping with Jung's focus on archetypal patterns and a non-dualistic understanding of the unity of subject and object, mind and matter. (Some readers may already be familiar with Jung's letters with the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, that reveal how limited the Americans actually were.) I see mainstream American psychology as a series of reactions against the abstract and the non-rational, beginning with Freud (the rationalist), who was rejecting spirituality, to the humanists, who were rejecting the unconscious, to the behaviorists, who were rejecting the mind altogether.
Basically, the long arc of this reductionism was tracked in Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, beginning with Aristotle, through Kant, Descartes and the Enlightenment, where knowledge could no longer be derived from direct knowledge of the divine, so reason replaced it for several centuries, followed by the distrust of reason and the recourse to empirical data.
The overarching move was from spirit to psyche to mind (including emotion) to body, with each step being a fearful retreat from knowledge that could no longer be trusted. American psychology was following the final two steps, having long ago rejected spirit and psyche as legitimate objects of study.
Seen in this way, the circularity of Hillman's approach (images can only be understood through imagination) harkens back several steps to a time when psyche was not only legitimate as an object of study but was understood to be the only way we can know anything.
As Plotinus said, “No eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like, nor can a soul see beauty without becoming beautiful.” Knower and known, subject and object, had to adopt a similar form to make deep knowledge possible, and the form that they adopted was within the soul (as a non-dualistic field rather than as something contained within the individual).
With this history in mind, illustrating the loss of soul in American psychology, Hillman was not only setting the field back several hundred years; he was doing so quite deliberately. His style of rhetoric in his doctoral dissertation, Emotion, is Aristotelian: he talks about formal causes, uses categorical thinking and logical analysis, so the classical ideas are evoked not only in the content but in the style and process.
The most telling part of the book, however, comes at the end, when he evokes the image of the centaur as a metaphor for the relationship between mind and body, thought and emotion, human and animal. Without naming the myth, he is in effect talking about Chiron, the wounded healer, who embodies the integration - or rather the original, primordial unity - in which healer and patient, reason and emotion, are not necessary distinctions. In this sense, the book is not actually about emotion per se; it’s about walking backwards through the door of emotion to a time when emotion wasn’t split off from the mind.
Hillman’s move, made well before he carved out archetypal psychology as a distinct perspective, reversed what American psychology had been doing, ostensibly using logic to analyze emotion, but returning to the imagination. This return was not a synthesis or integration, but a demonstration of primal unity that was understood long before the Aristotelian/Cartesian/modern split. We can therefore confirm that Re-Visioning Psychology was absolutely the threat the editor feared; but of course the editor failed to recognize that going back a few hundred years would have been a step in the right direction.
In understanding this set-back that is actually a re-visioning and a return to ancient sources, another line of thinking comes to mind, and it could be summed up in a comment that Hillman shared in a public lecture while explaining various influences on his thinking (which included Gestalt psychology, personal construct theory a la George Kelly, and the theory of affordances). In addition to these sources, Hillman quoted Ezekiel, “I prophecy against my people.”
The implication is that the whole project, his entire life’s work, was not intended to be helpful or constructive in the usual sense, but rather subversive, deconstructive, and opposed to all our thinking and acting, because everything in our culture is based on faulty assumptions, false oppositions, unnecessary dualisms, and absurd literalisms (not only in the form of religious beliefs but also in the form of rationalistic methods and practices). We might say that Hillman was in the ultimate bind in which all truly divergent, original thinkers find themselves: if he had been fully understood, he would have been completely rejected. Even today, it’s possible that the deep implications of Hillman’s thought remain somewhat obscure. Simply put, it’s extremely difficult to ‘get it’.
The deep irony is that once the reader does ‘get it’, there is a realization of an underlying simplicity, or better, unity: everything is an image—thoughts, emotions, objects, ideas, the gods, all of it—and all that’s left is “play” (a term that Hillman did not use and frankly resisted, given that it derives from Heidegger’s late work on Earth and Sky, Gods and Mortals).
So we might say, when we overcome subjective dualisms, we are left with cosmological unity and the interplay of images in the psyche. The real challenge, however, is that in order to get to this state of “play”, one must first fall part, go bugs, fall down the deepest well, or like an Innuit shaman, get eaten by a polar bear. One must “die.” Even though this is a metaphorical, imaginal death, it is just as terrifying and impossible when seen from the side of “life.”
Hillman says this in many different places (e.g. “the imaginal ego at home in the dark” in The Dream and the Underworld), but because he is not a guru or a preacher, the full implications of what he’s saying have sometimes been missed. Hillman did not overtly lead people through the process on a personal, experiential level, although a close reading of his work did have that effect, which I have argued in my introduction to Inhuman Relations (volume 7 of the Uniform Edition of Hillman’s essays). And really, who can blame any reader for missing the initiatory aspect of his work?
Without a container (for example, a therapist or a shaman, a mentor or a wise old person), how many of us are actually willing to go through a “death” experience, to fall utterly apart when no one is there to pick up the pieces? Or, said differently, how many of us are willing to continue to live in total uncertainty, in Keats’ “negative capability,” with nothing other than images themselves as the ground of our experience? All the religious traditions point toward it in their own way, but consistently, the idea gets turned into a belief rather than the way out of belief.
For all of Hillman’s humility, he is actually saying the same things that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tsu were saying; but this is missed because he has already seen through his own message. No one has been able to mistake his work for a religious system. As the saying goes, If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him; but if you meet Hillman on the road, there is no need to kill him, because he’s already killed himself. It’s quite remarkable, actually, that he’s managed to accomplish this move – in the abstract, refusing to be codified, canonized, or in a more practical sense, turned into a school of thought or a formal training institute. Even Jung had followers, despite the fact that he was ambivalent about it: “Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian.”
Somehow Hillman managed to avoid the unwanted prospect of Hillmanians. (There are some "Hillmaniacs,” but they are a very different, less orthodox group...) I occasionally asked Hillman, where is the next generation who will pick up his work, or where is the next great mind, and he consistently indicated that he didn’t think the question was framed properly. I suspect that was because he knew that anyone who officially carried on in his name would have completely missed the point. The ironies abound…
*Sources of Archetypal Psychology*
Archetypal psychology, first named as such 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
Opening section of "And Huge Is Ugly..."
"In the last fifty years Western Civilization has been engulfed by a tide of gigantism. How can we save the Soul of the world?
I KNOW THAT SMALL is beautiful, but may I start off Big? I want to begin by recalling the enormities of events during the last half-century - my lifetime, and the lifetime of Kathleen Raine, Robert Bly and James Lovelock, your speakers today, as well as of many of you here - the enormities of the fifty years from the thirties through the eighties. And so I am calling this Schumacher lecture, "…And Huge Is Ugly."
Let us recall some of the devastating enormities: the Great Depression and the vast displays of totalitarianism; World War II, its massive battles with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of prisoners; the armadas and invasions. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, brighter than a thousand Suns. Religious wars in India and Palestine, roads packed with refugees, displaced persons. Superpowers, superhighways, supertankers, supermarkets, superbowls. Olympian spectaculars, the whole world watching TV at once. Urban conglomerations of ten, twelve, fifteen million persons.
Extermination of peoples in Biafra, Bangladesh, the Sudan, Ethiopia. Titan missiles, space shots, megatons of thrust. Defoliation, mile-long accelerators, high-energy physics, fission, fusion, and super-conductivity. Corporate multi-nationals. Gigantism in agriculture. Universities of 60,000 students. Trillion dollar budgets, and calculators that can bite off and chew these enormities. Mind-expanding drugs, cocaine highs, mushroom clouds and mushroom visions. Decibels of rock. Annual broken records in pole vault and discus and 100 yard dash - higher, father, faster. Population explosion. Suburbia sprawling, miles and miles of urban squalor, burning cities, burning forests, homelessness and hunger. Gargantuan consumerism. Garbage barges, garbage dumps, dead fish, dead skies, and ageless species extinguished en masse.
These enormities have had a counterpart in the realm of ideas - in theology, in semantics, in Cosmology. In theology, Harvey Cox's Secular City and John Robinson's Honest to God brought God into the humanistic, personal world, dethroning the Lord of the Universe, as Bulkmann had demythologized God. And Thomas Altizer announced a post-holocaust theology: God is Dead. This, feminism has further defined by putting the coup de grace to all patriarchies everywhere, leaving the Goddess to rule alone, thereby agreeing with the Pope in a curiously monotheistic way, the Pope who, in 1950, raised Maria to heaven with the dogma of her Assumption.
In semantics, we suffered through logical positivism and radical nominalism which reduce statements about the world and life to language only and then cut off the signification of the language from significance beyond language, leading finally to deconstruction and post-modernism's witty little jokes on a pompous academic scale.
Cosmology has been fascinated with black holes, anti-matter, catastrophe theory. Heidegger's dread, Levina's absence, and Buddhism's profound insistence on the void.
I have not mentioned many other events that might give us cheer. These are easier for our minds to cling to and by means of them see into a New Age. I am staying with the enormities, not because I am an accountant of Saturnine doom; but rather because these same enormities have dwarfed our sensitivities to that condition which Robert J. Lifton calls "psychic numbing," a term which fits our time and so replaces Auden's "age of anxiety."
"Verweile doch, du bist so schoen," says Faust to the vision of his soul. "Stay a while, linger, you are so lovely, so beautiful," but we cannot perceive Gretchen or Helen, or the loveliness of the world, the beauty of which E.F. Schumacher urged us toward, if our senses are numbed by mind-blowing enormities.
Therefore, our task is to begin where we actually are right in the midst of the huge and the ugly and ourselves numb to it. For a rule of archetypal psychology is "start right where you are." Don’t' escape by looking for origins or solutions. Just begin in the midst of the mess." -JH
Archetypal psychology, first named as such 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
Opening section of "And Huge Is Ugly..."
"In the last fifty years Western Civilization has been engulfed by a tide of gigantism. How can we save the Soul of the world?
I KNOW THAT SMALL is beautiful, but may I start off Big? I want to begin by recalling the enormities of events during the last half-century - my lifetime, and the lifetime of Kathleen Raine, Robert Bly and James Lovelock, your speakers today, as well as of many of you here - the enormities of the fifty years from the thirties through the eighties. And so I am calling this Schumacher lecture, "…And Huge Is Ugly."
Let us recall some of the devastating enormities: the Great Depression and the vast displays of totalitarianism; World War II, its massive battles with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of prisoners; the armadas and invasions. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, brighter than a thousand Suns. Religious wars in India and Palestine, roads packed with refugees, displaced persons. Superpowers, superhighways, supertankers, supermarkets, superbowls. Olympian spectaculars, the whole world watching TV at once. Urban conglomerations of ten, twelve, fifteen million persons.
Extermination of peoples in Biafra, Bangladesh, the Sudan, Ethiopia. Titan missiles, space shots, megatons of thrust. Defoliation, mile-long accelerators, high-energy physics, fission, fusion, and super-conductivity. Corporate multi-nationals. Gigantism in agriculture. Universities of 60,000 students. Trillion dollar budgets, and calculators that can bite off and chew these enormities. Mind-expanding drugs, cocaine highs, mushroom clouds and mushroom visions. Decibels of rock. Annual broken records in pole vault and discus and 100 yard dash - higher, father, faster. Population explosion. Suburbia sprawling, miles and miles of urban squalor, burning cities, burning forests, homelessness and hunger. Gargantuan consumerism. Garbage barges, garbage dumps, dead fish, dead skies, and ageless species extinguished en masse.
These enormities have had a counterpart in the realm of ideas - in theology, in semantics, in Cosmology. In theology, Harvey Cox's Secular City and John Robinson's Honest to God brought God into the humanistic, personal world, dethroning the Lord of the Universe, as Bulkmann had demythologized God. And Thomas Altizer announced a post-holocaust theology: God is Dead. This, feminism has further defined by putting the coup de grace to all patriarchies everywhere, leaving the Goddess to rule alone, thereby agreeing with the Pope in a curiously monotheistic way, the Pope who, in 1950, raised Maria to heaven with the dogma of her Assumption.
In semantics, we suffered through logical positivism and radical nominalism which reduce statements about the world and life to language only and then cut off the signification of the language from significance beyond language, leading finally to deconstruction and post-modernism's witty little jokes on a pompous academic scale.
Cosmology has been fascinated with black holes, anti-matter, catastrophe theory. Heidegger's dread, Levina's absence, and Buddhism's profound insistence on the void.
I have not mentioned many other events that might give us cheer. These are easier for our minds to cling to and by means of them see into a New Age. I am staying with the enormities, not because I am an accountant of Saturnine doom; but rather because these same enormities have dwarfed our sensitivities to that condition which Robert J. Lifton calls "psychic numbing," a term which fits our time and so replaces Auden's "age of anxiety."
"Verweile doch, du bist so schoen," says Faust to the vision of his soul. "Stay a while, linger, you are so lovely, so beautiful," but we cannot perceive Gretchen or Helen, or the loveliness of the world, the beauty of which E.F. Schumacher urged us toward, if our senses are numbed by mind-blowing enormities.
Therefore, our task is to begin where we actually are right in the midst of the huge and the ugly and ourselves numb to it. For a rule of archetypal psychology is "start right where you are." Don’t' escape by looking for origins or solutions. Just begin in the midst of the mess." -JH
On Defining the Soul:
(from Hillman's The Myth of Analysis)
“Definition states what something is and where it is separated from what it is not. Definition excludes by cutting out what does not belong… As much of the soul is ambiguous and as knowledge about it is still incomplete, and may always be, sharp definitions are premature.
The major problems which one brings to an analysis are the major problems of every soul: love, family, work, money, emotion, death; and the defining knife may rather maim these issues than free them from their surrounds. Definitions are anyway more appropriate to logic and natural science, where strict conventions about words must be followed and where definitions serve close to systems of operations.
The psyche is not a closed system in the same way. Definition settles unease by nailing things down. But the psyche may be better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames in knowledge. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical aspect called the “unconscious.”
The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance, one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes… This permits levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on” (from the Myth of Analysis by James Hillman, footnote 24, page 31
James Hillman on the Soul
(from The Myth of Analysis)
Soul is not a scientific term, and it appears rarely in psychology today, and then usually with inverted commas, as if to keep it from infecting its scientifically sterile surround… There are many words of this sort which carry meaning, yet which find no place in today’s science. It does not mean that the references of these words are not real because scientific method leaves them out… Its meaning is best given by its context…
The root metaphor of the analyst’s point of view is that human behavior is understandable because it has an inside meaning. The inside meaning is suffered and experienced… Other words long associated with “soul” amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, essence, innermost, purpose, courage, virtue, morality, wisdom, death, God… “Primitive” languages have often elaborate concepts about animated principles which ethnologists have translated by “soul.” For these peoples, soul is a highly differentiated idea referring to a reality of great impact.
The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a cosmic force in which all living things participate, as having been given by God, as conscience, as a multiplicity… One can search one’s soul and one’s soul can be on trial. There are parables describing possession of the soul by and sale of the soul to the Devil… of development of the soul… of journeys of the soul… while the search for the soul leads always into “depths”…
This exploration of the word shows that we are dealing not with a concept, but a symbol. Symbols, as we know, are not completely within our control, so that we are not able to use the word in an unambiguous way, even though we take it to refer to that unknown human factor which makes meaning possible, which turns events into experiences, which is communicated in love and which has a religious concern.
The soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept… in the same manner as all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought. “Matter” and “nature” and “energy” have ultimately the same ambiguity; so too have “life,” “health.” (The Myth of Analysis, James Hillman, 22-23)
On spirit and soul from the Myth of Analysis:
"At this point in our discussion, spirit and soul part company and the paths of spiritual discipline and psychological development diverge. This divergence is usually not understood, since the complexes of the psyche too easily volatilize into the rarefactions of spiritual formulae.
Then we seek spiritual guidance for psychological tangles, confusing psychotherapy with yoga and the analyst with the master. Although spiritual disciplines may begin with personifications of the goal and may stress the importance of community and the master, these personifications must later be dissolved in experiences of higher abstraction and objectlessness. Persons and involvements are at best secondary. The psyche, with its emotions, images, and anthropomorphic attachments, is fundamentally a disturbance.
Besides, in spiritual disciplines even the community and the master are ultimately transpersonal abstractions. People are never as real as spirit. The vale of the world is transcended through retreat, meditation, and prayer. The spirit calls one up and out; we shall overcome, transcending even the “we.”
"But psychological development stops in isolation; it seems unable to forgo the context of other souls. Thus the psychologist delights in clinical fantasies, his cases, their families; his fascination with social and personal details reflects at the first and personal level his involvement with the opus. Why are we so avid for a bit of gossip, and why is scandalmongering so grossly profitable? Gossip is after all a primary activity of the psyche. Something psychological is going on in our craving for tales of souls in a mess. Such tales express the psyche’s myth-making function at the personal level of storytelling, tale-tattling.
When the psychologist disregards gossip, he may be sailing too high, off into the superiorities of the spirit. Gossip provides the psychic ballast of human dirt that keeps us down to earthly involvement. Soul making would seem to have a Dionysian hole through which the individual soul is drawn into a communal “madness,” misnamed “psychic infection.”
This leakage, or contamination, between souls dissolves paranoid isolation and seems required by the soul in contradistinction to the spirit, which proceeds, as Plotinus said, from the alone to the alone. Those in spiritual disciplines leave out the personal life, reporting on the objective nature of their experiences: the visions, sensations, texts, diets, and exercises. In alchemy we learn of substances and operations, not of biographical emotions; in mysticism we hear of prayers, rituals, and teachings, not of the relationships with other monks or nuns. But psychology is created within the vale of living intimacy.
"Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence: God in the soul or the soul in God, the soul in the body, the soul in the world, souls in each other or in the world-soul. Owing to this immanence, dialogue is not a bridge constructed between isolated skin-encased subjects and objects, I’s and Thous, but is intrinsic, an internal relationship, a condition of the souls immanence. The I-Thou is a necessity, a given a priori with the gift of soul." (The Myth of Analysis, 26-27)
(from Hillman's The Myth of Analysis)
“Definition states what something is and where it is separated from what it is not. Definition excludes by cutting out what does not belong… As much of the soul is ambiguous and as knowledge about it is still incomplete, and may always be, sharp definitions are premature.
The major problems which one brings to an analysis are the major problems of every soul: love, family, work, money, emotion, death; and the defining knife may rather maim these issues than free them from their surrounds. Definitions are anyway more appropriate to logic and natural science, where strict conventions about words must be followed and where definitions serve close to systems of operations.
The psyche is not a closed system in the same way. Definition settles unease by nailing things down. But the psyche may be better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames in knowledge. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical aspect called the “unconscious.”
The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance, one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes… This permits levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on” (from the Myth of Analysis by James Hillman, footnote 24, page 31
James Hillman on the Soul
(from The Myth of Analysis)
Soul is not a scientific term, and it appears rarely in psychology today, and then usually with inverted commas, as if to keep it from infecting its scientifically sterile surround… There are many words of this sort which carry meaning, yet which find no place in today’s science. It does not mean that the references of these words are not real because scientific method leaves them out… Its meaning is best given by its context…
The root metaphor of the analyst’s point of view is that human behavior is understandable because it has an inside meaning. The inside meaning is suffered and experienced… Other words long associated with “soul” amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, essence, innermost, purpose, courage, virtue, morality, wisdom, death, God… “Primitive” languages have often elaborate concepts about animated principles which ethnologists have translated by “soul.” For these peoples, soul is a highly differentiated idea referring to a reality of great impact.
The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a cosmic force in which all living things participate, as having been given by God, as conscience, as a multiplicity… One can search one’s soul and one’s soul can be on trial. There are parables describing possession of the soul by and sale of the soul to the Devil… of development of the soul… of journeys of the soul… while the search for the soul leads always into “depths”…
This exploration of the word shows that we are dealing not with a concept, but a symbol. Symbols, as we know, are not completely within our control, so that we are not able to use the word in an unambiguous way, even though we take it to refer to that unknown human factor which makes meaning possible, which turns events into experiences, which is communicated in love and which has a religious concern.
The soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept… in the same manner as all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought. “Matter” and “nature” and “energy” have ultimately the same ambiguity; so too have “life,” “health.” (The Myth of Analysis, James Hillman, 22-23)
On spirit and soul from the Myth of Analysis:
"At this point in our discussion, spirit and soul part company and the paths of spiritual discipline and psychological development diverge. This divergence is usually not understood, since the complexes of the psyche too easily volatilize into the rarefactions of spiritual formulae.
Then we seek spiritual guidance for psychological tangles, confusing psychotherapy with yoga and the analyst with the master. Although spiritual disciplines may begin with personifications of the goal and may stress the importance of community and the master, these personifications must later be dissolved in experiences of higher abstraction and objectlessness. Persons and involvements are at best secondary. The psyche, with its emotions, images, and anthropomorphic attachments, is fundamentally a disturbance.
Besides, in spiritual disciplines even the community and the master are ultimately transpersonal abstractions. People are never as real as spirit. The vale of the world is transcended through retreat, meditation, and prayer. The spirit calls one up and out; we shall overcome, transcending even the “we.”
"But psychological development stops in isolation; it seems unable to forgo the context of other souls. Thus the psychologist delights in clinical fantasies, his cases, their families; his fascination with social and personal details reflects at the first and personal level his involvement with the opus. Why are we so avid for a bit of gossip, and why is scandalmongering so grossly profitable? Gossip is after all a primary activity of the psyche. Something psychological is going on in our craving for tales of souls in a mess. Such tales express the psyche’s myth-making function at the personal level of storytelling, tale-tattling.
When the psychologist disregards gossip, he may be sailing too high, off into the superiorities of the spirit. Gossip provides the psychic ballast of human dirt that keeps us down to earthly involvement. Soul making would seem to have a Dionysian hole through which the individual soul is drawn into a communal “madness,” misnamed “psychic infection.”
This leakage, or contamination, between souls dissolves paranoid isolation and seems required by the soul in contradistinction to the spirit, which proceeds, as Plotinus said, from the alone to the alone. Those in spiritual disciplines leave out the personal life, reporting on the objective nature of their experiences: the visions, sensations, texts, diets, and exercises. In alchemy we learn of substances and operations, not of biographical emotions; in mysticism we hear of prayers, rituals, and teachings, not of the relationships with other monks or nuns. But psychology is created within the vale of living intimacy.
"Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence: God in the soul or the soul in God, the soul in the body, the soul in the world, souls in each other or in the world-soul. Owing to this immanence, dialogue is not a bridge constructed between isolated skin-encased subjects and objects, I’s and Thous, but is intrinsic, an internal relationship, a condition of the souls immanence. The I-Thou is a necessity, a given a priori with the gift of soul." (The Myth of Analysis, 26-27)
James Hillman as Researcher of Psyche as Image and Myth
By Susanna Ruebsaat PhDc
“… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22).
Archetypal Psychology is a polytheistic psychology that recognizes the myriad fantasies and myths that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. It models the unconscious mind as the source of healing and development in the individual.
“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).
“We shall now be working within an area—psychopathology—that is central to the experience of soul. In this chapter we shall attempt to understand why pathologized events must necessarily be central to soul and therefore must be essential to any psychology that bases itself upon soul. By coming to grips with the perplexities of psychic disorder, symptoms, and suffering, our hope is to gain a new purchase upon the psyche’s pathologizing tendency so as to comprehend it from another angle.
We shall be attempting to envision pathologizing psychologically.
Our starting point is in the main tradition of depth psychology, for like Freud in the motto above, we begin in the odd, un-understandable, and alien symptom rather than in the familiar ego, and as in all depth psychology we draw our insights about the familiar from the alien, or as Erik Erikson has put it: “Pathography remains the traditional source of psychoanalytic insight.”
The insights of depth psychology derive from souls in extremis, the sick, suffering, abnormal, and fantastic conditions of psyche. Our souls in private to ourselves, in close communion with another, and even in public exhibit psychopathologies.
Each soul at some time or another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions, and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions.
We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place or be understood by those who would try. Our minds, feelings, wills, and behaviors deviate from normal ways. Our insights are impotent, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don’t care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes, loves.
The study of lives and the care of souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts—that is, with psychopathology. Between the lines of each biography and in the lines of each face we may read a struggle with alcohol, with suicidal despair, with dreadful anxiety, with lascivious sexual obsessions, cruelties at close quarters, secret hallucinations, or paranoid spiritualisms. Ageing brings loneliness of soul, moments of acute psychic pain, and haunting remembrances as memory disintegrates. The night world in which we dream shows the soul split into antagonisms; night after night we are fearful, aggressive, guilty, and failed.
These are the actualities—the concrete mess of psychological existence as it is phenomenologically, subjectively, and individually ... Through them, I hope to find some psychological necessity in the pathologizing activity of the soul.“ ~James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
Hillman (“Image-Sense”, Spring 1979, p.135) complained that “Jung’s [typology] model cuts the double sense in two, sensation and intuition, opposing them to each other. In that system, sensation perceives consciously and intuition unconsciously…the problem that this model causes for sensation is much like what that cross does to thinking and feeling. They are forced into diametric opposition. However, common speech, which betrays common experience, employs terms like ‘thoughtfulness’, ‘consideration’, and ‘attentiveness’ equally for thinking and feeling. Psychological functions are not inherently opposed; we make them so with our conceptual models.”
although religion and psychology are intertwined, Hillman (1985) stressed,“the Gods of psychology are not to be believed in, not taken literally, not imagined theologically” (p. 35).
Journalist Margot Adler (2014), who wrote one of the first full-length examinations of neo-paganism in the United States, argued that “much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists (p. 28). She identified religious studies scholar David Miller (1974) and Hillman (1981) as primary exponents of this approach; however, Adler (2014) noted “both Miller and Hillman worry about a Pagan revival” or a “true revival of paganism as religion,” preferring instead a “polytheistic psychology as a substitute” (p. 31).
Jung (1961/1963) seemed less worried about making this sharp distinction between religion and psychology, considering the “autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes” as “the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached from a psychological point of view” (p. 353). There are multiple benefits to a pluralistic, polythetic approach, whether religious or psychological.
https://www.academia.edu/43323058/Following_Other_Gods_A_Depth_Psychological_Approach_to_Spiritual_Transformation_Through_Polytheistic_Personal_Myths
By Susanna Ruebsaat PhDc
“… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios” (Hillman, 1976, p.22).
Archetypal Psychology is a polytheistic psychology that recognizes the myriad fantasies and myths that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. It models the unconscious mind as the source of healing and development in the individual.
“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).
“We shall now be working within an area—psychopathology—that is central to the experience of soul. In this chapter we shall attempt to understand why pathologized events must necessarily be central to soul and therefore must be essential to any psychology that bases itself upon soul. By coming to grips with the perplexities of psychic disorder, symptoms, and suffering, our hope is to gain a new purchase upon the psyche’s pathologizing tendency so as to comprehend it from another angle.
We shall be attempting to envision pathologizing psychologically.
Our starting point is in the main tradition of depth psychology, for like Freud in the motto above, we begin in the odd, un-understandable, and alien symptom rather than in the familiar ego, and as in all depth psychology we draw our insights about the familiar from the alien, or as Erik Erikson has put it: “Pathography remains the traditional source of psychoanalytic insight.”
The insights of depth psychology derive from souls in extremis, the sick, suffering, abnormal, and fantastic conditions of psyche. Our souls in private to ourselves, in close communion with another, and even in public exhibit psychopathologies.
Each soul at some time or another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions, and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions.
We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place or be understood by those who would try. Our minds, feelings, wills, and behaviors deviate from normal ways. Our insights are impotent, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don’t care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes, loves.
The study of lives and the care of souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts—that is, with psychopathology. Between the lines of each biography and in the lines of each face we may read a struggle with alcohol, with suicidal despair, with dreadful anxiety, with lascivious sexual obsessions, cruelties at close quarters, secret hallucinations, or paranoid spiritualisms. Ageing brings loneliness of soul, moments of acute psychic pain, and haunting remembrances as memory disintegrates. The night world in which we dream shows the soul split into antagonisms; night after night we are fearful, aggressive, guilty, and failed.
These are the actualities—the concrete mess of psychological existence as it is phenomenologically, subjectively, and individually ... Through them, I hope to find some psychological necessity in the pathologizing activity of the soul.“ ~James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
Hillman (“Image-Sense”, Spring 1979, p.135) complained that “Jung’s [typology] model cuts the double sense in two, sensation and intuition, opposing them to each other. In that system, sensation perceives consciously and intuition unconsciously…the problem that this model causes for sensation is much like what that cross does to thinking and feeling. They are forced into diametric opposition. However, common speech, which betrays common experience, employs terms like ‘thoughtfulness’, ‘consideration’, and ‘attentiveness’ equally for thinking and feeling. Psychological functions are not inherently opposed; we make them so with our conceptual models.”
although religion and psychology are intertwined, Hillman (1985) stressed,“the Gods of psychology are not to be believed in, not taken literally, not imagined theologically” (p. 35).
Journalist Margot Adler (2014), who wrote one of the first full-length examinations of neo-paganism in the United States, argued that “much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists (p. 28). She identified religious studies scholar David Miller (1974) and Hillman (1981) as primary exponents of this approach; however, Adler (2014) noted “both Miller and Hillman worry about a Pagan revival” or a “true revival of paganism as religion,” preferring instead a “polytheistic psychology as a substitute” (p. 31).
Jung (1961/1963) seemed less worried about making this sharp distinction between religion and psychology, considering the “autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes” as “the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached from a psychological point of view” (p. 353). There are multiple benefits to a pluralistic, polythetic approach, whether religious or psychological.
https://www.academia.edu/43323058/Following_Other_Gods_A_Depth_Psychological_Approach_to_Spiritual_Transformation_Through_Polytheistic_Personal_Myths
"When we ask why each analysis comes upon the death experience so often and in such variety, we find, primarily, death appears in order to make way for transformation. The flower withers around its swelling pod, the snake sheds its skin, and the adult puts off his childish ways. The creative force kills as it produces the new. Every turmoil and disorder called neurosis can be seen as a life and death struggle in which the players are masked.
What is called death by the neurotic mainly because it is dark and unknown is a new life trying to break through into consciousness; what he calls life because it is familiar is but a dying pattern he tries to keep alive. The death experience breaks down the old order, and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous breakdown’ (synthesising too as it goes along), analysis means dying. The dread to begin an analysis touches these deep terrors, and the fundamental problem of resistance cannot be taken superficially.
Without a dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because, as we shall consider later, it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favours the death experience to usher in change. Viewed this way, a suicide impulse is a transformation drive. It says: ‘Life as it presents itself must change. Something must give way. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is a tale told by an idiot. The pattern must come to a complete stop. But, since I can do nothing about life out there, having tried every twist and turn, I shall put an end to it here, in my own body, that part of the objective world over which I still have power. I put an end to myself.’
When we examine this reasoning we find it leads from psychology to ontology. The movement towards a complete stop, towards that fulfilment in stasis where all processes cease, is an attempt to enter another level of reality, to move from becoming to being. To put an end to oneself means to come to one’s end, to find the end or limit of what one is, in order to arrive at what one is not—yet. ‘This’ is exchanged for ‘that’; one level is wiped out for another. Suicide is the attempt to move from one realm to another by force through death." ~James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul
What is called death by the neurotic mainly because it is dark and unknown is a new life trying to break through into consciousness; what he calls life because it is familiar is but a dying pattern he tries to keep alive. The death experience breaks down the old order, and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous breakdown’ (synthesising too as it goes along), analysis means dying. The dread to begin an analysis touches these deep terrors, and the fundamental problem of resistance cannot be taken superficially.
Without a dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because, as we shall consider later, it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favours the death experience to usher in change. Viewed this way, a suicide impulse is a transformation drive. It says: ‘Life as it presents itself must change. Something must give way. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is a tale told by an idiot. The pattern must come to a complete stop. But, since I can do nothing about life out there, having tried every twist and turn, I shall put an end to it here, in my own body, that part of the objective world over which I still have power. I put an end to myself.’
When we examine this reasoning we find it leads from psychology to ontology. The movement towards a complete stop, towards that fulfilment in stasis where all processes cease, is an attempt to enter another level of reality, to move from becoming to being. To put an end to oneself means to come to one’s end, to find the end or limit of what one is, in order to arrive at what one is not—yet. ‘This’ is exchanged for ‘that’; one level is wiped out for another. Suicide is the attempt to move from one realm to another by force through death." ~James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul
"Psychology, as the specialty named after Psyche, has a special obligation to the soul. The psychologist should be a keeper of the great natural preserve of memory and its innumerable treasures. But the nineteenth-century psychologist (and the nineteenth century is a style of mind not confined to the last century) laid waste this area of the soul with its inroads and sign posts. While other nineteenth century investigators were polluting the archaic, natural and mythic in the outer world, psychology was doing much the same thing with archaic, natural and mythic within. Therapeutic Depth Psychology shares this blame, since it shares nineteenth century attitudes. It gives names with a pathological bias to the animals of the imagination. We invented psychopathology and thereby labelled the memoria a madhouse. We invented the diagnoses with which we declared ourselves insane. After subtly poisoning our own imaginal potency with this language, we complain of a cultural wasteland and loss of soul. The poison spreads, words continually fall 'mentally ill' and are usurped by psychopathology..."
--James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
Hillman says, "Soul-making must be reimagined. We have to go back before Romanticism, back to medieval alchemy and Renaissance Neoplatonism, back to Plato, back to Egypt, and also especially out of Western history to tribal animistic psychologies that are always mainly concerned, not with individualities, but with the soul of things (“environmental concerns,” “deep ecology,” as it’s now called) and propitiatory acts that keep the world on its course." (100 Years of Therapy)
“I always thought that psychology goes on in the writing. So one of the question I used to ask myself was how do you write psychology? Well, you must write it so that it touches the soul, or it’s not psychology. It has to have that moving quality of experience, and that means it has to have many sorts of metaphors and absurdities and things that go with life.Otherwise you’re writing an academic or a scientific description of something but it’s no longer psychology.” (Hillman, page 200, Lament of the Dead)
"Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind’s thinking in images, imaging ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas of little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha chakra whose dominant color is a smoky-purple-blue."
James Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis”
Imagination is Reality (Roberts Avens) was the first comprehensive work to place archetypal psychology within a major tradition of modern thought. It recognized mythical thinking and imagination as the primal force and basic reality of human existence. By drawing upon the writings of four twentieth-century thinkers (Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer), Avens clarified the post-Jungian direction of psychology, moving toward poetic and polytheistic imagination.
"If, as the 11th chapter of Genesis says, unity leads to hybris, then we must guard against any attempt at unification: unified field theory in physics, unique explanations of evolution in biochemistry and biotechnology, one true religion and a single way of practicing it, a single interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, a single global economic system, a single astrophysical interpretation of the origins of the cosmos, a single definition of democracy or justice, and above all a single system of measurement based on numbers to calculate the value. "There are many ways to kneel and kiss the earth," writes Rumi ".
James Hillman, Ground Zero: A Reading
--James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
Hillman says, "Soul-making must be reimagined. We have to go back before Romanticism, back to medieval alchemy and Renaissance Neoplatonism, back to Plato, back to Egypt, and also especially out of Western history to tribal animistic psychologies that are always mainly concerned, not with individualities, but with the soul of things (“environmental concerns,” “deep ecology,” as it’s now called) and propitiatory acts that keep the world on its course." (100 Years of Therapy)
“I always thought that psychology goes on in the writing. So one of the question I used to ask myself was how do you write psychology? Well, you must write it so that it touches the soul, or it’s not psychology. It has to have that moving quality of experience, and that means it has to have many sorts of metaphors and absurdities and things that go with life.Otherwise you’re writing an academic or a scientific description of something but it’s no longer psychology.” (Hillman, page 200, Lament of the Dead)
"Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind’s thinking in images, imaging ideationally, speculatively, silveredly, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas of little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself, which locates this consciousness in the throat of the visuddha chakra whose dominant color is a smoky-purple-blue."
James Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis”
Imagination is Reality (Roberts Avens) was the first comprehensive work to place archetypal psychology within a major tradition of modern thought. It recognized mythical thinking and imagination as the primal force and basic reality of human existence. By drawing upon the writings of four twentieth-century thinkers (Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer), Avens clarified the post-Jungian direction of psychology, moving toward poetic and polytheistic imagination.
"If, as the 11th chapter of Genesis says, unity leads to hybris, then we must guard against any attempt at unification: unified field theory in physics, unique explanations of evolution in biochemistry and biotechnology, one true religion and a single way of practicing it, a single interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, a single global economic system, a single astrophysical interpretation of the origins of the cosmos, a single definition of democracy or justice, and above all a single system of measurement based on numbers to calculate the value. "There are many ways to kneel and kiss the earth," writes Rumi ".
James Hillman, Ground Zero: A Reading
“There are three portions or persons of Eros that have been classically differentiated: himeros or physical desire for the immediately present to be grasped in the heat of the moment; anteros or answering love; and pothos, the longing toward the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible, that idealization which is attendant upon all love and which is always beyond capture. If himeros is the material and physical desire of eros, and anteros the relational mutuality and exchange, pothos is love's spiritual portion. Pothos here would refer to the spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit. When pothos is presented on a vase painting (5th century, British Museum) as drawing Aphrodite's chariot, we see that pothos is the motive force that drives desire ever onward, as the portion of love that is never satisfied by actual loving and actual possession of the object. It is the fantasy factor that pulls the chariot beyond immediacy, like the seizures that took Alexander and like Ulysses's desire for "home".” (From “Loves Tortuous Enchantments” in A Blue Fire by 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 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, Soul's Code. p.39
“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
It fights the unconsciousness, the blindness, that all myth creates about itself. You never can see the actual myth you are in or only through a glass darkly.” ― James Hillman, Inter Views
“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.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress. May I state this as a bare and familiar fact without quoting a guru, witnessing for Christ, or claiming the miracle of recovery? Why not keep within psychology proper what once was called providence—being invisibly watched and watched over?”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“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.”
― James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
“The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [...] affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [...]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one.”
― James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology
“Getting better” means “getting stronger”; health has become equivalent to strength, strength to life. We are built up to break down and then be rebuilt as we were before, like a machine caught in an accelerated feedback. The soul seems able to make itself heard only by speaking the physician’s language symptoms. To be weak and without hope, to be passive to the symptomatic manifestations of the unconscious, is often a highly positive condition at the beginning of analysis. It does not feel positive because our hope is for something else, for something we expect from what we have already known. But death is going on and a transformation is probable.”
― James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul
“There could be a change of consciousness but let’s watch out that we start “hoping”; hope doesn’t do it, St. Paul talks about ‘watch out for hope’, T.S. Eliot picks it up again in Four Quartets ‘watch out for hope’.
.
So hope is inside; not out there and it’s one of the evils, and why is hope an evil; is because it projects you forward and takes you away from what is. You keep thinking; “well it’s getting better” well it’s not getting better; “well it’s on so well they’ll do it I can see a new dawn coming” No, if you live in that new dawn coming you miss what’s actually in front of you and what has to happen and I know that from being in psychoanalysis for so many years, you don’t talk about whether it’s getting better or not getting better or where it’s going or what this dream might mean in the future and our addiction to the future; it’s much more being attentive to what really is right now and you work on that and you don’t need any hope; you’re just working on it.”
-James Hillman from https://youtu.be/rFa0X06hLOU
The three articles/blog posts that I will mention here were all written by individuals who appear to have attended one of his lectures toward the end of his life. Perhaps they even attended the same lecture. In any case, the articles all discussed Hillman’s notion of hope, which is a topic that he apparently lectured upon toward the end of his life. But he also wrote about hope many years ago. Of course, it is possible that he was wrestling with the notion of hope himself toward the end of his life while dealing with an illness, and it is these battles within himself that were projected outward toward his audiences.
Tracey Cleantis, writer of Freudian Sip, published an article on Hillman 02/22/2011. Its title, James Hillman: Follow Your Uncertainty. In this article, she said that after hearing Hillman speak at a conference that, “Hillman warns that hope is a cruel thing to give a patient, that depression is the appropriate response to the world we live in…”
Hillman on hope is again mentioned in an article written by Michael Hanson, in Marketminder, dated 11/08/2011, and titled, Remembering James Hillman. Hanson said, “The first time I lunched with him, I hesitated, pushing around salad on my plate, finally asking, ‘What do you think of the psychological value of hope, Mr. Hillman?’ He said, ‘I do not like hope. It is an illusion—a psychological fantasy. Hope creates an expectation, and I see little need of such a thing.’”
And in a third article, this time by Tayria Ward, Ph.D., written in Doctortayria’s Blog, in an article dated 04/06/2011, and titled, Hope, the last evil? She recalled a classroom lecture by Hillman in which he spoke of “the naiveté of hope,” in which hope was the last “evil” left in Pandora’s Box. Ward said, “His point as I understand 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.” Ward adds later in this article, “Part of me now wants, truly, to give up on hope, to confront present reality for what it suggests to me for better and for worse…” Later she says, “That feeling, I find, leads to despair…but I still believe in hope.”
This theme on Hillman and hope essentially seems to distill down to this: Hillman seemed to have something against hope and even described it as an “evil” that doesn’t belong in the psychotherapy process.
http://www.santacruzpsychologist.com/blog/2013/hope-hillman-and-the-pitfalls-of-intellectualism/
"So hope is inside; not out there and it’s one of the evils, and why is hope an evil - it's because it projects you forward and takes you away from what is. You keep thinking, “Well, it’s getting better” - well it’s not getting better . . . . No, if you live in that new dawn coming you miss what’s actually in front of you and what has to happen and I know that from being in psychoanalysis for so many years; you don’t talk about whether it’s getting better or not getting better, or where it’s going or what this dream might mean in the future and our addiction to the future; it’s much more being attentive to what really is right now and you work on that and you don’t need any hope, you’re just working on it." ~ James Hillman
BY A PSYCHOLOGICAL FAITH
Nowadays, when the term ′′ soul ′′ is mentioned in the academic environment, the word usually follows between quotes, as in order not to contaminate the scientific aseptic medium thus preserving the character of scientific rigour.
Both Freud and Jung used the word soul (′′ seele ′′ in German) to express the experience of innerity.
′′ It was Freud's official English translator who contributed decisively to the diminishing value of the word soul within psychology. Instead of translating ′′ seele ′′ by ′′ soul ", preserving Freud's romantic formation, he chose to opt for ′′ mind ", sharply scientific soundword." (Barcellos)
Thus the mind is conceived as a biological phenomenon with a great prolonged evolutionary history.
In this mechanistic deterministic way, contemporary man's gaze turns to biological patterns, algorithms, neuroimmunology, hypothalamus, neural networks, synaptic connections... maybe in the vain hope that at some point amid flesh and blood can find the nature of the Man's awareness, his soul (! ?)).
Already in psychology there is a cult of the person in each of their manifestations: ′′ personality development, personality inventory, personal psychodynamics, research of opinions and personal differences, their fascination as an object of research - this is based on ideological literalism: personalism."
′′ We personalize the soul, shove it all into humans... We allocate the soul within the limits of human skin ′′
It was the philosopher Marcílio Ficino who pointed out that we need an education that goes in the opposite direction of our tendencies to naturalism and literalism.
Seeing through literal, passing through the image, means glimming the soul, means abandoning the ego's viewpoint and its vision as real.
It is an act of psychological faith that emerges from the psyche as a faith in the reality of the soul.
′′ Since the psyche is primarily image, and image is always psyche, this faith is manifested in the belief in the images ′′
′′ Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in their darkness. Your confidence is in imagination as the only non-controversial reality, directly presented, immediately felt. Confidence in imaginal and confidence in the soul walk together ′′
′′ Imagining is psychological faith and acts of psychological faith are imaginative activities."
′′ This is a work in imagination, with imagination and for imagination
This other way of perception evokes a psychological faith that is not subject to ego and not to sense perception, but rather to the attention and affirmation of the images that arise in spontaneously psychism in the daydreams, fantasies and dreams (in our constant ′′travels ′′), and they are not results of sensory impressions, as well as they are not a mental construct, they simply come up without us having control.
It is necessary to understand what image is not about visibility, ′′Image is not what you see, but how you see it. An image is given from the imaginative perspective and can only be perceived by the act of imagining.′′
The autonomy of the image presents itself in the poetic and metaphysical instant of its own creation. Images themselves long to come afloat, enabling knowledge, interventions and changes. Therefore, through the complexity of this poiesis - the creation of images in a narrative - is that we can access other portals, others than from here.
This psychological faith would enable man to rescue the forgotten dasein, provide a dialogical encounter alongside the discovery of others who are present in each thing as their double light and others besides them.
′′ Movement toward the soul is a movement of innerization, a look into things. However, this innerization should not be confused as the inside of man, but the inside of things, of all things."
This way awake in the soul
Awakening in the psyche
We woke up from the long positivist and empirist dream
We find other realities (as ontologically real as this one we live)
Reality that is neither the senses nor the intellect.
One in the world
Described in prime times by the airtight sages as:
The eighth weather
The eighth orb
Alam Al Mithal
The Malakut
Mundus Archetypalis
The mundus imaginalis.
References: Hillman, Reviewing Psychology Gustavo Barcellos
A few notes on Hillman and politics (read power)
" Furthermore, the malaise that today afflicts the politics [of the body or of the soul] of the nation is also conceptual. Dysfunctional ideas also require therapy, and not just the carriers and victims of these ideas. Nor can it be expected that poor, cheap ideas can be cured with emotion therapy. One cannot leave the head or the left lobe of the brain out, and expect a critical discernment of media distortions and a raising of the level of our national debates.
It doesn't matter how sincerely I work on my feelings about power: if my mind is still spellbound by burning fantasies of growth and efficiency or by ideas simplistic of control, of authority, of supremacy and prestige, I will remain stuck in my daily life confrontation with the concrete management of power. Therapy it must shake and modify the ideas and myths that govern my mind, however harmonious my emotional body is, increased self-esteem and positive the field of human relations, I can also being able to communicate better, to travel traits longer jogging, to keep me a job but in private I will continue to yearn for increase power, because I will still be unaware of all the complexities involved in it and, therefore, incapable to express how much I really want. [...]
History and anthropology demonstrate clearly that polytheistic treatment does not guarantee freedom from political tyranny, and yet for psychological reasons, it is worthwhile to examine it carefully. The pantheon was structured so that Zeus / Jupiter, for example, it was simply the primus inter pares. He could not cross over into the domains of others Olympic. This restriction goes beyond the concept of limited sovereignty , because absolutism cannot be content simply by sharing power with an oligarchy: the juntas are oligarchies. Nor can it be limited by law: tyranny begins by subverting the law or folding it for your own use. The idea of a pantheon, which corresponds to the internal structure of the psyche, can instead constitute a brake precisely where tyranny arises, that is, in the fantasy of the mind that sees itself itself as an absolute and solitary ruler. The vocabulary - incidentally - attributes to the term «absolute » [to loose from] the meaning of « without conditions, limitations or obligations; independent, disengaged ". And dissolved from relations, free from shackles, acts freely. This in which the tyrannical mind has faith is its own power, which is also the one who "creates his own mind". The idea of the pantheon, on the other hand, refuses to let the mind believes in itself so absolutely. It says that the mind, like everything else in the world, is composite and subject to many powers, each with myths that require continuous observance. "
James Hillman, Kinds of power
" Furthermore, the malaise that today afflicts the politics [of the body or of the soul] of the nation is also conceptual. Dysfunctional ideas also require therapy, and not just the carriers and victims of these ideas. Nor can it be expected that poor, cheap ideas can be cured with emotion therapy. One cannot leave the head or the left lobe of the brain out, and expect a critical discernment of media distortions and a raising of the level of our national debates.
It doesn't matter how sincerely I work on my feelings about power: if my mind is still spellbound by burning fantasies of growth and efficiency or by ideas simplistic of control, of authority, of supremacy and prestige, I will remain stuck in my daily life confrontation with the concrete management of power. Therapy it must shake and modify the ideas and myths that govern my mind, however harmonious my emotional body is, increased self-esteem and positive the field of human relations, I can also being able to communicate better, to travel traits longer jogging, to keep me a job but in private I will continue to yearn for increase power, because I will still be unaware of all the complexities involved in it and, therefore, incapable to express how much I really want. [...]
History and anthropology demonstrate clearly that polytheistic treatment does not guarantee freedom from political tyranny, and yet for psychological reasons, it is worthwhile to examine it carefully. The pantheon was structured so that Zeus / Jupiter, for example, it was simply the primus inter pares. He could not cross over into the domains of others Olympic. This restriction goes beyond the concept of limited sovereignty , because absolutism cannot be content simply by sharing power with an oligarchy: the juntas are oligarchies. Nor can it be limited by law: tyranny begins by subverting the law or folding it for your own use. The idea of a pantheon, which corresponds to the internal structure of the psyche, can instead constitute a brake precisely where tyranny arises, that is, in the fantasy of the mind that sees itself itself as an absolute and solitary ruler. The vocabulary - incidentally - attributes to the term «absolute » [to loose from] the meaning of « without conditions, limitations or obligations; independent, disengaged ". And dissolved from relations, free from shackles, acts freely. This in which the tyrannical mind has faith is its own power, which is also the one who "creates his own mind". The idea of the pantheon, on the other hand, refuses to let the mind believes in itself so absolutely. It says that the mind, like everything else in the world, is composite and subject to many powers, each with myths that require continuous observance. "
James Hillman, Kinds of power
"Were Americans to set up statues, as did the Romans, to the personified characteristics that move its national behavior and are idealized as virtues, one of them would surely be Rashness, the god of Haste. Quick, Fast, Instant, Flash, Time-Saver, One-Liner, Sound-Bite – are some of this god’s epithets. This is the figure who makes one act before thinking, and lets action determine what to think: when a problem occurs, it is Haste who asks, “What do we do about it?” “What are you taking for it?” " --James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hermes_Ecopsychology_and_Complexity_Theo/ju-NsCN3w1oC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,*Archetypal+Psychology:+A+Brief+Account*+(1983,&pg=PA180&printsec=frontcover Appendix K
Archetypal Psychology
"To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch." --Hillman, Soul's Code
"I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks..." --Carl Jung
"Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
"By having the courage to stand for one's own experience, one begins to give real being to the soul. Everything depends on the individual's ability to stand for their own experience (symptoms, suffering and accomplishments) in the face of the world that gives these things no credit." --James Hillman
According to Hillman, it is "spirit's self-knowledge in the mirror of the soul, soul's recognition of its spirits." There is no single way of knowing thyself, even though psychology has favored the method of introspection and insight. He suggests, "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. Self-understanding healed by active imagination."
“We have lost the feeling of the beauty of the world that we are looking for substitutes. Erich Hoffer said: “You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.” Meaning we rush around buying stuff, needing stuff permanently needy, needing therapists, needing love, needing relationships, needing holidays, needing vacations and you deserve it; says the ads, you deserve it because you’re miserable, you’re depressed. So now the government has all the health services shown you can read a questionnaire and find out you’re depressed even if you don’t really know it or feel it it can be discovered and then you can take medication against it. But the feeling of loss: is that we don’t know what it is we’ve lost and that’s what I’ve been trying to emphasize; is what we’ve lost is the beauty of the world and we make up for it with attempting to conquer the world or own the world possess the world.
You know, I’m a therapist so I’m very careful about using words like saving so I’m not really talking about “saving” or “salvation” or any of that. I’m talking much more about waking up to common sense, it’s just a matter of realizing how dependent we are on taking a deep breath or how dependent we’re upon our glass of water and if that is lost then we are in some kind of unreal world; delusional world. So it’s that waking up to insanity of the way we’ve structured ourselves rather than doing something in the world to make a change, that’s the old style American way; let’s fix it, I’m not talking about fixing it, I’m talking about making a change in the mind that realizes; my god I’m crazy.
Once we reawaken our aesthetic sense and are not anesthetized as we’re by all the distractions; if we’re not anesthetized we would be able to see and appreciate the beauty in the world. Now the moment there’s beauty, you fall in love with beauty that’s Plato but it’s also our own experiences. You see a beautiful man or a beautiful woman and you fall in love with them that’s the first bit of attraction and if you fall in love with something ; love the world, not through Christian moralism about you must love the world or an economic one is sustainability for our own benefit therefore we live longer that is not it, it’s got to be something much more profound that touches the heart and it touches the heart if you realize that our job on the earth is to love it; to fall in love with it; not just to love it -you must love the world- but to fall in love with it and you only fall in love with it if you aesthetically alive to it.”
-From James Hillman Interview https://youtu.be/rFa0X06hLOU.
'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.
"Archetypal Psychology has no great interest in the ego, but focuses instead on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning: ‘the fundamental fantasies that animate all life’. For someone who had always been steeped in myth and story, this was pure gold. Archetypal Psychology focuses on the many myths, images and symbols – gods, goddesses, animals and other archetypes – which shape our inner lives. Imagining, Hillman declared – the construction of images through which we both experience and interpret the world – is critical to understanding psyche. And, more than that, these images express what is important, what is of value for psyche." --Sharon Blackie
Archetypal Psychotherapy - The Clinical Legacy of James Hillman
By Jason A. Butler · 2014
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Archetypal_Psychotherapy/RjREAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,alchemicy,+archetypal+psychology&printsec=frontcover
"To what does the soul turn that has no therapists to visit? It takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless walk through the city streets, a long watch of the night sky. Just stare out the window or boil water for a cup of tea. We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch." --Hillman, Soul's Code
"I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks..." --Carl Jung
"Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act." --James Hillman, Healing Fiction
"By having the courage to stand for one's own experience, one begins to give real being to the soul. Everything depends on the individual's ability to stand for their own experience (symptoms, suffering and accomplishments) in the face of the world that gives these things no credit." --James Hillman
According to Hillman, it is "spirit's self-knowledge in the mirror of the soul, soul's recognition of its spirits." There is no single way of knowing thyself, even though psychology has favored the method of introspection and insight. He suggests, "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. Self-understanding healed by active imagination."
“We have lost the feeling of the beauty of the world that we are looking for substitutes. Erich Hoffer said: “You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.” Meaning we rush around buying stuff, needing stuff permanently needy, needing therapists, needing love, needing relationships, needing holidays, needing vacations and you deserve it; says the ads, you deserve it because you’re miserable, you’re depressed. So now the government has all the health services shown you can read a questionnaire and find out you’re depressed even if you don’t really know it or feel it it can be discovered and then you can take medication against it. But the feeling of loss: is that we don’t know what it is we’ve lost and that’s what I’ve been trying to emphasize; is what we’ve lost is the beauty of the world and we make up for it with attempting to conquer the world or own the world possess the world.
You know, I’m a therapist so I’m very careful about using words like saving so I’m not really talking about “saving” or “salvation” or any of that. I’m talking much more about waking up to common sense, it’s just a matter of realizing how dependent we are on taking a deep breath or how dependent we’re upon our glass of water and if that is lost then we are in some kind of unreal world; delusional world. So it’s that waking up to insanity of the way we’ve structured ourselves rather than doing something in the world to make a change, that’s the old style American way; let’s fix it, I’m not talking about fixing it, I’m talking about making a change in the mind that realizes; my god I’m crazy.
Once we reawaken our aesthetic sense and are not anesthetized as we’re by all the distractions; if we’re not anesthetized we would be able to see and appreciate the beauty in the world. Now the moment there’s beauty, you fall in love with beauty that’s Plato but it’s also our own experiences. You see a beautiful man or a beautiful woman and you fall in love with them that’s the first bit of attraction and if you fall in love with something ; love the world, not through Christian moralism about you must love the world or an economic one is sustainability for our own benefit therefore we live longer that is not it, it’s got to be something much more profound that touches the heart and it touches the heart if you realize that our job on the earth is to love it; to fall in love with it; not just to love it -you must love the world- but to fall in love with it and you only fall in love with it if you aesthetically alive to it.”
-From James Hillman Interview https://youtu.be/rFa0X06hLOU.
'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.
"Archetypal Psychology has no great interest in the ego, but focuses instead on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning: ‘the fundamental fantasies that animate all life’. For someone who had always been steeped in myth and story, this was pure gold. Archetypal Psychology focuses on the many myths, images and symbols – gods, goddesses, animals and other archetypes – which shape our inner lives. Imagining, Hillman declared – the construction of images through which we both experience and interpret the world – is critical to understanding psyche. And, more than that, these images express what is important, what is of value for psyche." --Sharon Blackie
Archetypal Psychotherapy - The Clinical Legacy of James Hillman
By Jason A. Butler · 2014
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Archetypal_Psychotherapy/RjREAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=,alchemicy,+archetypal+psychology&printsec=frontcover
Metaphor reanimates the soul and the environment. Hillman said, "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. ... 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 emerged from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel...And most amazing is it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. ... Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitation of angels, even if the gifts they brings are not centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. ... To see the angel in the malady reqires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
James Hillman "Philosophical Intimations."
"Our society offers places where you can let your feelings out. You may go to group therapy or to sensitivity training; and, no matter how silly or strange the feelings, they are received. There are also places where you can improve your will: the gym or spa to work out, willing yourself to lift that contraption another twenty times; or to an EST meeting to develop your self-control and willful determination. But where do you go to play with ideas?
One of the great difficulties in our American life is that we don’t have places for entertaining ideas. And that is precisely what we’re supposed to do with an idea: entertain it. This means having respect for ideas themselves: letting them come and go without demanding too much from them at first, like their origins (who said that first), their popularity (what if everybody thought that), their logic (but that doesn’t fit with what you just said).
Why can’t they be a little crazy? We admit our feelings are crazy. We all have crazy feelings that might want to do this or say that. But maybe our ideas have arms and legs too and are crazy and want to get out and meet other ideas, air themselves, spend time with each other in public. The ideas themselves, not the people in whom they occur. Just the ideas wanting to appear and be received, welcomed, entertained for a while.
What we usually do with an idea is put it into practice. Someone says: “oh, that’s a good idea!” and he means: “Oh boy, I can save four bucks this way!” Or “Smart. I can do something now that I couldn’t have done before because I had a bright idea. I can hang the strap like this instead of like that.” That’s what makes a “good idea” in our society. A good idea means useful, practical, immediately applicable. Isn’t it a shame that we can value ideas only when they have themselves in a harness. I think it breaks their spirit. We don’t let them run loose, to see where they might take us if we just fed them with a little attention and trusted their autonomy."
"Our society offers places where you can let your feelings out. You may go to group therapy or to sensitivity training; and, no matter how silly or strange the feelings, they are received. There are also places where you can improve your will: the gym or spa to work out, willing yourself to lift that contraption another twenty times; or to an EST meeting to develop your self-control and willful determination. But where do you go to play with ideas?
One of the great difficulties in our American life is that we don’t have places for entertaining ideas. And that is precisely what we’re supposed to do with an idea: entertain it. This means having respect for ideas themselves: letting them come and go without demanding too much from them at first, like their origins (who said that first), their popularity (what if everybody thought that), their logic (but that doesn’t fit with what you just said).
Why can’t they be a little crazy? We admit our feelings are crazy. We all have crazy feelings that might want to do this or say that. But maybe our ideas have arms and legs too and are crazy and want to get out and meet other ideas, air themselves, spend time with each other in public. The ideas themselves, not the people in whom they occur. Just the ideas wanting to appear and be received, welcomed, entertained for a while.
What we usually do with an idea is put it into practice. Someone says: “oh, that’s a good idea!” and he means: “Oh boy, I can save four bucks this way!” Or “Smart. I can do something now that I couldn’t have done before because I had a bright idea. I can hang the strap like this instead of like that.” That’s what makes a “good idea” in our society. A good idea means useful, practical, immediately applicable. Isn’t it a shame that we can value ideas only when they have themselves in a harness. I think it breaks their spirit. We don’t let them run loose, to see where they might take us if we just fed them with a little attention and trusted their autonomy."
ON PARANOIA
paranoia and fundamentalism - revelation & delusion
"Hillman lays the blame for our collective misanthropy and social irresponsibility at the feet of the anomic archetype of individualism, one that wears a Protestant face. That worship of individualism in its most narrow sense underlies many of the new religious movements whose adherents hold that they can dissolve the thin boundary between the God within and the "wholly other" God without -- if they're only self-actualizing enough, only a little more enlightened, a little more ethical, a little more good-hearted. Just tear away one more veil, peel one more layer of the onion. Aquinas says that religion is giving God what is due. The religious question becomes: To serve the gods? Or become one?
In On Paranoia, Hillman is vociferously anti-Christian, holding that in denying the pantheon of gods in favor of one true God (the Self or the self), the imaginal values that form the living infrastructure of our identities are abstracted and trivialized as "just ideas". "
https://williammorristile.com/notes/on_paranoia.html
Many exhibit paranoid personality characteristics; rigid, suspicious, hypervigilant, mirthless, and self-important, yet experience no delusions and revelations.
"Since I have set this impossible question, I feel obliged to give it my impossible reply. I question the question: it is a false one, rising from the assumption, both theological and psychiatric, that there is a clear distinction between revelation and delusion, between correct and incorrect method of manifestation of the hidden. Hence "incorrigibility" has always been the stigma distinguishing true paranoia. Suppose, however, we start with another assumption: there is no, and can be no, clear distinction. Revelation always comes as incorrigible, always in delusional form. . . It comes from the Highest Authority, the very voice of Truth with all the certainty of the transcendent nous. What possibly could be corrected, and from what but an inferior, fallible and only-human perspective could such correction come? " (Hillman in On Paranoia)
"lunatic literalism results from revelation which excites and ensure literalisms of every sort by announcing itself as the voice of the hidden, speaking truth. We cannot suppress the fact that the God of our culture's theology is a divinity who must reveal to be divine, reveal in words, words that literal, that this theological God is himself a literalist, which, if pursued to the end, is therefore 'lunatic', or paranoid."
"lunatic literalism results from revelation which excites and ensure literalisms of every sort by announcing itself as the voice of the hidden, speaking truth. We cannot suppress the fact that the God of our culture's theology is a divinity who must reveal to be divine, reveal in words, words that literal, that this theological God is himself a literalist, which, if pursued to the end, is therefore 'lunatic', or paranoid.
Paranoia and the Polis
Because paranoia is given with our theological worldview, Hillman argues that we had to enter through theology in order to reach the psychological roots of paranoia.
Hillman brings in the polis as an unacknowledged primordial psychic phenomenon, that thereby manifests its shadow in 18th century "enlightened" literalism called secularism. Hillman draws upon the analogy between the soul of the state and the state of the soul in Plato's Republic to find the remedy for the paranoia of the state in the remedies proposed by individual paranoid souls for their own recovery, the return of the poetic and Jung's idea of the unconscious. In more "primitive" societies, the state respected the limits of its own ruling consciousness, turning to oracles to predict the future.
Like Cassandra, who had the gift of prophecy yet no one would believe her, the paranoid polis distrusts itself, yet holds its own answer. The idea of an unconscious brings opponents to see the other's unconscious as a screen for their own concealed intentions. Statements about the other become self-reflexive. The human connection is not by way of perceived power differentials that isolate but through weakness, the need for community.
Summary of the Argument
paranoia and fundamentalism - revelation & delusion
"Hillman lays the blame for our collective misanthropy and social irresponsibility at the feet of the anomic archetype of individualism, one that wears a Protestant face. That worship of individualism in its most narrow sense underlies many of the new religious movements whose adherents hold that they can dissolve the thin boundary between the God within and the "wholly other" God without -- if they're only self-actualizing enough, only a little more enlightened, a little more ethical, a little more good-hearted. Just tear away one more veil, peel one more layer of the onion. Aquinas says that religion is giving God what is due. The religious question becomes: To serve the gods? Or become one?
In On Paranoia, Hillman is vociferously anti-Christian, holding that in denying the pantheon of gods in favor of one true God (the Self or the self), the imaginal values that form the living infrastructure of our identities are abstracted and trivialized as "just ideas". "
https://williammorristile.com/notes/on_paranoia.html
Many exhibit paranoid personality characteristics; rigid, suspicious, hypervigilant, mirthless, and self-important, yet experience no delusions and revelations.
"Since I have set this impossible question, I feel obliged to give it my impossible reply. I question the question: it is a false one, rising from the assumption, both theological and psychiatric, that there is a clear distinction between revelation and delusion, between correct and incorrect method of manifestation of the hidden. Hence "incorrigibility" has always been the stigma distinguishing true paranoia. Suppose, however, we start with another assumption: there is no, and can be no, clear distinction. Revelation always comes as incorrigible, always in delusional form. . . It comes from the Highest Authority, the very voice of Truth with all the certainty of the transcendent nous. What possibly could be corrected, and from what but an inferior, fallible and only-human perspective could such correction come? " (Hillman in On Paranoia)
"lunatic literalism results from revelation which excites and ensure literalisms of every sort by announcing itself as the voice of the hidden, speaking truth. We cannot suppress the fact that the God of our culture's theology is a divinity who must reveal to be divine, reveal in words, words that literal, that this theological God is himself a literalist, which, if pursued to the end, is therefore 'lunatic', or paranoid."
"lunatic literalism results from revelation which excites and ensure literalisms of every sort by announcing itself as the voice of the hidden, speaking truth. We cannot suppress the fact that the God of our culture's theology is a divinity who must reveal to be divine, reveal in words, words that literal, that this theological God is himself a literalist, which, if pursued to the end, is therefore 'lunatic', or paranoid.
Paranoia and the Polis
Because paranoia is given with our theological worldview, Hillman argues that we had to enter through theology in order to reach the psychological roots of paranoia.
Hillman brings in the polis as an unacknowledged primordial psychic phenomenon, that thereby manifests its shadow in 18th century "enlightened" literalism called secularism. Hillman draws upon the analogy between the soul of the state and the state of the soul in Plato's Republic to find the remedy for the paranoia of the state in the remedies proposed by individual paranoid souls for their own recovery, the return of the poetic and Jung's idea of the unconscious. In more "primitive" societies, the state respected the limits of its own ruling consciousness, turning to oracles to predict the future.
Like Cassandra, who had the gift of prophecy yet no one would believe her, the paranoid polis distrusts itself, yet holds its own answer. The idea of an unconscious brings opponents to see the other's unconscious as a screen for their own concealed intentions. Statements about the other become self-reflexive. The human connection is not by way of perceived power differentials that isolate but through weakness, the need for community.
Summary of the Argument
- There is a juncture where psychology and religion cannot be separated, at the place where "the nature of reality, and the unseen order" meet in the heart of the individual.
- Theology postulates "a correct revelation".
- Psychology examines and identifies what is "incorrect revelation" or delusion, or paranoia.
- We may be able to get at what comprises "correct revelation" by defining the characteristics of "incorrect revelation". In this way, Hillman examines psychological literature and autobiographical writings of three famous institutionalized cases, as well as excerpts from Jung's memoirs, all men who lived consistently and religiously with their "revelation". Drawing on the three case studies, he identifies characteristics of paranoia that include:- an "incorrigibility" in the delusions that attests to an impersonal, noetic factor that intimates that the disorder of mind rests in a prior disorder of spirit,
- "literalization" of ideas. Succumbing to a seductive search for meaning, and
- "concretization" of words into events. - Hillman also notes a common theme: a hinging of universal "meaning" on the individual.
- Hillman examines traditional interpretations of paranoia by Freud as modes of denying homoerotic desire. (I have intentionally abbreviated this discussion).
- He examines and rejects the following as criteria in determining "incorrect revelation":
- content,
- mission,
- societal acceptance,
- context,
- harmfulness,
- in-character. - He questions the question, as "rising from the assumption, both theological and psychiatric, that there is a clear distinction between revelation and delusion, between correct and incorrect method of manifestation of the hidden."
- He argues against the context that invites systematic theology and systematic paranoia in favor of the assertion that all delusion is revelatory and all revelation, delusional, or in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, "an intelligble event which make all other events intelligible." That the assumption that what we call the Deity or Spirit is hidden necessarily brings revelation to religion, and so delusion as well.
- Because paranoia is given with our theological worldview, we have to enter theology in order to reach the psychological roots of paranoia. Hillman seeks to apply a deconstructionist therapeutic exegesis extrapolated from the characteristics identified in the case studies (incorrigibility, literalization, concretization) to the idea of "revelation" itself, such that the veils are themselves delusional.
- He brings in the polis as an unacknowledged, primordial psychic phenomenon, that thereby manifests its shadow in an anachronism of 18th century literalism called secularism.
Hillman’s Contributions to Psychology
James Hillman, PhD, is an American psychologist and is considered
to be the founder of Archetypal Psychology. He is a leading scholar
in Jungian and post-Jungian thought, a self-described “renegade
psychologist” and is both a social critic and revisionist of depth
psychology. He is the author of over twenty books on psychology,
philosophy, and spirituality.
Hillman 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 Bestseller List that year. His works and
ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularized by other authors such as Thomas Moore, author of the bestselling book Care of the 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. His 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 workin 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.
Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue
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 didJung. 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 analytical. His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”
Hillman’s 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and
Calling, outlines 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 to find their particular calling, the
seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitatea 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 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.
"You know, I never saw myself as moving against Jung, only in taking his work in a new direction. I was always a part of the family tree, only I confined myself to a few of its branches: poetics of mind, imgination, alchemy. I did not like what some of others branches were doing but that did not mean I wanted to lop myself from the tree...". -Hillman. Congresso IAAP/Montreal/2010.
*Adapted from Wikipedia
James Hillman, PhD, is an American psychologist and is considered
to be the founder of Archetypal Psychology. He is a leading scholar
in Jungian and post-Jungian thought, a self-described “renegade
psychologist” and is both a social critic and revisionist of depth
psychology. He is the author of over twenty books on psychology,
philosophy, and spirituality.
Hillman 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 Bestseller List that year. His works and
ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularized by other authors such as Thomas Moore, author of the bestselling book Care of the 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. His 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 workin 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.
Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue
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 didJung. 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 analytical. His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”
Hillman’s 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and
Calling, outlines 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 to find their particular calling, the
seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitatea 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 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.
"You know, I never saw myself as moving against Jung, only in taking his work in a new direction. I was always a part of the family tree, only I confined myself to a few of its branches: poetics of mind, imgination, alchemy. I did not like what some of others branches were doing but that did not mean I wanted to lop myself from the tree...". -Hillman. Congresso IAAP/Montreal/2010.
*Adapted from Wikipedia
Excerpt: 'Peaks and Vales' by James Hillman:
"..So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots (Jung’s ill-favored earlier term “racial unconscious”). Thus, from the spirit point of view, it can make no difference if our teacher be a Zaddik from a Polish shtetl, an Indian from under a Mexican cactus, or a Japanese master in a garden of stones, these differences are but conditionings of history, personalistic hangups. The spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless.
I shall ride this horse of history until it drops, for I submit that history has become the Great Repressed. If in Freud’s time sexuality was the Great Repressed and the creator of the internal ferment of the psychoneuroses, today the one thing we will not tolerate is history. No; we are each Promethean with a bag of possibilities, Pandoran hopes, open, unencumbered, the future before us, so various, so beautiful, so new – new and liberated men and women living forward into a science fiction. So history rumbles below, continuing to work in our psychic complexes.
Our complexes are history at work in the soul: father’s socialism, his father’s fundamentalism, and my reaction against them like Hefner to Methodism, Kinsey to Boy-Scoutism, Nixon to Quakerism. It is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below.
From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints “bid farewell to their comrades.” As I’m here as an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension. The soul feels left behind, and we see this soul reacting with anima resentments. Spiritual teachings warn the initiate so often about introspective broodings, about jealousy, spite, and pettiness, about attachments to sensations and memories. These cautions present an accurate phenomenology of how the soul feels when the spirit bids farewell.
If a person is concurrently in therapy and in a spiritual discipline – Vedanta, breathing exercises, transcendental meditation, etc. – the spiritual teacher may well regard the analysis as a waste of time with trivia and illusions. The analyst may regard the spiritual exercises as a leak in the psychic vessel, or an escape into either physicality (somatizing, a sort of sophisticated hysterical conversion) or into metaphysicality. These are conditions that grow in the same hedgerow: both physicalize, substantiate, hypostasize, taking their concepts as things. They both lose the “as if,” the metaphorical Hermes approach, forgetting that metaphysics too is a fantasy system, even if one that must unfortunately take itself as literally real.
Besides these mutual accusations of triviality, there is a more essential question that we in our analytical armchairs ask: Who is making the trip? Here it is not a discussion about the relative value of doctrines or goals; nor is it an analysis of the visions seen and experiences felt. The essential issue is not the analysis of content of spiritual experiences, for we have seen similar experiences in the county hospital, in dreams, in drug trips. Having visions is easy. The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy, and then congealing this play into paranoid monuments of eternal truth. And then are not these seemingly mind-blowing events of light, of synchronicitv, of spiritual sight in an LSD trip often trivial – seeing the universe revealed in a buttonhole stitch or linoleum pattern – at least as trivial as what takes place in a usual therapy session that picks apart the tangles of the daily domestic scene?
The question of what is trivial and what is meaningful depends on the archetype that gives meaning, and this, says Jung, is the self. Once the self is constellated, meaning comes with it. But as with any archetypal event, it has its undifferentiated foolish side. So one can be overwhelmed by displaced, inferior, paranoid meaningfulness, just as one can be overwhelmed by eros and one’s soul (anima) put through the throes of desperate, ridiculous love.
The disproportion between the trivial content of a synchronistic event on the one hand, and on the other, the giant sense of meaning that comes with it, shows what I mean. Like a person who has fallen into love, so a person who has fallen into meaning begins that process of self-validation and self-justification of trivia that belong to the experience of the archetype within any complex and form part of its defense. It therefore makes little difference, psychodynamically, whether we fall into the shadow and justify our disorders of morality, or the anima and our disorders of beauty, or the self and our disorders of meaning. Paranoia has been defined as a disorder of meaning – that is, it can be referred to the influence of an undifferentiated self-archetype. Part of this disorder is the very systematization that would, by defensive means of the doctrine of synchronicity, give profound meaningful order to a trivial coincidence.
Here we return to Mr. Forster, who reminded us that the spirit’s voice is humble and the soul’s humorful. [20] Humility is awed and wowed by meaning; the soul takes the same events more as the puns and pranks of Pan. [21] Humility and humor are two ways of coming down to humus, to the human condition. Humility would have us bow down to the world and pay our due to its reality. Render unto Caesar. Humor brings us down with a pratfall. Heavy meaningful reality becomes suspect, seen through, the world laughable – paranoia dissolved, as synchronicity becomes spontaneity.
Thus the relation of the soul analyst to the spiritual event is not in terms of the doctrines or of the contents. Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain. Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling?
This question is not so different from one put in spiritual disciplines, and it is crucial. For it is not the trip and its stations and path, not the rate of ascent and the rung of the ladder, or the peak and its experience, nor even the return – it is the person in the person prompting the whole endeavor. And here we fall back into history, the historical ego, our Western-Northern willpower, the very willpower that brought the missionaries and trappers, the cattlemen and ranchers and planters, the Okies and Arkies, the orange-growers, wine-growers, and sectarians, and the gold-rushers arid railroaders to California to begin with. Can this be left at the door like a dusty pair of outworn shoes when one goes into the sweet-smelling pad of the meditation room? Can one close the door on the person who brought one to the threshold in the first place?
The movement from one side of the brain to the other, from tedious daily life in the supermarket to supra-consciousness, from trash to transcendence, the “altered state of consciousness” approach – to put it all it in a nutshell – denies this historical ego. It is an approach going back to Saul who became Paul, conversion into the opposite, knocked off one’s ass in a flash.
So you see the archetypal question is neither how does the soul/spirit conflict happen, nor why, but who among the variety of figures of which we are each composed, which archetypal figure or person is in this happening? What God is at work in calling us up the mountain or in holding us to the vales? For archetypal psychology, there is a god in every perspective, in every position. All things are determined by psychic images, including our formulations of the spirit. All things present themselves to consciousness in the shapings of one or another divine perspective. Our vision is mimetic to one or another of the gods.
Who is going up the mountain: is it the unconscious do-gooder Christian in us, he who has lost his historical Christianity and is an unconscious crusader, knight, missionary, savior? (I tend to see the latent “Christian Soldier” of our unconscious Christianity as more of a social danger than so-called latent psychosis, latent homosexuality, or masked, latent depression.)
Who is going up the mountain: is it the Climber, a man who would become the mountain himself, I on Mount Rushmore – humble now, but just you wait and see …
Is it the heroic ego? Is it Hercules, still at the same labors: cleaning up the stables of pollution, killing the swamp creatures, clubbing his animals, refusing the call of women, progressing through twelve stages (all in the end to go mad and marry Hebe, who is Hera, Mom, in her younger, sweeter, smilingly hebephrenic form)?
Or is the one ascending the spiritual impetus of the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of the spirit – Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun’s chariot out of control, burning up the world; Bellerophon, ascending on his white winged horse, then falling onto the plains of wandering, limping ever after? These are the puer high climbers, the heaven stormers, whose eros reflects the torch and ladder of Eros and his searching arrow, a longing for higher and further and more and purer and better. Without this archetypal component affecting our lives, there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny.
So, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually as well, the issue is one of finding connections between the puer’s drive upward and the soul’s clouded, encumbering embrace. My notion of this connection would avoid two side tracks. The first would take the soul up too, “liberate it” from its vale – the transcendentalist’s demand. The second would reduce the spirit to a complex and would thus deny the puer’s legitimate ambition and art of flying – the psychoanalyst’s demand.
Let’s remember here that he who cannot fly cannot imagine, as Gaston Bachelard said, and also Mohammed Ali. To imagine in a true high-flying, free-falling way, to walk on air and put on airs, to experience pneumatic reality and its concomitant inflation, one must imagine out of the valley, above the grainfields and the daily bread. Sometimes this is too much for professional analysts, and by not recognizing the archetypal claims of the puer, they thwart imagination."
"..So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots (Jung’s ill-favored earlier term “racial unconscious”). Thus, from the spirit point of view, it can make no difference if our teacher be a Zaddik from a Polish shtetl, an Indian from under a Mexican cactus, or a Japanese master in a garden of stones, these differences are but conditionings of history, personalistic hangups. The spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless.
I shall ride this horse of history until it drops, for I submit that history has become the Great Repressed. If in Freud’s time sexuality was the Great Repressed and the creator of the internal ferment of the psychoneuroses, today the one thing we will not tolerate is history. No; we are each Promethean with a bag of possibilities, Pandoran hopes, open, unencumbered, the future before us, so various, so beautiful, so new – new and liberated men and women living forward into a science fiction. So history rumbles below, continuing to work in our psychic complexes.
Our complexes are history at work in the soul: father’s socialism, his father’s fundamentalism, and my reaction against them like Hefner to Methodism, Kinsey to Boy-Scoutism, Nixon to Quakerism. It is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below.
From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints “bid farewell to their comrades.” As I’m here as an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension. The soul feels left behind, and we see this soul reacting with anima resentments. Spiritual teachings warn the initiate so often about introspective broodings, about jealousy, spite, and pettiness, about attachments to sensations and memories. These cautions present an accurate phenomenology of how the soul feels when the spirit bids farewell.
If a person is concurrently in therapy and in a spiritual discipline – Vedanta, breathing exercises, transcendental meditation, etc. – the spiritual teacher may well regard the analysis as a waste of time with trivia and illusions. The analyst may regard the spiritual exercises as a leak in the psychic vessel, or an escape into either physicality (somatizing, a sort of sophisticated hysterical conversion) or into metaphysicality. These are conditions that grow in the same hedgerow: both physicalize, substantiate, hypostasize, taking their concepts as things. They both lose the “as if,” the metaphorical Hermes approach, forgetting that metaphysics too is a fantasy system, even if one that must unfortunately take itself as literally real.
Besides these mutual accusations of triviality, there is a more essential question that we in our analytical armchairs ask: Who is making the trip? Here it is not a discussion about the relative value of doctrines or goals; nor is it an analysis of the visions seen and experiences felt. The essential issue is not the analysis of content of spiritual experiences, for we have seen similar experiences in the county hospital, in dreams, in drug trips. Having visions is easy. The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy, and then congealing this play into paranoid monuments of eternal truth. And then are not these seemingly mind-blowing events of light, of synchronicitv, of spiritual sight in an LSD trip often trivial – seeing the universe revealed in a buttonhole stitch or linoleum pattern – at least as trivial as what takes place in a usual therapy session that picks apart the tangles of the daily domestic scene?
The question of what is trivial and what is meaningful depends on the archetype that gives meaning, and this, says Jung, is the self. Once the self is constellated, meaning comes with it. But as with any archetypal event, it has its undifferentiated foolish side. So one can be overwhelmed by displaced, inferior, paranoid meaningfulness, just as one can be overwhelmed by eros and one’s soul (anima) put through the throes of desperate, ridiculous love.
The disproportion between the trivial content of a synchronistic event on the one hand, and on the other, the giant sense of meaning that comes with it, shows what I mean. Like a person who has fallen into love, so a person who has fallen into meaning begins that process of self-validation and self-justification of trivia that belong to the experience of the archetype within any complex and form part of its defense. It therefore makes little difference, psychodynamically, whether we fall into the shadow and justify our disorders of morality, or the anima and our disorders of beauty, or the self and our disorders of meaning. Paranoia has been defined as a disorder of meaning – that is, it can be referred to the influence of an undifferentiated self-archetype. Part of this disorder is the very systematization that would, by defensive means of the doctrine of synchronicity, give profound meaningful order to a trivial coincidence.
Here we return to Mr. Forster, who reminded us that the spirit’s voice is humble and the soul’s humorful. [20] Humility is awed and wowed by meaning; the soul takes the same events more as the puns and pranks of Pan. [21] Humility and humor are two ways of coming down to humus, to the human condition. Humility would have us bow down to the world and pay our due to its reality. Render unto Caesar. Humor brings us down with a pratfall. Heavy meaningful reality becomes suspect, seen through, the world laughable – paranoia dissolved, as synchronicity becomes spontaneity.
Thus the relation of the soul analyst to the spiritual event is not in terms of the doctrines or of the contents. Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain. Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling?
This question is not so different from one put in spiritual disciplines, and it is crucial. For it is not the trip and its stations and path, not the rate of ascent and the rung of the ladder, or the peak and its experience, nor even the return – it is the person in the person prompting the whole endeavor. And here we fall back into history, the historical ego, our Western-Northern willpower, the very willpower that brought the missionaries and trappers, the cattlemen and ranchers and planters, the Okies and Arkies, the orange-growers, wine-growers, and sectarians, and the gold-rushers arid railroaders to California to begin with. Can this be left at the door like a dusty pair of outworn shoes when one goes into the sweet-smelling pad of the meditation room? Can one close the door on the person who brought one to the threshold in the first place?
The movement from one side of the brain to the other, from tedious daily life in the supermarket to supra-consciousness, from trash to transcendence, the “altered state of consciousness” approach – to put it all it in a nutshell – denies this historical ego. It is an approach going back to Saul who became Paul, conversion into the opposite, knocked off one’s ass in a flash.
So you see the archetypal question is neither how does the soul/spirit conflict happen, nor why, but who among the variety of figures of which we are each composed, which archetypal figure or person is in this happening? What God is at work in calling us up the mountain or in holding us to the vales? For archetypal psychology, there is a god in every perspective, in every position. All things are determined by psychic images, including our formulations of the spirit. All things present themselves to consciousness in the shapings of one or another divine perspective. Our vision is mimetic to one or another of the gods.
Who is going up the mountain: is it the unconscious do-gooder Christian in us, he who has lost his historical Christianity and is an unconscious crusader, knight, missionary, savior? (I tend to see the latent “Christian Soldier” of our unconscious Christianity as more of a social danger than so-called latent psychosis, latent homosexuality, or masked, latent depression.)
Who is going up the mountain: is it the Climber, a man who would become the mountain himself, I on Mount Rushmore – humble now, but just you wait and see …
Is it the heroic ego? Is it Hercules, still at the same labors: cleaning up the stables of pollution, killing the swamp creatures, clubbing his animals, refusing the call of women, progressing through twelve stages (all in the end to go mad and marry Hebe, who is Hera, Mom, in her younger, sweeter, smilingly hebephrenic form)?
Or is the one ascending the spiritual impetus of the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of the spirit – Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun’s chariot out of control, burning up the world; Bellerophon, ascending on his white winged horse, then falling onto the plains of wandering, limping ever after? These are the puer high climbers, the heaven stormers, whose eros reflects the torch and ladder of Eros and his searching arrow, a longing for higher and further and more and purer and better. Without this archetypal component affecting our lives, there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny.
So, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually as well, the issue is one of finding connections between the puer’s drive upward and the soul’s clouded, encumbering embrace. My notion of this connection would avoid two side tracks. The first would take the soul up too, “liberate it” from its vale – the transcendentalist’s demand. The second would reduce the spirit to a complex and would thus deny the puer’s legitimate ambition and art of flying – the psychoanalyst’s demand.
Let’s remember here that he who cannot fly cannot imagine, as Gaston Bachelard said, and also Mohammed Ali. To imagine in a true high-flying, free-falling way, to walk on air and put on airs, to experience pneumatic reality and its concomitant inflation, one must imagine out of the valley, above the grainfields and the daily bread. Sometimes this is too much for professional analysts, and by not recognizing the archetypal claims of the puer, they thwart imagination."
*Peaks and Vales, Spirit and Soul*
His trip up the mountain and descent again into the valley remains a powerful metaphor for some of Hillman’s most important later insights about psychology. In his book on Kundalini, Gopi Krishna would write: “But for the care taken of me by my mother in my childhood and youth, under adverse circumstances and in the grip of poverty, and thereafter by my wife through all the critical phases of my transformation... I could never have emerged from the terrible ordeal alive and intact.”38
Hillman responded in his Psychological Commentary to the book: “He admits that were it not for his mother and his wife, he would have died long ago.. . . Is he not just where he started: in the mother-complex, a victim of mother-matter, passive, delicate, dependent? . . . However, within his tradition, this dependent relation to the Mother archetype is inevitable. Ramakrishna, for example, was always the devotee of the Mother, while the Indian Holy Man is ever her son in the sense of drawing sustenance from life and earth which is the cow that must never be harmed. Only in the West is this attitude questionable, for we tend to view negatively the realm of the Mother and to call that inevitable dependence upon the material limits in which we are set a ‘complex.’ We in the West are often too quick to condemn the ‘Mother’ thereby cutting ourselves off from our own ground.” Yet Gopi Krishna “lives the opposites. On the one hand he is involved in the bold spiritual adventure, requiring the masculine virtues of endurance, courage and individuality, while on the other he acknowledges without shame his weakness, sensitivity and physical limitations. He accepts the feminine root, not only of the Kundalini, but of life itself, thereby showing us a positive relation to the maternal archetype.”39
It had taken years, but Hillman had clearly come to terms with the mother-and-grandmother image that haunted his sleep in the Himalayas and for some time afterward. Gopi Krishna, recalling a time when he was unable to eat and reached a near-death state, wrote of “a vivid dream in which I saw myself seated at a meal with a half-filled plate in front of me, containing boiled rice and a meat preparation common in Kashmir which I ate with enjoyment.” Upon awakening, he had called his wife to his side and “in a weak voice I asked her to serve me nourishment every two hours that day.”40 Hillman wrote in the Commentary that he was “enormously impressed that our author was saved by a dream, and such a simple one: a dish of meat.”41 In the simplest of dreams, it seemed, could be salvation.
However, Hillman would part company with Gopi Krishna when it came to the importance of going “high in the mountains... because that’s where you meet the spirit.”42 In a widely read and well-received lecture he gave in 1975 called “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline,” Hillman described how “peaks have belonged to the spirit ever since Mount Sinai and Mount Olympus, Mount Patmos and the Mount of Olives, and Mount Moriah of the first patriarchal Abraham . . . the clamber up the peaks in search of spirit is the drive of the spirit in search of itself.”43
The word “Vale” came from the Romantics, and Hillman took a “passage from Keats as a psychological motto: ‘Call the world, if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’”44 Hillman went on to note that “vale in the usual religious language of our culture is a depressed emotional place - the vale of tears; Jesus walked this lonesome valley, the valley of the shadow of death. The very first definition of ‘valley’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘long depression or hollow.’”45
That is certainly what Hillman experienced when he left the peak and came down into what was known as the Vale of Kashmir. It could be said that this was his time of “awakening,” but not in the sense of Gopi Krishna’s ascension to spirit, rather of Hillman’s immersion in Keats’ realm of “soul-making.” As he wrote in the same essay: “From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints ‘bid farewell to their comrades.’” But the viewpoint of soul “appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension.”46
Hillman continued to elaborate the distinction between spirit and soul in his landmark work, Re-Visioning Psychology, published in 1975. “Oriental transcendence,” as he put it, “once uprooted and imported to the West . . . urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise—not snared, court bliss—not affliction . . . In the East this spirit is rooted in the thick yellow loam of richly pathologized imagery—demons, monsters, grotesque Goddesses, tortures, and obscenities. It rises within a pathologized world, chained by obligations, agonized.” But in the West, “it arrives debrided of its imaginal ground, dirtfree and smelling of sandalwood, another upward vision that offers a way to bypass our Western psychopathologies . . . By turning away from its pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed.”47
Harkening back to that early talk with Gopi Krishna about mind-and-body, in “An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit,” Hillman continued: “Today we have rather lost this difference that most cultures, even tribal ones, know and live in terms of. Our distinctions are Cartesian: between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition and, in others too, was the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both.”48 Hillman situates psychology between science and religion.
Jung had presaged what Hillman saw about the East-West divergence, writing in 1923 that “nowadays far too many Europeans are inclined to carry Eastern ideas and methods over unexamined into our occidental mentality . . . What has emerged from the Eastern spirit is based upon the peculiar history of that mentality, which is most fundamentally different from ours.”49 Jung had given a seminar titled “The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga” in 1932 and described it as “a model of something that was almost completely lacking in Western psychology—an account of the developmental phases of higher consciousness.”50
Jung believed that “the bizarre symptomatology that patients at times presented actually resulted from the awakening of the Kundalini.”51 Yet he had also seen a danger for people outside of the Eastern tradition: “The European who practices yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge of madness.”52 (Hillman later said he had “Jung to thank” for his not “going East” like so many of his generation, “especially Americans and American Jews... ”)53
~Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
His trip up the mountain and descent again into the valley remains a powerful metaphor for some of Hillman’s most important later insights about psychology. In his book on Kundalini, Gopi Krishna would write: “But for the care taken of me by my mother in my childhood and youth, under adverse circumstances and in the grip of poverty, and thereafter by my wife through all the critical phases of my transformation... I could never have emerged from the terrible ordeal alive and intact.”38
Hillman responded in his Psychological Commentary to the book: “He admits that were it not for his mother and his wife, he would have died long ago.. . . Is he not just where he started: in the mother-complex, a victim of mother-matter, passive, delicate, dependent? . . . However, within his tradition, this dependent relation to the Mother archetype is inevitable. Ramakrishna, for example, was always the devotee of the Mother, while the Indian Holy Man is ever her son in the sense of drawing sustenance from life and earth which is the cow that must never be harmed. Only in the West is this attitude questionable, for we tend to view negatively the realm of the Mother and to call that inevitable dependence upon the material limits in which we are set a ‘complex.’ We in the West are often too quick to condemn the ‘Mother’ thereby cutting ourselves off from our own ground.” Yet Gopi Krishna “lives the opposites. On the one hand he is involved in the bold spiritual adventure, requiring the masculine virtues of endurance, courage and individuality, while on the other he acknowledges without shame his weakness, sensitivity and physical limitations. He accepts the feminine root, not only of the Kundalini, but of life itself, thereby showing us a positive relation to the maternal archetype.”39
It had taken years, but Hillman had clearly come to terms with the mother-and-grandmother image that haunted his sleep in the Himalayas and for some time afterward. Gopi Krishna, recalling a time when he was unable to eat and reached a near-death state, wrote of “a vivid dream in which I saw myself seated at a meal with a half-filled plate in front of me, containing boiled rice and a meat preparation common in Kashmir which I ate with enjoyment.” Upon awakening, he had called his wife to his side and “in a weak voice I asked her to serve me nourishment every two hours that day.”40 Hillman wrote in the Commentary that he was “enormously impressed that our author was saved by a dream, and such a simple one: a dish of meat.”41 In the simplest of dreams, it seemed, could be salvation.
However, Hillman would part company with Gopi Krishna when it came to the importance of going “high in the mountains... because that’s where you meet the spirit.”42 In a widely read and well-received lecture he gave in 1975 called “Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline,” Hillman described how “peaks have belonged to the spirit ever since Mount Sinai and Mount Olympus, Mount Patmos and the Mount of Olives, and Mount Moriah of the first patriarchal Abraham . . . the clamber up the peaks in search of spirit is the drive of the spirit in search of itself.”43
The word “Vale” came from the Romantics, and Hillman took a “passage from Keats as a psychological motto: ‘Call the world, if you please, “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’”44 Hillman went on to note that “vale in the usual religious language of our culture is a depressed emotional place - the vale of tears; Jesus walked this lonesome valley, the valley of the shadow of death. The very first definition of ‘valley’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘long depression or hollow.’”45
That is certainly what Hillman experienced when he left the peak and came down into what was known as the Vale of Kashmir. It could be said that this was his time of “awakening,” but not in the sense of Gopi Krishna’s ascension to spirit, rather of Hillman’s immersion in Keats’ realm of “soul-making.” As he wrote in the same essay: “From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints ‘bid farewell to their comrades.’” But the viewpoint of soul “appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension.”46
Hillman continued to elaborate the distinction between spirit and soul in his landmark work, Re-Visioning Psychology, published in 1975. “Oriental transcendence,” as he put it, “once uprooted and imported to the West . . . urges: rise above psychological hassles and tangles, be wise—not snared, court bliss—not affliction . . . In the East this spirit is rooted in the thick yellow loam of richly pathologized imagery—demons, monsters, grotesque Goddesses, tortures, and obscenities. It rises within a pathologized world, chained by obligations, agonized.” But in the West, “it arrives debrided of its imaginal ground, dirtfree and smelling of sandalwood, another upward vision that offers a way to bypass our Western psychopathologies . . . By turning away from its pathologizings they turn away from its full richness. By going upward towards spiritual betterment they leave its afflictions, giving them less validity and less reality than spiritual goals. In the name of the higher spirit, the soul is betrayed.”47
Harkening back to that early talk with Gopi Krishna about mind-and-body, in “An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit,” Hillman continued: “Today we have rather lost this difference that most cultures, even tribal ones, know and live in terms of. Our distinctions are Cartesian: between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition and, in others too, was the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both.”48 Hillman situates psychology between science and religion.
Jung had presaged what Hillman saw about the East-West divergence, writing in 1923 that “nowadays far too many Europeans are inclined to carry Eastern ideas and methods over unexamined into our occidental mentality . . . What has emerged from the Eastern spirit is based upon the peculiar history of that mentality, which is most fundamentally different from ours.”49 Jung had given a seminar titled “The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga” in 1932 and described it as “a model of something that was almost completely lacking in Western psychology—an account of the developmental phases of higher consciousness.”50
Jung believed that “the bizarre symptomatology that patients at times presented actually resulted from the awakening of the Kundalini.”51 Yet he had also seen a danger for people outside of the Eastern tradition: “The European who practices yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge of madness.”52 (Hillman later said he had “Jung to thank” for his not “going East” like so many of his generation, “especially Americans and American Jews... ”)53
~Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
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: Tree essays in archetypal
psychology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the soul. New York: Harper & Row.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul. New York: HarperCollins.
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: Tree essays in archetypal
psychology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Hillman, J. (1964). Suicide and the soul. New York: Harper & Row.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul. New York: HarperCollins.
PARADIGM IS ANOTHER WORD FOR ARCHETYPE
Cultivating Mythic Imagination
The Essence of Archetypes
Jon Mills
ABSTRACT Jung’s notion of the archetype remains an equivocal concept, so much so that Jungians and post-Jungians have failed to agree on its essential nature. In this essay, I wish to argue that an archetype may be understood as an unconscious schema that is self-constitutive and emerges into consciousness from its own a priori ground, hence an autonomous self-determinative act derived from archaic ontology. After offering an analysis of the archetype debate, I set out to philosophically investigate the essence of an archetype by examining its origins and dialectical reflections as a process system arising from its own autochthonous parameters. I offer a descriptive explication of the inner constitution and birth of an archetype based on internal rupture and the desire to project its universality, form, and patternings into psychic reality as self-instantiating replicators. Archetypal content is the appearance of essence as the products of self-manifestation, for an archetype must appear in order to be made actual. Here we must seriously question that, in the beginning, if an archetype is self-constituted and self-generative, the notion and validity of a collective unconscious becomes rather dubious, if not superfluous. I conclude by sketching out an archetypal theory of alterity based on dialectical logic.
Archetypal psychology is a neo-Jungian aesthetic approach engaging the transpersonal numinous, relationships, and dreams. This framework includes the arts, humanities, and cultural imagination, as primary modes of inquiry and aesthetic appreciation of a life story. Classically, spirit is related to heights, and soul to fathomless depths. This is a depth psychology concerned with the unconscious, multiple interpretations, and expressions.
Hillman deconstructed Jung's history, nostalgia, metaphysics, and 'scientific' psychological theory, individuation and the Self, moving it into the polis beyond the consulting room. Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being.
"Hermes could both be the servant of the healer archetype, centered on Aesculapius (see Kereny, Asklepios: Archetypal image of the Physician's existence) and, in a more differentiated way, connect the patient with the archetype that made him ill, providing healing through this link. In professional practice I find little incompatibility between the healing constellation of Aesculapius (the healer in the patient) and healing through the archetypal complex that caused the patient's illness. (Cf. E.R.Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational) where the different contexts of healing are described: Asclepius, "the general practitioner", and the diagnosis and treatment of the coribantic ritual in which, through music, the patient discovered which God was causing his illness ".
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Hermes and His Children
"By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim." (James Hillman)
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…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.”
Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche. He draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Hillman and other neo-Jungians consider images as essentially aesthetic core experiences. The term “aesthetic” suggests we engage reality at the pre-conceptual level of instinct and intuition, affect and vision. Images enact the movement of experience and reveal the nature of mind and matter, self and world, as well as the metaphysics of belief that art implies.
Art is a liminal space of self-transformation. Works with a trans- quality go beyond mundane time, space, logic and personal taste or aesthetic preference. They connect with our essential Being at the core, reflected in nature and art, piercing time to find eternity. Transcending content, they open a new dimension...an invisible initiatory dimension. From here the artist gives birth to the secret space of the image itself which comes alive by giving shape to that secret.
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. 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.
Art, philosophy, and religion have always been preoccupied with death in one form or another. “Death is the translation of life into soul,” suggested James Hillman in Animal Presences. We postulate soul in special relationship with death. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard.
When we are transparent, we are seen through with nothing left to hide. Archetypal fantasies are at work all the time in the psychologically creative person. Anima is the poetic basis of mind. Hillman's imaginal soul-making suggests the daimon or soul-guide enables us throughout the necessities of our inherent unfolding, our fate.
“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.” --James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Like dream and vision, aesthetics take us beyond the judgments of self, culture, and society. Words, concepts, beliefs, ideations are forces in a universe of forces. The riddle of soul is tied up with the psyche-soma relationship problem. The soul continually drives us to myth, philosophy, religion, art, and above all to the trials of daily life and death.
These images hold profound psychological wisdom rooted in the first dreams of humankind still valid in our day. "Within the metaphorical perspective, within the imaginal field, nothing is more sure than the soul's own activity following it's wayward inertia from insight to insight..." (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology pg. 154)
Metaphors are mini-myths expressing creative mythopoesis. Mythical images are metaphors of depth in the psychic dimension. Psychaesthetic response is phenomenologically perceived and expressed rather than psychoanalytical.
Rooted in aesthetics and imagination, everything is interpreted as image, as story, and as potentially meaningful with reference to the individual vision. With a poetic basis of mind, the symbolic is paramount, taking precedence over the literal.
Mythological studies unpacks the issues, concepts, and characteristics of the archetypes in the contemporary world. Soul-making allows us to express that relationship within our daily lives -- a process of continuous remembrance for the sake of tending the soul of the world.
Mythopoesis creates imaginal resonance. The metaphoric characters and the inner dramas of the complexes led psychologists to call their approach to the psyche a “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman, 1975, p. xi). Hillman pushes archetypal theory to its fullest stature. For him, an archetype and a God, in the classic (e.g., Grecian or polytheistic) sense of the word, are the same.
The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves. The invisible force of animation is an immense force of nature -- metaphysical, biological, and phenomenological resonance.
We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience. We are aroused by the power, presence, or realization of a divinity -- an uncanny, mighty spirit, a tremendous mystery. Numinous experience is primordial, beyond the will, an awesome religious power and thrilling presence that creates an altered state of consciousness.
Additionally, Hillman prefers the word soul to the words personal or collective unconscious. Hillman amplified the term “soul” by using these related words: “mind,spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence,innermost purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God” (Hillman,1964, p. 44).
Mythos, the essential narrative nature of our being, is a dimension of our consciousness. Mythological studies reflect current philosophical, psychological, and sociological topics--as well as the complexity, distortions, monsters, wounds, symptoms, and problems of deep character. Roszak’s ecopsychology (1992) also asserts that human psychology as embedded in nature represents a full return of soul in the form of the world soul, or Anima Mundi (Gaia theory).
We have to embrace paradox to approach myth. Myth descends down into unfathomable cosmos and soul and upward in culture, language, and art. The imaginal realm requires no theoretical structure. Our mythological sensibility sees through to archetypal undercurrents in life experiences, theories, and cultural phenomena, revisioning, reinterpreting, and re-situating mythic currents with topical reverence.
A person must have the will and the passion for the demands of the talent domain. Part of being ensouled, or filled with soul, is to acquire expertise in the place of passion. Inner life is a virtual or artistic truth, with license, a shifty, even healing fiction.
Talents are not to be developed blindly without inquiry into that passion. We are encouraged to notice those areas where an incredible drive compels us to work in a domain. That drive is like a thorn, an incurable mad spot, or daimon--to become oceanic and go into the flow.
We engage the phenomenal world with mythic sensibility. Poets and artists use mythic characters and tropes to express contemporary metaphors and images found in every drama, gesture, heroic and passionate act.
Archetypal Psychology has lifted the embargo on the esoteric and polytheism, allowing exploration of new concepts and devotions. Post qualitative inquiry encourages concrete, practical experimentation and the creation of the not yet instead of the repetition of what is.
Archetypal psychology is polytheistic, recognizing many viewpoints of various gods and goddesses who inform them. Rather than emphasizing or developing ego strength, it deliteralizes the ego. Focus is on psyche, or soul, and the archai, as depth patterns of psychic functioning. Ego is our real world navigator, not the center of the psyche. But it needs to know its boundaries, avoid inflation and self-delusion, and defer or build relations with the archetypes.
Hillman declares that, "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."
Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment.
There are interdependent unconscious neural, phenomenological, and cognitive levels of embodiment. Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience. It is irrational. nonlinear, and entangled. There are no consistent level-independent truths. Even embodied truth is not absolute, objective truth, nor does it need to be but it allows us self-reflection, bridging the gap between symbols and the world.
Hillman (1980) noted, “To know ourselves we must know the Gods and Goddesses of myth” (p. iv). Hillman (1972) said, "Soul-making is not treatment, not therapy, not even a process of self-realization but is essentially an imaginative activity or an activity of the imaginal realm as itplays through all of life everywhere and which does not need analyst or ananalysis." (p. 7)
Metamodern paradigms allow integrative/developmental post-Jungian tendencies to freely mingle with AP, without polar dissonance.
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself, which was Hillman's main point in Re-Visioning Psychology.
"What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is—the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth. By employing the dream as a model of psychic actuality, and by conceiving a theory of personality based on the dream, we are imagining the psyche’s basic structure to be an inscape of personified images…We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images." (Revisioning Psychology, p. 33)
Hillman has 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 has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground. It is not analytical nor interpretive, but ideational and phenomenological, rather than ideological or belief-based. It is a way of seeing through beliefs learned by rote. We stay with the image and engage it directly, relating rather than amplifying it or replacing it with a concept or single meaning. Hillman said, "Dreams call from the imagination to the imagination, and can be answered only by the imagination" (1979: 55).
Imagination
"Thus fantasy is no carefree daydream, but the implacable carrier of the necessities that drive us. Psychic reality is enslaved to imagination. Imagination does not free us but captures us and yokes us to its myths; we are workers for its Kings and Queens. We are tied in blood with what Jung calls our “instinctual images.”
To insist, as Jung does, that human reality is primarily psychic and that the image is the primordial and immediate presentation of this reality requires a further recognition. Reality is only so if it is necessary. To use the word “reality” implies an ontological condition that cannot be otherwise. Therefore there must be something unalterably necessary about images so that psychic reality, which first of all consists in images, cannot be mere afterimages of sense impressions. Images are primordial, archetypal, in themselves ultimate reals, the only direct reality that the psyche experiences. As such they are the shaped presences of necessity. Personally, experientially, this implies that when we search for what is implacably determining our lives and holding them in servitude, we must turn to the images of our fantasies within which necessity lies concealed.
Furthermore, this implies that we must beware of being too ’active’ with our images, moving them around to redeem our problems. Then the practice of active imagination would become an attempt to dodge the necessity of the image and its claim upon the soul." -James Hillman, Mythic Figures
Welcome to soul reality. Archetypal psychology and James Hillman take us out of our heads and back into the world again with a switch from science to metaphor, from concepts to engagement. Archetypes are universal prototypes. Where Jung focused on individuation, Hillman focuses on soul-making or psychological creativity, looking at each event as a moment of creative potential. In Archetypal Psychology individuation is imagination, a synthetic not analytical approach.
“By starting and staying with the soul’s native polycentricity, the multiple archetypal powers, psychology must always keep in mind the governance of the Gods” (Hillman, 1975, p. 167); “thereis no place without Gods and no activity that does not enact them. Every fantasy,every experience has its archetypal reason. There is nothing that does not belong to one God or another” (Hillman, 1975, pp. 168–169).
Beauty
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. Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme.
Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids subjectivism. This mystery is rooted in a synthesis of philosophy and aesthetics in spoken and unspoken languages. It is the self-organizing creation and participatory engagement of a new myth -- a mythical domain, sharing symbolic meaning, fantasy, and rituals. Things are never literally what they seem in a world of wonders. This challenges our mundane positions, habits, and defenses.
The archaic mind mirrors the modern, exposing the subtext if life. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is beyond aesthetic because it is more than skin deep and touches something in us. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
The epic journey is a search for soul, a search for self, a challenge or mission to find what cannot be found in the ordinary world. When the soul becomes our central trope, we find our opus, the hidden agenda of being. Life itself is initiating us. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic.
The art of survival equals the survival of art. Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, "getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.
"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. Hillman's psychology of beauty restores sensitivity to one of the most neglected, and therefore, for human life, most troubling of the gods, Aphrodite. He understands her as the divine figure immanent in the world of sense. Naked, jeweled, alluring Aphrodite is nature and culture exposing itself to the soul with its beauty, ornament, and form. The soul delights and, to use a Renaissance term, feeds on this beauty.
"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. It is possible to become a monotheist in the religion of Venus.
"In spite of these dangers, the aesthetic life is particularly important in our time because it is so overlooked and undervalued. Hillman recommends that to revive this aesthetic sense we might look to the animals and see the beauty they reveal in expressing their own natures so directly. Our proper form of display, he says, is rhetoric, our fantasy-filled capacity to speak, tell stories, paint, dance, sing, make music, build buildings, write letters, make movies, and so on. The beautiful, and therefore the soul, is in the everyday display of our natures.
"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."-James Hillman, Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore
Tending Soul
When we tend to soul, life passages are natural initiations. The term “genius” is used by most depth psychology thinkers as interchangeable with the term “daimon,” indicating an “other,” who is the protector of our reason for being. (Hillman,1996, 1999; Jung, 1965; Moore, 1994; Myss, 2001)
This psychology arises and depends from tending to the sensory and psychic qualities of images, allowing them to illuminate consciousness. Human consciousness forms in association with soul and spirit. Panpsychism suggests that rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, it is possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that was there all along as a field phenomenon.
Hillman alleged "going up the mountain in the disguise of psychology are the behavior therapies and release and relax therapies" which will "cure the symptom and lose the God" and "lose the symptom and return the world back to the ego." (Peaks and Vales).
Thinking and analysis don't rule as codified integrative factors in this non-developmental model. It is not an ego psychology, a "tuning up" of the personality, making it more effective in the world, dressed for success. There is no climbing the peaks for transcendent experiences as what is here and now is psyche's immediate presence.
Soul makes itself known through fragmentation, confusions, symptoms, pathologies, and personifications. The downward pull of emerging unconscious provokes defensiveness from rationalization, pain, fear, resistance, escape, commitment-phobia, ego-death paranoia, profaning the sacred. Hillman writes, “The psyche does not exist without pathologizing”(1975, p. 70). We often find the presence of traumas, mental illnesses, crimes, and afflictions accompanying eminence.
Images are not reduced to allegories or literalisms and transcendence does not supersede engagement with what is the pluralistic and metaphorical imaginal. Hillman saw archetypes as “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the rootsof the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world” (p. xiii).
He said that archetypes are “axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return.” As such, archetypes resemble “the models or paradigms,that we find in other fields . . . translations from one metaphor to another.”
All language, all definition is metaphorical, even in science and in logic. Archetypes can possess us and blind us: “one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance.”
Emptiness is the real Philosopher's Stone. By dissolving into non-relative consciousness, mood swings, or identification with conflicting polar positions may be transcended by an enlarged state of consciousness which embraces and contains the entire continuum.
Flow replaces polarity. Dreams, visions or the stream of consciousness can be used therapeutically as an evolutionary force to guide people from a small sense of self and expand them toward a larger image.
Autonomous archetypal forces inhabit the psyche with their own agendas, patterns, and goals. Our psyche is transpersonal, trans-human; it has no boundaries. Our conscious awareness is only a manifestation of this larger consciousness. Within this larger consciousness, we are at home with a plurality of visions.
We need to know our imaginal truth. We cannot attack an autonomous complex directly. When we are driven to the edge of the abyss between disintegration and chaos, we find insight at the raw edge of confrontation. We may or may not know ourselves, but we are revealed to ourselves as we reveal ourselves to others.
Personifying carries us into myth. 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 bottom-line dimension of death, darkness, and weakness that is the deeper sense of meaningfulness -- peripheral, inner, underworld, soul-perspective or night-perspective -- chthonic images. This generally taboo process is a functional definition of soul, psyche, or imagination.
Pathologizing is a form of soul-making, engaging emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with maximizing emotional well being and wholeness. 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, 57).
Hillman says our soul is “led to a knowledge of itself through . . . death . . . . By beginning with the symptom . . . pathologizing turns the entire psyche upon a new pivot: death becomes the center, and with it fantasies that lead right out of life” (p. 111). Since soul-making is founded on suffering and death, it is clear that new psycho-spiritual experiences of reality require a psychological dying.
James Hillman suggests, "Character requires the additional years." "The last years confirm and fulfill character." Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life.
Hillman reminds us that the living soul is embedded in and dependent on anima mundi, the soul of the world. He sees death as a permanent resident of the psyche.
Hillman says that, “Living in terms of life’s only certain end means to live aimed toward death. This end is present here and now as the purpose of life, which means the moment of death – at any moment – is every moment. Death cannot be put off to the future and reserved for old age.” The soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently.
Pan
"When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscience. (Hercules who cleaned up Pan’s natural world first, clubbing instinct with his willpower, does not stop to clear away the dismembered carcasses left to putrefy after his civilizing creative tasks. He strides on to the next task, and ultimate madness). As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch; he was repressed. Therefore as suggested above, Pan still lives, and not merely in the literary imagination. He lives in the repressed which returns, in the pathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities."
--Hillman
"Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direst participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead's term "nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality." --Hillman p.33, Pan and the Nightmare
A cry went out through late antiquity: "Great Pan is dead!" Plutarch reported it in his "On the failure of the Oracles, " yet the saying has itself become oracular, meaning many things to many people in many ages. One thing was announced: nature had become deprived of its creative voice. It was no longer an independent living force of generativity. What had had soul lost it: or lost was the psychic connection with nature. With Pan dead, so too was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. They had lost their light and fell easily to asceticism, following sheepishly without instinctual rebellion their new shepherd, Christ, with his new means of management. Nature no longer spoke to us-- or we could no longer hear. The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural things with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished... When Pan is alive then nature is too, so the owl's hoot is Athena and the mollusk on the shore is Aphrodite... When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscious... As the human loses personal connection with a personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch, he was repressed... Pan still lives... in the repressed which returns, in the psychopathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities."
James Hillman, A BLUE FIRE: pp.97-98 (originally in "Pan": 24-25,33, 54)
To grasp Pan as nature we must first be grasped by nature, both ‘out there’ in an empty countryside which speaks in sounds not words, and ‘in here’ in a startle reaction. — James Hillman
[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)
By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity… (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
[The] archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena [are] transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. (Hillman, 1997, p.12)
Hillman reintroduces the concept of the anima mundi, the world-soul of Neoplatonism, and says:
[Psychology] is to hear the psyche speaking through all things of the world, thereby recovering the world as a place of soul. (ibid. p.25)
The curative or salvational vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi) […] The artificial tension between soul and world, private and public, interior and exterior thus disappears when the soul as anima mundi, and its making, is located in the world. (ibid. p.35)
My notions of ritual suggest ways of respecting the power of the call. They suggest disciplines imbued with more-than-human values, whose rituals will be touched by beauty, transcendence, adventure, and death. Like cures like — again that old adage. We must go toward where the seed originates and attempt to follow its deepest intuitions. Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed. Yet it must also have rituals of recognitions that give the demonic a place — other than prisons — as Athena found an honored place for the destructive, blood-angered Furies in the midst of civilized Athens. (Hillman, 1996, p.246)
So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insists upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic environments, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity. (ibid. p.243)
If we can so readily accept the Mother-myth, then why not another myth, a different myth, the Platonic one this book proposes? It cannot be the resistance to myth that makes us balk at the acorn theory, since we so gullibly swallow the myth of the Mother. The reason we resist the myth of the daimon, I believe, is that it comes clean. It is not disguised as empirical fact. It states itself openly as a myth. (Hillman, 1996, pp.67-68)
[Archetypal psychology] starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the process of imagination… (Hillman, 1997, p.19 & 1992a, xi.)
A puer-inspired theory will also limp among the facts, even collapse when met with the questioning inquiries of so-called reality […] an archetypal psychology is obliged to show its own mythical premises… (Hillman, 1996, p.283)
The polytheistic analogy is both religious and not religious […] The Gods are taken essentially, as foundations, so that psychology points beyond soul and can never be merely agnostic […] The Gods are therefore the Gods of religion and not mere nomina, categories, devices ex machina. They are respected as powers and persons and creators of value […] In archetypal psychology, Gods are imagined. They are approached through psychological methods of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. (Hillman, 1997, pp.44-46)
The autochtonous quality of images as independent of the subjective imagination which does the perceiving takes Casey’s idea one step further […] but then comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of imagination itself as a mental activity. (ibid. p.15)
You make soul by living life, not by retreating from the world into the ‘inner work’ or beyond the world in spiritual disciplines and meditation… (Hillman & Ventura, 1992b, p.50)
By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, 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. (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
The calling from the eternal world demands that this world here be turned upside down, to restore its nearness to the moon; lunacy, love, poetics. (Hillman, 1996, p.282)
[When] the idea of progress through hierarchical stages is suspended, there will be more tolerance for the non-growth, non-upward and non-ordered components of the psyche….We may then discover that many of the judgements which have previously been called psychological were rather theological. (Hillman, 1981, p.198)
[When] the monotheism of consciousness is no longer able to deny the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems and no longer able to deal with our actual psychic state, then there arises the fantasy of returning to Greek polytheism. (Hillman, 1992a, p.27)
Growth offers salvation from what developmental theory has dogmatically declared to be our basic nature, the helpless and hope-filled state called ‘my inner child’… Growth equals secular salvation. (Hillman & Ventura, 1992b, p.70)
Hillman, J. (1997). Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. Spring Publications.
-------- (1992a). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper Collins.
-------- (2013). Senex & Puer. Spring Publications (Kindle edition).
-------- (1996). The Soul’s Code. Random House.
-------- (1998). The Myth of Analysis. Northwestern University Press.
-------- (1981). ‘Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?’ in D.L. Miller: The New Polytheism (Revised Edition). Spring Publications.
Hillman, J. & Ventura, M. (1992b). We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy – and the world’s getting worse. Harper Collins.
Cultivating Mythic Imagination
The Essence of Archetypes
Jon Mills
ABSTRACT Jung’s notion of the archetype remains an equivocal concept, so much so that Jungians and post-Jungians have failed to agree on its essential nature. In this essay, I wish to argue that an archetype may be understood as an unconscious schema that is self-constitutive and emerges into consciousness from its own a priori ground, hence an autonomous self-determinative act derived from archaic ontology. After offering an analysis of the archetype debate, I set out to philosophically investigate the essence of an archetype by examining its origins and dialectical reflections as a process system arising from its own autochthonous parameters. I offer a descriptive explication of the inner constitution and birth of an archetype based on internal rupture and the desire to project its universality, form, and patternings into psychic reality as self-instantiating replicators. Archetypal content is the appearance of essence as the products of self-manifestation, for an archetype must appear in order to be made actual. Here we must seriously question that, in the beginning, if an archetype is self-constituted and self-generative, the notion and validity of a collective unconscious becomes rather dubious, if not superfluous. I conclude by sketching out an archetypal theory of alterity based on dialectical logic.
Archetypal psychology is a neo-Jungian aesthetic approach engaging the transpersonal numinous, relationships, and dreams. This framework includes the arts, humanities, and cultural imagination, as primary modes of inquiry and aesthetic appreciation of a life story. Classically, spirit is related to heights, and soul to fathomless depths. This is a depth psychology concerned with the unconscious, multiple interpretations, and expressions.
Hillman deconstructed Jung's history, nostalgia, metaphysics, and 'scientific' psychological theory, individuation and the Self, moving it into the polis beyond the consulting room. Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being.
"Hermes could both be the servant of the healer archetype, centered on Aesculapius (see Kereny, Asklepios: Archetypal image of the Physician's existence) and, in a more differentiated way, connect the patient with the archetype that made him ill, providing healing through this link. In professional practice I find little incompatibility between the healing constellation of Aesculapius (the healer in the patient) and healing through the archetypal complex that caused the patient's illness. (Cf. E.R.Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational) where the different contexts of healing are described: Asclepius, "the general practitioner", and the diagnosis and treatment of the coribantic ritual in which, through music, the patient discovered which God was causing his illness ".
Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Hermes and His Children
"By accepting the idea that I am the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim." (James Hillman)
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…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.”
Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche. He draws fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Hillman and other neo-Jungians consider images as essentially aesthetic core experiences. The term “aesthetic” suggests we engage reality at the pre-conceptual level of instinct and intuition, affect and vision. Images enact the movement of experience and reveal the nature of mind and matter, self and world, as well as the metaphysics of belief that art implies.
Art is a liminal space of self-transformation. Works with a trans- quality go beyond mundane time, space, logic and personal taste or aesthetic preference. They connect with our essential Being at the core, reflected in nature and art, piercing time to find eternity. Transcending content, they open a new dimension...an invisible initiatory dimension. From here the artist gives birth to the secret space of the image itself which comes alive by giving shape to that secret.
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. 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.
Art, philosophy, and religion have always been preoccupied with death in one form or another. “Death is the translation of life into soul,” suggested James Hillman in Animal Presences. We postulate soul in special relationship with death. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard.
When we are transparent, we are seen through with nothing left to hide. Archetypal fantasies are at work all the time in the psychologically creative person. Anima is the poetic basis of mind. Hillman's imaginal soul-making suggests the daimon or soul-guide enables us throughout the necessities of our inherent unfolding, our fate.
“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.” --James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Like dream and vision, aesthetics take us beyond the judgments of self, culture, and society. Words, concepts, beliefs, ideations are forces in a universe of forces. The riddle of soul is tied up with the psyche-soma relationship problem. The soul continually drives us to myth, philosophy, religion, art, and above all to the trials of daily life and death.
These images hold profound psychological wisdom rooted in the first dreams of humankind still valid in our day. "Within the metaphorical perspective, within the imaginal field, nothing is more sure than the soul's own activity following it's wayward inertia from insight to insight..." (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology pg. 154)
Metaphors are mini-myths expressing creative mythopoesis. Mythical images are metaphors of depth in the psychic dimension. Psychaesthetic response is phenomenologically perceived and expressed rather than psychoanalytical.
Rooted in aesthetics and imagination, everything is interpreted as image, as story, and as potentially meaningful with reference to the individual vision. With a poetic basis of mind, the symbolic is paramount, taking precedence over the literal.
Mythological studies unpacks the issues, concepts, and characteristics of the archetypes in the contemporary world. Soul-making allows us to express that relationship within our daily lives -- a process of continuous remembrance for the sake of tending the soul of the world.
Mythopoesis creates imaginal resonance. The metaphoric characters and the inner dramas of the complexes led psychologists to call their approach to the psyche a “poetic basis of mind” (Hillman, 1975, p. xi). Hillman pushes archetypal theory to its fullest stature. For him, an archetype and a God, in the classic (e.g., Grecian or polytheistic) sense of the word, are the same.
The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves. The invisible force of animation is an immense force of nature -- metaphysical, biological, and phenomenological resonance.
We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience. We are aroused by the power, presence, or realization of a divinity -- an uncanny, mighty spirit, a tremendous mystery. Numinous experience is primordial, beyond the will, an awesome religious power and thrilling presence that creates an altered state of consciousness.
Additionally, Hillman prefers the word soul to the words personal or collective unconscious. Hillman amplified the term “soul” by using these related words: “mind,spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence,innermost purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God” (Hillman,1964, p. 44).
Mythos, the essential narrative nature of our being, is a dimension of our consciousness. Mythological studies reflect current philosophical, psychological, and sociological topics--as well as the complexity, distortions, monsters, wounds, symptoms, and problems of deep character. Roszak’s ecopsychology (1992) also asserts that human psychology as embedded in nature represents a full return of soul in the form of the world soul, or Anima Mundi (Gaia theory).
We have to embrace paradox to approach myth. Myth descends down into unfathomable cosmos and soul and upward in culture, language, and art. The imaginal realm requires no theoretical structure. Our mythological sensibility sees through to archetypal undercurrents in life experiences, theories, and cultural phenomena, revisioning, reinterpreting, and re-situating mythic currents with topical reverence.
A person must have the will and the passion for the demands of the talent domain. Part of being ensouled, or filled with soul, is to acquire expertise in the place of passion. Inner life is a virtual or artistic truth, with license, a shifty, even healing fiction.
Talents are not to be developed blindly without inquiry into that passion. We are encouraged to notice those areas where an incredible drive compels us to work in a domain. That drive is like a thorn, an incurable mad spot, or daimon--to become oceanic and go into the flow.
We engage the phenomenal world with mythic sensibility. Poets and artists use mythic characters and tropes to express contemporary metaphors and images found in every drama, gesture, heroic and passionate act.
Archetypal Psychology has lifted the embargo on the esoteric and polytheism, allowing exploration of new concepts and devotions. Post qualitative inquiry encourages concrete, practical experimentation and the creation of the not yet instead of the repetition of what is.
Archetypal psychology is polytheistic, recognizing many viewpoints of various gods and goddesses who inform them. Rather than emphasizing or developing ego strength, it deliteralizes the ego. Focus is on psyche, or soul, and the archai, as depth patterns of psychic functioning. Ego is our real world navigator, not the center of the psyche. But it needs to know its boundaries, avoid inflation and self-delusion, and defer or build relations with the archetypes.
Hillman declares that, "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."
Mythical figures are eternal metaphors of the imagination, the dynamics of psychic reality. Jung suggested myth is a revelation of the divine life in humanity, our unconscious grasp of the history of the world, the wild energies of creation, and our sense of embodiment.
There are interdependent unconscious neural, phenomenological, and cognitive levels of embodiment. Mind is not separate from bodily experience, but is naturally more than our conceptual experience. It is irrational. nonlinear, and entangled. There are no consistent level-independent truths. Even embodied truth is not absolute, objective truth, nor does it need to be but it allows us self-reflection, bridging the gap between symbols and the world.
Hillman (1980) noted, “To know ourselves we must know the Gods and Goddesses of myth” (p. iv). Hillman (1972) said, "Soul-making is not treatment, not therapy, not even a process of self-realization but is essentially an imaginative activity or an activity of the imaginal realm as itplays through all of life everywhere and which does not need analyst or ananalysis." (p. 7)
Metamodern paradigms allow integrative/developmental post-Jungian tendencies to freely mingle with AP, without polar dissonance.
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself, which was Hillman's main point in Re-Visioning Psychology.
"What we learn from dreams is what psychic nature really is—the nature of psychic reality: not I, but we; not one, but many. Not monotheistic consciousness looking down from its mountain, but polytheistic consciousness wandering all over the place, in the vales and along rivers, in the woods, the sky, and under the earth. By employing the dream as a model of psychic actuality, and by conceiving a theory of personality based on the dream, we are imagining the psyche’s basic structure to be an inscape of personified images…We can describe the psyche as a polycentric realm of nonverbal, nonspatial images." (Revisioning Psychology, p. 33)
Hillman has 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 has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground. It is not analytical nor interpretive, but ideational and phenomenological, rather than ideological or belief-based. It is a way of seeing through beliefs learned by rote. We stay with the image and engage it directly, relating rather than amplifying it or replacing it with a concept or single meaning. Hillman said, "Dreams call from the imagination to the imagination, and can be answered only by the imagination" (1979: 55).
Imagination
"Thus fantasy is no carefree daydream, but the implacable carrier of the necessities that drive us. Psychic reality is enslaved to imagination. Imagination does not free us but captures us and yokes us to its myths; we are workers for its Kings and Queens. We are tied in blood with what Jung calls our “instinctual images.”
To insist, as Jung does, that human reality is primarily psychic and that the image is the primordial and immediate presentation of this reality requires a further recognition. Reality is only so if it is necessary. To use the word “reality” implies an ontological condition that cannot be otherwise. Therefore there must be something unalterably necessary about images so that psychic reality, which first of all consists in images, cannot be mere afterimages of sense impressions. Images are primordial, archetypal, in themselves ultimate reals, the only direct reality that the psyche experiences. As such they are the shaped presences of necessity. Personally, experientially, this implies that when we search for what is implacably determining our lives and holding them in servitude, we must turn to the images of our fantasies within which necessity lies concealed.
Furthermore, this implies that we must beware of being too ’active’ with our images, moving them around to redeem our problems. Then the practice of active imagination would become an attempt to dodge the necessity of the image and its claim upon the soul." -James Hillman, Mythic Figures
Welcome to soul reality. Archetypal psychology and James Hillman take us out of our heads and back into the world again with a switch from science to metaphor, from concepts to engagement. Archetypes are universal prototypes. Where Jung focused on individuation, Hillman focuses on soul-making or psychological creativity, looking at each event as a moment of creative potential. In Archetypal Psychology individuation is imagination, a synthetic not analytical approach.
“By starting and staying with the soul’s native polycentricity, the multiple archetypal powers, psychology must always keep in mind the governance of the Gods” (Hillman, 1975, p. 167); “thereis no place without Gods and no activity that does not enact them. Every fantasy,every experience has its archetypal reason. There is nothing that does not belong to one God or another” (Hillman, 1975, pp. 168–169).
Beauty
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. Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme.
Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids subjectivism. This mystery is rooted in a synthesis of philosophy and aesthetics in spoken and unspoken languages. It is the self-organizing creation and participatory engagement of a new myth -- a mythical domain, sharing symbolic meaning, fantasy, and rituals. Things are never literally what they seem in a world of wonders. This challenges our mundane positions, habits, and defenses.
The archaic mind mirrors the modern, exposing the subtext if life. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is beyond aesthetic because it is more than skin deep and touches something in us. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
The epic journey is a search for soul, a search for self, a challenge or mission to find what cannot be found in the ordinary world. When the soul becomes our central trope, we find our opus, the hidden agenda of being. Life itself is initiating us. It seeks and sometimes embodies a new way of being, an ethic and aesthetic that is open and psychophysically transformational -- morphogenic.
The art of survival equals the survival of art. Ideally, it is the harmonization of cognitive awareness with empathic and compassionate emotional sensitivity to the zeitgeist of the day. It implies a global conscious awareness, "getting” the Big Picture, and perhaps doing something about it.
"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. Hillman's psychology of beauty restores sensitivity to one of the most neglected, and therefore, for human life, most troubling of the gods, Aphrodite. He understands her as the divine figure immanent in the world of sense. Naked, jeweled, alluring Aphrodite is nature and culture exposing itself to the soul with its beauty, ornament, and form. The soul delights and, to use a Renaissance term, feeds on this beauty.
"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. It is possible to become a monotheist in the religion of Venus.
"In spite of these dangers, the aesthetic life is particularly important in our time because it is so overlooked and undervalued. Hillman recommends that to revive this aesthetic sense we might look to the animals and see the beauty they reveal in expressing their own natures so directly. Our proper form of display, he says, is rhetoric, our fantasy-filled capacity to speak, tell stories, paint, dance, sing, make music, build buildings, write letters, make movies, and so on. The beautiful, and therefore the soul, is in the everyday display of our natures.
"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."-James Hillman, Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore
Tending Soul
When we tend to soul, life passages are natural initiations. The term “genius” is used by most depth psychology thinkers as interchangeable with the term “daimon,” indicating an “other,” who is the protector of our reason for being. (Hillman,1996, 1999; Jung, 1965; Moore, 1994; Myss, 2001)
This psychology arises and depends from tending to the sensory and psychic qualities of images, allowing them to illuminate consciousness. Human consciousness forms in association with soul and spirit. Panpsychism suggests that rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, it is possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that was there all along as a field phenomenon.
Hillman alleged "going up the mountain in the disguise of psychology are the behavior therapies and release and relax therapies" which will "cure the symptom and lose the God" and "lose the symptom and return the world back to the ego." (Peaks and Vales).
Thinking and analysis don't rule as codified integrative factors in this non-developmental model. It is not an ego psychology, a "tuning up" of the personality, making it more effective in the world, dressed for success. There is no climbing the peaks for transcendent experiences as what is here and now is psyche's immediate presence.
Soul makes itself known through fragmentation, confusions, symptoms, pathologies, and personifications. The downward pull of emerging unconscious provokes defensiveness from rationalization, pain, fear, resistance, escape, commitment-phobia, ego-death paranoia, profaning the sacred. Hillman writes, “The psyche does not exist without pathologizing”(1975, p. 70). We often find the presence of traumas, mental illnesses, crimes, and afflictions accompanying eminence.
Images are not reduced to allegories or literalisms and transcendence does not supersede engagement with what is the pluralistic and metaphorical imaginal. Hillman saw archetypes as “the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the rootsof the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world” (p. xiii).
He said that archetypes are “axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return.” As such, archetypes resemble “the models or paradigms,that we find in other fields . . . translations from one metaphor to another.”
All language, all definition is metaphorical, even in science and in logic. Archetypes can possess us and blind us: “one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance.”
Emptiness is the real Philosopher's Stone. By dissolving into non-relative consciousness, mood swings, or identification with conflicting polar positions may be transcended by an enlarged state of consciousness which embraces and contains the entire continuum.
Flow replaces polarity. Dreams, visions or the stream of consciousness can be used therapeutically as an evolutionary force to guide people from a small sense of self and expand them toward a larger image.
Autonomous archetypal forces inhabit the psyche with their own agendas, patterns, and goals. Our psyche is transpersonal, trans-human; it has no boundaries. Our conscious awareness is only a manifestation of this larger consciousness. Within this larger consciousness, we are at home with a plurality of visions.
We need to know our imaginal truth. We cannot attack an autonomous complex directly. When we are driven to the edge of the abyss between disintegration and chaos, we find insight at the raw edge of confrontation. We may or may not know ourselves, but we are revealed to ourselves as we reveal ourselves to others.
Personifying carries us into myth. 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 bottom-line dimension of death, darkness, and weakness that is the deeper sense of meaningfulness -- peripheral, inner, underworld, soul-perspective or night-perspective -- chthonic images. This generally taboo process is a functional definition of soul, psyche, or imagination.
Pathologizing is a form of soul-making, engaging emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation in a culture obsessed with maximizing emotional well being and wholeness. 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, 57).
Hillman says our soul is “led to a knowledge of itself through . . . death . . . . By beginning with the symptom . . . pathologizing turns the entire psyche upon a new pivot: death becomes the center, and with it fantasies that lead right out of life” (p. 111). Since soul-making is founded on suffering and death, it is clear that new psycho-spiritual experiences of reality require a psychological dying.
James Hillman suggests, "Character requires the additional years." "The last years confirm and fulfill character." Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life.
Hillman reminds us that the living soul is embedded in and dependent on anima mundi, the soul of the world. He sees death as a permanent resident of the psyche.
Hillman says that, “Living in terms of life’s only certain end means to live aimed toward death. This end is present here and now as the purpose of life, which means the moment of death – at any moment – is every moment. Death cannot be put off to the future and reserved for old age.” The soul needs death and death resides in the soul permanently.
Pan
"When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscience. (Hercules who cleaned up Pan’s natural world first, clubbing instinct with his willpower, does not stop to clear away the dismembered carcasses left to putrefy after his civilizing creative tasks. He strides on to the next task, and ultimate madness). As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch; he was repressed. Therefore as suggested above, Pan still lives, and not merely in the literary imagination. He lives in the repressed which returns, in the pathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities."
--Hillman
"Panic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direst participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead's term "nature alive" means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality." --Hillman p.33, Pan and the Nightmare
A cry went out through late antiquity: "Great Pan is dead!" Plutarch reported it in his "On the failure of the Oracles, " yet the saying has itself become oracular, meaning many things to many people in many ages. One thing was announced: nature had become deprived of its creative voice. It was no longer an independent living force of generativity. What had had soul lost it: or lost was the psychic connection with nature. With Pan dead, so too was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. They had lost their light and fell easily to asceticism, following sheepishly without instinctual rebellion their new shepherd, Christ, with his new means of management. Nature no longer spoke to us-- or we could no longer hear. The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural things with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished... When Pan is alive then nature is too, so the owl's hoot is Athena and the mollusk on the shore is Aphrodite... When Pan is dead, then nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscious... As the human loses personal connection with a personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the devil merge. Pan never died, say many commentators on Plutarch, he was repressed... Pan still lives... in the repressed which returns, in the psychopathologies of instinct which assert themselves, as Roscher indicates, primarily in the nightmare and its associated erotic, demonic, and panic qualities."
James Hillman, A BLUE FIRE: pp.97-98 (originally in "Pan": 24-25,33, 54)
To grasp Pan as nature we must first be grasped by nature, both ‘out there’ in an empty countryside which speaks in sounds not words, and ‘in here’ in a startle reaction. — James Hillman
[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)
By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity… (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
[The] archetypes of the psyche, as the fundamental structures of the imagination or as fundamentally imaginative phenomena [are] transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance. (Hillman, 1997, p.12)
Hillman reintroduces the concept of the anima mundi, the world-soul of Neoplatonism, and says:
[Psychology] is to hear the psyche speaking through all things of the world, thereby recovering the world as a place of soul. (ibid. p.25)
The curative or salvational vision of archetypal psychology focuses upon the soul in the world which is also the soul of the world (anima mundi) […] The artificial tension between soul and world, private and public, interior and exterior thus disappears when the soul as anima mundi, and its making, is located in the world. (ibid. p.35)
My notions of ritual suggest ways of respecting the power of the call. They suggest disciplines imbued with more-than-human values, whose rituals will be touched by beauty, transcendence, adventure, and death. Like cures like — again that old adage. We must go toward where the seed originates and attempt to follow its deepest intuitions. Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed. Yet it must also have rituals of recognitions that give the demonic a place — other than prisons — as Athena found an honored place for the destructive, blood-angered Furies in the midst of civilized Athens. (Hillman, 1996, p.246)
So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insists upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic environments, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity. (ibid. p.243)
If we can so readily accept the Mother-myth, then why not another myth, a different myth, the Platonic one this book proposes? It cannot be the resistance to myth that makes us balk at the acorn theory, since we so gullibly swallow the myth of the Mother. The reason we resist the myth of the daimon, I believe, is that it comes clean. It is not disguised as empirical fact. It states itself openly as a myth. (Hillman, 1996, pp.67-68)
[Archetypal psychology] starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the process of imagination… (Hillman, 1997, p.19 & 1992a, xi.)
A puer-inspired theory will also limp among the facts, even collapse when met with the questioning inquiries of so-called reality […] an archetypal psychology is obliged to show its own mythical premises… (Hillman, 1996, p.283)
The polytheistic analogy is both religious and not religious […] The Gods are taken essentially, as foundations, so that psychology points beyond soul and can never be merely agnostic […] The Gods are therefore the Gods of religion and not mere nomina, categories, devices ex machina. They are respected as powers and persons and creators of value […] In archetypal psychology, Gods are imagined. They are approached through psychological methods of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. (Hillman, 1997, pp.44-46)
The autochtonous quality of images as independent of the subjective imagination which does the perceiving takes Casey’s idea one step further […] but then comes the awareness that images are independent of subjectivity and even of imagination itself as a mental activity. (ibid. p.15)
You make soul by living life, not by retreating from the world into the ‘inner work’ or beyond the world in spiritual disciplines and meditation… (Hillman & Ventura, 1992b, p.50)
By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it [a polytheistic psychology] would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, 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. (Hillman, 1981, p.197)
The calling from the eternal world demands that this world here be turned upside down, to restore its nearness to the moon; lunacy, love, poetics. (Hillman, 1996, p.282)
[When] the idea of progress through hierarchical stages is suspended, there will be more tolerance for the non-growth, non-upward and non-ordered components of the psyche….We may then discover that many of the judgements which have previously been called psychological were rather theological. (Hillman, 1981, p.198)
[When] the monotheism of consciousness is no longer able to deny the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems and no longer able to deal with our actual psychic state, then there arises the fantasy of returning to Greek polytheism. (Hillman, 1992a, p.27)
Growth offers salvation from what developmental theory has dogmatically declared to be our basic nature, the helpless and hope-filled state called ‘my inner child’… Growth equals secular salvation. (Hillman & Ventura, 1992b, p.70)
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-------- (1998). The Myth of Analysis. Northwestern University Press.
-------- (1981). ‘Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?’ in D.L. Miller: The New Polytheism (Revised Edition). Spring Publications.
Hillman, J. & Ventura, M. (1992b). We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy – and the world’s getting worse. Harper Collins.
Excerpt from "We'Ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse" | Hillman, James, Ventura, Michael:
HILLMAN: "Either I can use it or I can get rid of it, but it's fucking inefficient to have it around where it's not usable but it's still there." This is what makes us, Americans, white Americans, psychological amateurs and innocents. We don't have enough stuff in the psyche, we keep getting rid of the ore! We're not psychologically sophisticated people.
I'd rather not say is it or isn't it processing. I'd rather say, "What happens if you call it processing?" And you described what happens, you either try to get rid of it or make it useful. So it's exploitative. The notion of transformation that dominates therapy: transform something useless into something useful.
VENTURA: A consumer's ideology. You're consuming your psyche, as both a consumer and as a carnivore.
HILLMAN: And also as an industrialist: you're making a profit out of it.
VENTURA: And the psyche doesn't like that. So what it says is, “Okay! I'll make you boring.”
HILLMAN (laughs): I was waiting for you to say something very different; I was waiting for you to say, "Okay, I'll send you another complaint!”
VENTURA: That's only if it still likes you—then the psyche gives you another chance with something new to deal with. If it's really disgusted with you it says, "I'll make you boring."
HILLMAN: So that you become processed cheese.
VENTURA: And you will be very well adjusted and even tempered, you won't "lose it," you won't have any extremes. And maybe you can even have a successful marriage with somebody as boring as you are.
HILLMAN: Usually, fortunately, that doesn't work, because the God of marriage doesn't allow that.
VENTURA: Right. The God of marriage is a very crazy God.
HILLMAN: The God of marriage wants a lot more.
VENTURA: And the psyche says to therapists especially, "I'll make you boring." That's what the therapists I know complain about.
HILLMAN: Oh, yes. The repressive atmosphere of therapy--
VENTURA:—repressive to the therapist--
HILLMAN:—that dictates psychology has to be respectable. This produces a terrible repression to the actual psychologist. We're not allowed in the street. We have to be careful, pretty correct, not extreme or radical, and not mix it up with our clients and patients out in the world. And this slants our thinking toward white, middle-class psychology. As one good friend of mine told me, “The trouble with getting old as a therapist is that I can’t grow into my eccentricity.” Because what’s expected of a therapist is regular hours, being on time, being a kind of square, reasonable person. The therapist is unconsciously modeling the goal of therapy.
VENTURA: The therapist is unconsciously modeling the unconscious goal of therapy.
HILLMAN: Well, that isn’t my goal. The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “You become what you are.” And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
VENTURA: It’s not processing and it’s not growth, ’cause that’s the same thing, that’s a consumer attitude toward life. So what the fuck is it?
HILLMAN: I think it’s life. That’s what it is. Meaning: going through life. Rousseau said, “The man among you is the most educated who can carry the joys and sorrows of life.” Education meant the joys and sorrows of life. So do you want to call it education? That’s pretty boring too.
VENTURA: Then there are all the words that the New Agers have made unpalatable, like journey.
HILLMAN: I tell you what I feel about it. I feel it’s service. I feel it’s devotion.
VENTURA: To what?
HILLMAN: To the Gods. I feel that these things occur, and they are what the psyche wants or sends me. What the Gods send me. There’s a lovely passage from Marcus Aurelius: “What I do I do always with the community in mind. What happens to me, what befalls me, comes from the Gods.” And befall is a very important word, because that’s where the word case comes from: cadere, to fall. And in German the word for a case is fall. So what falls on you is what happens to you, is the origins of the Greek word pathos too—what drops on you, what wounds you, what happens to you, what falls on you, how you fall, the way the dice fall.
VENTURA: You know, we keep circling the basic premise of American life, which has infected therapy, namely, “Everything is supposed to be all right. If things are not all right, then they’re very, very wrong.”
HILLMAN: So what happens to the pathos, the pathology of our lives, "that which can’t be accepted, can’t be changed, and won’t go away.”
VENTURA: You live it out.
HILLMAN: That becomes a devotion. A service. What else can you do?
HILLMAN: "Either I can use it or I can get rid of it, but it's fucking inefficient to have it around where it's not usable but it's still there." This is what makes us, Americans, white Americans, psychological amateurs and innocents. We don't have enough stuff in the psyche, we keep getting rid of the ore! We're not psychologically sophisticated people.
I'd rather not say is it or isn't it processing. I'd rather say, "What happens if you call it processing?" And you described what happens, you either try to get rid of it or make it useful. So it's exploitative. The notion of transformation that dominates therapy: transform something useless into something useful.
VENTURA: A consumer's ideology. You're consuming your psyche, as both a consumer and as a carnivore.
HILLMAN: And also as an industrialist: you're making a profit out of it.
VENTURA: And the psyche doesn't like that. So what it says is, “Okay! I'll make you boring.”
HILLMAN (laughs): I was waiting for you to say something very different; I was waiting for you to say, "Okay, I'll send you another complaint!”
VENTURA: That's only if it still likes you—then the psyche gives you another chance with something new to deal with. If it's really disgusted with you it says, "I'll make you boring."
HILLMAN: So that you become processed cheese.
VENTURA: And you will be very well adjusted and even tempered, you won't "lose it," you won't have any extremes. And maybe you can even have a successful marriage with somebody as boring as you are.
HILLMAN: Usually, fortunately, that doesn't work, because the God of marriage doesn't allow that.
VENTURA: Right. The God of marriage is a very crazy God.
HILLMAN: The God of marriage wants a lot more.
VENTURA: And the psyche says to therapists especially, "I'll make you boring." That's what the therapists I know complain about.
HILLMAN: Oh, yes. The repressive atmosphere of therapy--
VENTURA:—repressive to the therapist--
HILLMAN:—that dictates psychology has to be respectable. This produces a terrible repression to the actual psychologist. We're not allowed in the street. We have to be careful, pretty correct, not extreme or radical, and not mix it up with our clients and patients out in the world. And this slants our thinking toward white, middle-class psychology. As one good friend of mine told me, “The trouble with getting old as a therapist is that I can’t grow into my eccentricity.” Because what’s expected of a therapist is regular hours, being on time, being a kind of square, reasonable person. The therapist is unconsciously modeling the goal of therapy.
VENTURA: The therapist is unconsciously modeling the unconscious goal of therapy.
HILLMAN: Well, that isn’t my goal. The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “You become what you are.” And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.
VENTURA: It’s not processing and it’s not growth, ’cause that’s the same thing, that’s a consumer attitude toward life. So what the fuck is it?
HILLMAN: I think it’s life. That’s what it is. Meaning: going through life. Rousseau said, “The man among you is the most educated who can carry the joys and sorrows of life.” Education meant the joys and sorrows of life. So do you want to call it education? That’s pretty boring too.
VENTURA: Then there are all the words that the New Agers have made unpalatable, like journey.
HILLMAN: I tell you what I feel about it. I feel it’s service. I feel it’s devotion.
VENTURA: To what?
HILLMAN: To the Gods. I feel that these things occur, and they are what the psyche wants or sends me. What the Gods send me. There’s a lovely passage from Marcus Aurelius: “What I do I do always with the community in mind. What happens to me, what befalls me, comes from the Gods.” And befall is a very important word, because that’s where the word case comes from: cadere, to fall. And in German the word for a case is fall. So what falls on you is what happens to you, is the origins of the Greek word pathos too—what drops on you, what wounds you, what happens to you, what falls on you, how you fall, the way the dice fall.
VENTURA: You know, we keep circling the basic premise of American life, which has infected therapy, namely, “Everything is supposed to be all right. If things are not all right, then they’re very, very wrong.”
HILLMAN: So what happens to the pathos, the pathology of our lives, "that which can’t be accepted, can’t be changed, and won’t go away.”
VENTURA: You live it out.
HILLMAN: That becomes a devotion. A service. What else can you do?
Archetypal Psychology and my own contribution to it, I would like to point out the following: James Hillman's “Why Archetypal Psychology?” of 1971 was not only for me personally, but also objectively for the field, a real breakthrough overcoming the rather sterile state in which Jungian psychology was (and often still is), a state in which what Jung had worked out was more or less routinely repeated and applied to the new cases that the therapists had to deal with as well as to mythic and fairytale material not already interpreted by Jung himself. The fundamental significance of Hillman's paper lies in his raising a question, in his pushing beyond the level of what Jung had taught, the level of his dicta, to the question of what was the underlying deeper interest that inspired and motivated Jung's psychological investigation in the first place, and what was the pulsating heart of his psychology. Hillman thereby showed that he was no longer satisfied with simply taking over Jung's work as a ready-made (which is always a mindless business). He searched for the root principle of a true psychology in order to be able to construe our conception of psychology out of this productive center.His attempt was to think psychology, to develop a psychology that was a living organic whole, because grounded in a living center it was not a set of convictions and theorems, but an animating spirit and a general way of seeing and proceeding. This was the purpose that he tried to realize a few years later under the title of a “Re-Visioning” of Psychology. Unfortunately, at least this is my impression, in the further development of Archetypal Psychology this living spirit slowly solidified again in the direction (1) of a fixation, if not reification, of certain essential concepts such as “soul” in an anima-only sense and “the imaginal” as a strictly idealistic, (despite its officially metaphorical character but nevertheless) quasi-metaphysical given, and (2) of an oppositional thinking that (implicitly and partially explicitly) excludes certain essential areas or aspects of life as “not-soul,” e.g., what we call “the animus,” logical negation, historical Time, and much of the modern world (as a fallen soulless world). My own need, by contrast, is to keep the original questioning spirit of Hillman's 1971 paper alive, which leads me to speak of “the soul's” logical life, to conceive of true psychology as the discipline of interiority and absolute negativity, and to understand “the soul” predominantly as the soul of the real.
Wolfgang Giegerich, Berlin, February 2011
"After Hillman’s female analyst, Rivkah Scharf-Kluger, left to live in Israel, since May 1957 he had been seeing another of Jung’s female devotees, Dr. Liliane Frey, in addition to Meier. Now, having fulfilled “the minimum of 300 hours divided between a man and woman analyst” as well as 431 supervised hours seeing eight patients, Hillman applied to the Curatorium to present himself for the Diploma-Examinations. To his mother, as he prepared for his six final exams at the Jung Institute, James revealed:
“To be an analyst is a hell of a burden, since the questions one must face are not to be answered easily, else the patient himself would have found the answers. Every hour of working with someone involves the whole personality, with all its weaknesses especially in this Jungian method where the two people sit face to face, and not where one does all the talking lying down and the other hides behind a note book out of sight. So this autumn I have been depressed over facing all the implications of my work, my shortcomings, mistakes . . . It has never been clear sailing but the difficulties become more apparent as one gets nearer the port. One can only have an effect on the other person if one can experience certain symbols and certain problems and certain wounds. In ancient times the physician was symbolized as having a wound himself, or the same disease as the patient. Or he carried or caught the patient’s disease and thus by curing himself cured the patient. Since most of the illnesses brought to the consulting room are the standard illnesses of our day, illnesses which everyone has and shares, I have to work these things in myself before they can be of any use to anyone else.”
In February-March 1959, Hillman completed the examinations, thereafter to be “recognized by the Jungian International as an analyst . . . It is a turning point,” he wrote Kenny Donoghue, “after having been in school more or less since February 1931.” Hillman would look back on those years at the Institute and say: “I soaked it up. It probably was—objectively speaking, academically speaking—only third rate, many of the courses, most of the teachers, but, there was a madness there, a spirit, and I took in every word; I loved the material.” The Hillmans, along with the Steins and Spiegelmans, “celebrated the event by a trip to the Alps where we drank champagne and pledged eternal comradeship,” as Spiegelman remembered it.
Hillman had arrived in Switzerland six years before at the height of psychoanalytic culture, absorbed everything from clinical psychiatry and theories of neurosis to “The Shadow in Fairy Tales” and “Disturbances in Animal Behavior” at the Jung Institute, along with “four long years of sitting in on lectures and seminars, really dreadful” at the University of Zürich.
Now, considered by many to be the most brilliant graduate in the Institute’s eleven-year history, Hillman had a new challenge in mind—that is, if he could convince the Institute’s hierarchy of its worthiness."
~Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
Excerpt from 'Peaks and Vales' by James Hillman:
"..So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots (Jung’s ill-favored earlier term “racial unconscious”). Thus, from the spirit point of view, it can make no difference if our teacher be a Zaddik from a Polish shtetl, an Indian from under a Mexican cactus, or a Japanese master in a garden of stones, these differences are but conditionings of history, personalistic hangups. The spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless.
I shall ride this horse of history until it drops, for I submit that history has become the Great Repressed. If in Freud’s time sexuality was the Great Repressed and the creator of the internal ferment of the psychoneuroses, today the one thing we will not tolerate is history. No; we are each Promethean with a bag of possibilities, Pandoran hopes, open, unencumbered, the future before us, so various, so beautiful, so new – new and liberated men and women living forward into a science fiction. So history rumbles below, continuing to work in our psychic complexes.
Our complexes are history at work in the soul: father’s socialism, his father’s fundamentalism, and my reaction against them like Hefner to Methodism, Kinsey to Boy-Scoutism, Nixon to Quakerism. It is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below.
From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints “bid farewell to their comrades.” As I’m here as an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension. The soul feels left behind, and we see this soul reacting with anima resentments. Spiritual teachings warn the initiate so often about introspective broodings, about jealousy, spite, and pettiness, about attachments to sensations and memories. These cautions present an accurate phenomenology of how the soul feels when the spirit bids farewell.
If a person is concurrently in therapy and in a spiritual discipline – Vedanta, breathing exercises, transcendental meditation, etc. – the spiritual teacher may well regard the analysis as a waste of time with trivia and illusions. The analyst may regard the spiritual exercises as a leak in the psychic vessel, or an escape into either physicality (somatizing, a sort of sophisticated hysterical conversion) or into metaphysicality. These are conditions that grow in the same hedgerow: both physicalize, substantiate, hypostasize, taking their concepts as things. They both lose the “as if,” the metaphorical Hermes approach, forgetting that metaphysics too is a fantasy system, even if one that must unfortunately take itself as literally real.
Besides these mutual accusations of triviality, there is a more essential question that we in our analytical armchairs ask: Who is making the trip? Here it is not a discussion about the relative value of doctrines or goals; nor is it an analysis of the visions seen and experiences felt. The essential issue is not the analysis of content of spiritual experiences, for we have seen similar experiences in the county hospital, in dreams, in drug trips. Having visions is easy. The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy, and then congealing this play into paranoid monuments of eternal truth. And then are not these seemingly mind-blowing events of light, of synchronicitv, of spiritual sight in an LSD trip often trivial – seeing the universe revealed in a buttonhole stitch or linoleum pattern – at least as trivial as what takes place in a usual therapy session that picks apart the tangles of the daily domestic scene?
The question of what is trivial and what is meaningful depends on the archetype that gives meaning, and this, says Jung, is the self. Once the self is constellated, meaning comes with it. But as with any archetypal event, it has its undifferentiated foolish side. So one can be overwhelmed by displaced, inferior, paranoid meaningfulness, just as one can be overwhelmed by eros and one’s soul (anima) put through the throes of desperate, ridiculous love. The disproportion between the trivial content of a synchronistic event on the one hand, and on the other, the giant sense of meaning that comes with it, shows what I mean. Like a person who has fallen into love, so a person who has fallen into meaning begins that process of self-validation and self-justification of trivia that belong to the experience of the archetype within any complex and form part of its defense. It therefore makes little difference, psychodynamically, whether we fall into the shadow and justify our disorders of morality, or the anima and our disorders of beauty, or the self and our disorders of meaning. Paranoia has been defined as a disorder of meaning – that is, it can be referred to the influence of an undifferentiated self-archetype. Part of this disorder is the very systematization that would, by defensive means of the doctrine of synchronicity, give profound meaningful order to a trivial coincidence.
Here we return to Mr. Forster, who reminded us that the spirit’s voice is humble and the soul’s humorful. [20] Humility is awed and wowed by meaning; the soul takes the same events more as the puns and pranks of Pan. [21] Humility and humor are two ways of coming down to humus, to the human condition. Humility would have us bow down to the world and pay our due to its reality. Render unto Caesar. Humor brings us down with a pratfall. Heavy meaningful reality becomes suspect, seen through, the world laughable – paranoia dissolved, as synchronicity becomes spontaneity.
Thus the relation of the soul analyst to the spiritual event is not in terms of the doctrines or of the contents. Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain. Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling?
This question is not so different from one put in spiritual disciplines, and it is crucial. For it is not the trip and its stations and path, not the rate of ascent and the rung of the ladder, or the peak and its experience, nor even the return – it is the person in the person prompting the whole endeavor. And here we fall back into history, the historical ego, our Western-Northern willpower, the very willpower that brought the missionaries and trappers, the cattlemen and ranchers and planters, the Okies and Arkies, the orange-growers, wine-growers, and sectarians, and the gold-rushers arid railroaders to California to begin with. Can this be left at the door like a dusty pair of outworn shoes when one goes into the sweet-smelling pad of the meditation room? Can one close the door on the person who brought one to the threshold in the first place?
The movement from one side of the brain to the other, from tedious daily life in the supermarket to supra-consciousness, from trash to transcendence, the “altered state of consciousness” approach – to put it all it in a nutshell – denies this historical ego. It is an approach going back to Saul who became Paul, conversion into the opposite, knocked off one’s ass in a flash.
So you see the archetypal question is neither how does the soul/spirit conflict happen, nor why, but who among the variety of figures of which we are each composed, which archetypal figure or person is in this happening? What God is at work in calling us up the mountain or in holding us to the vales? For archetypal psychology, there is a god in every perspective, in every position. All things are determined by psychic images, including our formulations of the spirit. All things present themselves to consciousness in the shapings of one or another divine perspective. Our vision is mimetic to one or another of the gods.
Who is going up the mountain: is it the unconscious do-gooder Christian in us, he who has lost his historical Christianity and is an unconscious crusader, knight, missionary, savior? (I tend to see the latent “Christian Soldier” of our unconscious Christianity as more of a social danger than so-called latent psychosis, latent homosexuality, or masked, latent depression.)
Who is going up the mountain: is it the Climber, a man who would become the mountain himself, I on Mount Rushmore – humble now, but just you wait and see …
Is it the heroic ego? Is it Hercules, still at the same labors: cleaning up the stables of pollution, killing the swamp creatures, clubbing his animals, refusing the call of women, progressing through twelve stages (all in the end to go mad and marry Hebe, who is Hera, Mom, in her younger, sweeter, smilingly hebephrenic form)?
Or is the one ascending the spiritual impetus of the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of the spirit – Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun’s chariot out of control, burning up the world; Bellerophon, ascending on his white winged horse, then falling onto the plains of wandering, limping ever after? These are the puer high climbers, the heaven stormers, whose eros reflects the torch and ladder of Eros and his searching arrow, a longing for higher and further and more and purer and better. Without this archetypal component affecting our lives, there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny.
So, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually as well, the issue is one of finding connections between the puer’s drive upward and the soul’s clouded, encumbering embrace. My notion of this connection would avoid two side tracks. The first would take the soul up too, “liberate it” from its vale – the transcendentalist’s demand. The second would reduce the spirit to a complex and would thus deny the puer’s legitimate ambition and art of flying – the psychoanalyst’s demand. Let’s remember here that he who cannot fly cannot imagine, as Gaston Bachelard said, and also Mohammed Ali. To imagine in a true high-flying, free-falling way, to walk on air and put on airs, to experience pneumatic reality and its concomitant inflation, one must imagine out of the valley, above the grainfields and the daily bread. Sometimes this is too much for professional analysts, and by not recognizing the archetypal claims of the puer, they thwart imagination."
Wolfgang Giegerich, Berlin, February 2011
"After Hillman’s female analyst, Rivkah Scharf-Kluger, left to live in Israel, since May 1957 he had been seeing another of Jung’s female devotees, Dr. Liliane Frey, in addition to Meier. Now, having fulfilled “the minimum of 300 hours divided between a man and woman analyst” as well as 431 supervised hours seeing eight patients, Hillman applied to the Curatorium to present himself for the Diploma-Examinations. To his mother, as he prepared for his six final exams at the Jung Institute, James revealed:
“To be an analyst is a hell of a burden, since the questions one must face are not to be answered easily, else the patient himself would have found the answers. Every hour of working with someone involves the whole personality, with all its weaknesses especially in this Jungian method where the two people sit face to face, and not where one does all the talking lying down and the other hides behind a note book out of sight. So this autumn I have been depressed over facing all the implications of my work, my shortcomings, mistakes . . . It has never been clear sailing but the difficulties become more apparent as one gets nearer the port. One can only have an effect on the other person if one can experience certain symbols and certain problems and certain wounds. In ancient times the physician was symbolized as having a wound himself, or the same disease as the patient. Or he carried or caught the patient’s disease and thus by curing himself cured the patient. Since most of the illnesses brought to the consulting room are the standard illnesses of our day, illnesses which everyone has and shares, I have to work these things in myself before they can be of any use to anyone else.”
In February-March 1959, Hillman completed the examinations, thereafter to be “recognized by the Jungian International as an analyst . . . It is a turning point,” he wrote Kenny Donoghue, “after having been in school more or less since February 1931.” Hillman would look back on those years at the Institute and say: “I soaked it up. It probably was—objectively speaking, academically speaking—only third rate, many of the courses, most of the teachers, but, there was a madness there, a spirit, and I took in every word; I loved the material.” The Hillmans, along with the Steins and Spiegelmans, “celebrated the event by a trip to the Alps where we drank champagne and pledged eternal comradeship,” as Spiegelman remembered it.
Hillman had arrived in Switzerland six years before at the height of psychoanalytic culture, absorbed everything from clinical psychiatry and theories of neurosis to “The Shadow in Fairy Tales” and “Disturbances in Animal Behavior” at the Jung Institute, along with “four long years of sitting in on lectures and seminars, really dreadful” at the University of Zürich.
Now, considered by many to be the most brilliant graduate in the Institute’s eleven-year history, Hillman had a new challenge in mind—that is, if he could convince the Institute’s hierarchy of its worthiness."
~Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume I: The Making of a Psychologist
Excerpt from 'Peaks and Vales' by James Hillman:
"..So the spirit workers and spirit seekers first of all must climb over the debris of history, or prophesy its end or its unreality, time as illusion, as well as the history of their individual and particular localities, their particular ethnic and religious roots (Jung’s ill-favored earlier term “racial unconscious”). Thus, from the spirit point of view, it can make no difference if our teacher be a Zaddik from a Polish shtetl, an Indian from under a Mexican cactus, or a Japanese master in a garden of stones, these differences are but conditionings of history, personalistic hangups. The spirit is impersonal, rooted not in local soul, but timeless.
I shall ride this horse of history until it drops, for I submit that history has become the Great Repressed. If in Freud’s time sexuality was the Great Repressed and the creator of the internal ferment of the psychoneuroses, today the one thing we will not tolerate is history. No; we are each Promethean with a bag of possibilities, Pandoran hopes, open, unencumbered, the future before us, so various, so beautiful, so new – new and liberated men and women living forward into a science fiction. So history rumbles below, continuing to work in our psychic complexes.
Our complexes are history at work in the soul: father’s socialism, his father’s fundamentalism, and my reaction against them like Hefner to Methodism, Kinsey to Boy-Scoutism, Nixon to Quakerism. It is so much easier to transcend history by climbing the mountain and let come what may than it is to work on history within us, our reactions, habits, moralities, opinions, symptoms that prevent true psychic change. Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archaeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a recollecting. And – a planting in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with the spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below.
From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints “bid farewell to their comrades.” As I’m here as an advocate of soul, I have to present its viewpoint. Its viewpoint appears in the long hollow depression of the valley, the inner and closed dejection that accompanies the exaltation of ascension. The soul feels left behind, and we see this soul reacting with anima resentments. Spiritual teachings warn the initiate so often about introspective broodings, about jealousy, spite, and pettiness, about attachments to sensations and memories. These cautions present an accurate phenomenology of how the soul feels when the spirit bids farewell.
If a person is concurrently in therapy and in a spiritual discipline – Vedanta, breathing exercises, transcendental meditation, etc. – the spiritual teacher may well regard the analysis as a waste of time with trivia and illusions. The analyst may regard the spiritual exercises as a leak in the psychic vessel, or an escape into either physicality (somatizing, a sort of sophisticated hysterical conversion) or into metaphysicality. These are conditions that grow in the same hedgerow: both physicalize, substantiate, hypostasize, taking their concepts as things. They both lose the “as if,” the metaphorical Hermes approach, forgetting that metaphysics too is a fantasy system, even if one that must unfortunately take itself as literally real.
Besides these mutual accusations of triviality, there is a more essential question that we in our analytical armchairs ask: Who is making the trip? Here it is not a discussion about the relative value of doctrines or goals; nor is it an analysis of the visions seen and experiences felt. The essential issue is not the analysis of content of spiritual experiences, for we have seen similar experiences in the county hospital, in dreams, in drug trips. Having visions is easy. The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy, and then congealing this play into paranoid monuments of eternal truth. And then are not these seemingly mind-blowing events of light, of synchronicitv, of spiritual sight in an LSD trip often trivial – seeing the universe revealed in a buttonhole stitch or linoleum pattern – at least as trivial as what takes place in a usual therapy session that picks apart the tangles of the daily domestic scene?
The question of what is trivial and what is meaningful depends on the archetype that gives meaning, and this, says Jung, is the self. Once the self is constellated, meaning comes with it. But as with any archetypal event, it has its undifferentiated foolish side. So one can be overwhelmed by displaced, inferior, paranoid meaningfulness, just as one can be overwhelmed by eros and one’s soul (anima) put through the throes of desperate, ridiculous love. The disproportion between the trivial content of a synchronistic event on the one hand, and on the other, the giant sense of meaning that comes with it, shows what I mean. Like a person who has fallen into love, so a person who has fallen into meaning begins that process of self-validation and self-justification of trivia that belong to the experience of the archetype within any complex and form part of its defense. It therefore makes little difference, psychodynamically, whether we fall into the shadow and justify our disorders of morality, or the anima and our disorders of beauty, or the self and our disorders of meaning. Paranoia has been defined as a disorder of meaning – that is, it can be referred to the influence of an undifferentiated self-archetype. Part of this disorder is the very systematization that would, by defensive means of the doctrine of synchronicity, give profound meaningful order to a trivial coincidence.
Here we return to Mr. Forster, who reminded us that the spirit’s voice is humble and the soul’s humorful. [20] Humility is awed and wowed by meaning; the soul takes the same events more as the puns and pranks of Pan. [21] Humility and humor are two ways of coming down to humus, to the human condition. Humility would have us bow down to the world and pay our due to its reality. Render unto Caesar. Humor brings us down with a pratfall. Heavy meaningful reality becomes suspect, seen through, the world laughable – paranoia dissolved, as synchronicity becomes spontaneity.
Thus the relation of the soul analyst to the spiritual event is not in terms of the doctrines or of the contents. Our concern is with the person, the Who, going up the mountain. Also we ask, Who is already up there, calling?
This question is not so different from one put in spiritual disciplines, and it is crucial. For it is not the trip and its stations and path, not the rate of ascent and the rung of the ladder, or the peak and its experience, nor even the return – it is the person in the person prompting the whole endeavor. And here we fall back into history, the historical ego, our Western-Northern willpower, the very willpower that brought the missionaries and trappers, the cattlemen and ranchers and planters, the Okies and Arkies, the orange-growers, wine-growers, and sectarians, and the gold-rushers arid railroaders to California to begin with. Can this be left at the door like a dusty pair of outworn shoes when one goes into the sweet-smelling pad of the meditation room? Can one close the door on the person who brought one to the threshold in the first place?
The movement from one side of the brain to the other, from tedious daily life in the supermarket to supra-consciousness, from trash to transcendence, the “altered state of consciousness” approach – to put it all it in a nutshell – denies this historical ego. It is an approach going back to Saul who became Paul, conversion into the opposite, knocked off one’s ass in a flash.
So you see the archetypal question is neither how does the soul/spirit conflict happen, nor why, but who among the variety of figures of which we are each composed, which archetypal figure or person is in this happening? What God is at work in calling us up the mountain or in holding us to the vales? For archetypal psychology, there is a god in every perspective, in every position. All things are determined by psychic images, including our formulations of the spirit. All things present themselves to consciousness in the shapings of one or another divine perspective. Our vision is mimetic to one or another of the gods.
Who is going up the mountain: is it the unconscious do-gooder Christian in us, he who has lost his historical Christianity and is an unconscious crusader, knight, missionary, savior? (I tend to see the latent “Christian Soldier” of our unconscious Christianity as more of a social danger than so-called latent psychosis, latent homosexuality, or masked, latent depression.)
Who is going up the mountain: is it the Climber, a man who would become the mountain himself, I on Mount Rushmore – humble now, but just you wait and see …
Is it the heroic ego? Is it Hercules, still at the same labors: cleaning up the stables of pollution, killing the swamp creatures, clubbing his animals, refusing the call of women, progressing through twelve stages (all in the end to go mad and marry Hebe, who is Hera, Mom, in her younger, sweeter, smilingly hebephrenic form)?
Or is the one ascending the spiritual impetus of the puer aeternus, the winged godlike imago in us each, the beautiful boy of the spirit – Icarus on the way to the sun, then plummeting with waxen wings; Phaethon driving the sun’s chariot out of control, burning up the world; Bellerophon, ascending on his white winged horse, then falling onto the plains of wandering, limping ever after? These are the puer high climbers, the heaven stormers, whose eros reflects the torch and ladder of Eros and his searching arrow, a longing for higher and further and more and purer and better. Without this archetypal component affecting our lives, there would be no spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny.
So, psychologically, and perhaps spiritually as well, the issue is one of finding connections between the puer’s drive upward and the soul’s clouded, encumbering embrace. My notion of this connection would avoid two side tracks. The first would take the soul up too, “liberate it” from its vale – the transcendentalist’s demand. The second would reduce the spirit to a complex and would thus deny the puer’s legitimate ambition and art of flying – the psychoanalyst’s demand. Let’s remember here that he who cannot fly cannot imagine, as Gaston Bachelard said, and also Mohammed Ali. To imagine in a true high-flying, free-falling way, to walk on air and put on airs, to experience pneumatic reality and its concomitant inflation, one must imagine out of the valley, above the grainfields and the daily bread. Sometimes this is too much for professional analysts, and by not recognizing the archetypal claims of the puer, they thwart imagination."
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "Universe." A part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security."
Albert Einstein, 1972
Hillman and Jung describe complementary domains of contemplative spirit and enlivened imagination of soul or psyche available for exploration and guidance. But the call of Spirit may not make us wise about Psyche and its complex phenomena of archetypes, dreams, drives, and complexes, by which spirit is interpenetrated and which drive the recognition of spirit.
Hillman favored the psychological realm of psyche even though he had his own kundalini experiences and other spiritual insights and experience. He contrasted psyche with the constructions of theological, metaphysical, and hierarchical concepts of faith-based spirit. He used deconstruction as a tool to break open underlying structure and fantasies in ideas and concepts but did not study or follow the postmodern school, per se.
He followed Jung's lead recognizing awakening through alchemy, divination, and relational engagement with archetypal autonomy of the transpersonal or transhuman experience of self, other, and world.
"It is not the literal return to alchemy that is necessary but a restoration of the alchemical mode of imagining. For in that mode we restore matter to our speech - and that is our aim: the restoration of imaginative matter, not of literal alchemy."--James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology
We conclude Hillman considered ascensionistic routes and new agey or theosophical notions to be supported by personal and collective psychic fantasies taken literally, rather than metaphorically. In the worst cases, as a premature escapism from body and world as it is. Thus he prioritized soul, Anima Mundi, over spirit.
Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?
The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’
Soul provides a metaphorical language describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation. Transformation can be effected within the autonomous stream of imagery, through image processing via experiential therapy--change the imagery and you change the feelings.
Alchemy had one great prescription for the accomplishment of the Great Work: "Solve et Coagula." It sought to reduce or dissolve all to its primary, most fundamental essence and then embody that creative, holistic spirit. This is also the goal of transpersonal therapies--as of old, to turn the dross of life (lead) into "gold."
We repeat this process as modern alchemists when we seek the transformative medium which allows us to recognize our rigidities (lead) and facilitates our healing and expression of our full creative potential (gold). That medium is the ever-flowing river of our consciousness which can only be expressed through imagery.
Solutio
This liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone--Universal Solvent--has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles by recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth, ancestral awareness, generic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perceptions, and quantum consciousness.
The fractal nature of imagery encodes, enfolds, or compresses the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Nonlinear systems change radically through their feedback: the plurality, fragmentation and disintegration (ego death), the surrender to the alchemical dissolution (solve) and the getting it together again (coagula).
Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather, it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation. Random iterations or repetitions of imagery are more efficient than direct transformation replacement.
We find the attractor, and stay on it as we transform. The changes we make become the new self image. They key is the self referential repetition of the process over and over, such as reiterating dream images. This liquification symbolized by water possesses the power of resuscitation.
Liquification of consciousness implies a return to the womb for rebirth, baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It lays bare that which is below. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring or de-stratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state that brings dream-like information into waking life.
The essence of the transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery. In each dream journey we encounter a state of consciousness that is personal experience of primal chaos. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the chaos is an experience of no-form, total confusion, and disorientation.
The personal, subjective responses within this state are visceral as well as sensory imagery. The closer one is to the chaos field the more undifferentiated the imagery becomes, dissolving into impressionistic colors, intuitive perceptions, vague awareness, even total blankness of being overwhelmed by sensations. Another perception is characterized as a spiral or vortex. It exerts a magnetic draw on the journeyer who is drawn into it.
Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper often cause intense dizziness and disorientation. There may be feelings of entering a long dark tunnel, or flying apart in fragmentation or dismemberment becomes invisible because it is not-yet-visible.
Reaching the most primal state, one has the sense of deep transformative processes at work--a feeling of almost palpable relief, a sense of peacefulness and security which is the essence of the journey itself--timelessness, boundarylessness, tingling, effervescence--the ground state of being. Here we are simultaneously everything and nothing.
We are not separate from the universe: both science (holism, new physics, philosophy) and mystics (shamans, saints, and gurus) tell us so. And it can be experienced directly. The whole is reflected in the part and the part is seamlessly unified with the whole. Chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior, and senstive dependence on initial conditions.
We 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--self-organized emergent order. A vortex is remarkably stable to fluctuations and change, but under the right perturbations, it may either spontaneously disintegrate or evolve into a new form.
"The most deconstructed archetypal forms are vortexes, toroids, solitons, and singularities. The most fundamental archetype of process is the Field. The quantum vacuum is a dynamic massless scalar field. Scalars are just active information; a hologram is pure information. Entanglement is a property of nonlocal quantum information exchange. The central spiral vortex crossover point (all adjoining toroidal fractal involved fields) is what physicists call a "twistor" or a "wormhole"
Extensions, i.e. projections, emerge from a common source. They interface, entangle, and create a series of standing waves appearing as patterns made apparent within certain pre-conceived constraints. Visceral intentions are afforded the opportunity and potential to materialize within self-construed fields of virtual energy made accountable only to the observer, i.e. the original source. Not all “events” are tangible or recognizable in 3D space/time. Without a source there can be no observation, no designation, no extension, no field, no energy transmission, no light, no information, no creation and no expansion of awareness.
The Process:
A focal point emerges from an unknown field of virtual energy (unconscious). This phenomenon becomes evident as a center, a source, a unit and in essence, a position created for observation and reference based within the framework of an unchartered field.
Qualities that distinguish this source from its field of origin appear to be extensions of energy/light/information that qualify it as a field within a field; a holographic domain permeated with conditions that are shared and appear to be a part of a common source. These discharges of energy penetrate the same virtual field from which the source emerged, i.e. the same mysterious field that gave birth to the zero point/unit/source.
This process could also be described as a quest, an exploration, an inquiry into self through a series of holographic representations that constitute the virtual field of its very origination, i.e. projections patterned around a focal point of being-ness. These experiences are made apparent to the observer by taking relative “form” in the design process, which in reference to humanity, poses as a particular reality in 3D spacetime.
Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rackets, scripts, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifest as fear and pain. De-structuring transformative processes can dissolve them into an expanded awareness of the Whole. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned awareness, the ground state of the nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. The Universal Solvent dissolves the problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns, and this free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. Re-creational ego death provides for periodic destruction of outmoded systems and implies the value in recycling consciousness through death-rebirth experience.
The Universal Solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water--the transmutational water of life-aqua permanens. It is also the panacea, elixir vitae, tincture, or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, acting like a soothing balm. This divine water signifies a return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and for. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary and Gaian Consciousness. It is a rebirth of ancient, ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology and the flow of relationships.
Anima is the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours. She is the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness. Mystic ecstasy, or the (non-drug induced) psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding.
It dissolves the identification with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad identifications, structures, and patterns or to rest in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with deep consciousnesss.
There are seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism, as outlined by Edinger in Anatomy of the Psyche: 1) return to the womb or primal state; 20 dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; 3) containment of the a lesser thing by a greater; 4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; 5) purification ordeal; 6) solution of problems; and 7) melting or softening process.
The ego's confrontation with the unconscious brings about solutio. The alchemists Paracelsus said, "He who enters the Kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. They dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration. This spiritualizing instinct is a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine.
Experiential therapy typically recycles, recapitulates or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness.
That information which is most vital to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual unconsciousness, repeating the basic issues in yet another creative way. Stan Grof has catalogued an extensive taxonomy of these states in The Adventure of Self-Discovery. Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both the personal and universal levels.
The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation--the prima materia--of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace. The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness-expanding -- an automatic manifestation of imagination.
The panoply of ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos. There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it. The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as tasting music, seeing sound, etc.
Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced. Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-sturcturing of the primal self image. We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated into the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny. It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form. So, Jung called it an opus contra naturam, a work against nature.
But chaos theory shows it is actually quite organic, natural and instinctual to de-stratify and de-structure each level of organization when diving deep inside toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state. This is the amniotic bliss of the Void, the Cosmic Womb.
Albert Einstein, 1972
Hillman and Jung describe complementary domains of contemplative spirit and enlivened imagination of soul or psyche available for exploration and guidance. But the call of Spirit may not make us wise about Psyche and its complex phenomena of archetypes, dreams, drives, and complexes, by which spirit is interpenetrated and which drive the recognition of spirit.
Hillman favored the psychological realm of psyche even though he had his own kundalini experiences and other spiritual insights and experience. He contrasted psyche with the constructions of theological, metaphysical, and hierarchical concepts of faith-based spirit. He used deconstruction as a tool to break open underlying structure and fantasies in ideas and concepts but did not study or follow the postmodern school, per se.
He followed Jung's lead recognizing awakening through alchemy, divination, and relational engagement with archetypal autonomy of the transpersonal or transhuman experience of self, other, and world.
"It is not the literal return to alchemy that is necessary but a restoration of the alchemical mode of imagining. For in that mode we restore matter to our speech - and that is our aim: the restoration of imaginative matter, not of literal alchemy."--James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology
We conclude Hillman considered ascensionistic routes and new agey or theosophical notions to be supported by personal and collective psychic fantasies taken literally, rather than metaphorically. In the worst cases, as a premature escapism from body and world as it is. Thus he prioritized soul, Anima Mundi, over spirit.
Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? We can abstract from the particular nature of existing things what distinguishes them from each other, and what can we know about them simply because they exist?
The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’
Soul provides a metaphorical language describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation. Transformation can be effected within the autonomous stream of imagery, through image processing via experiential therapy--change the imagery and you change the feelings.
Alchemy had one great prescription for the accomplishment of the Great Work: "Solve et Coagula." It sought to reduce or dissolve all to its primary, most fundamental essence and then embody that creative, holistic spirit. This is also the goal of transpersonal therapies--as of old, to turn the dross of life (lead) into "gold."
We repeat this process as modern alchemists when we seek the transformative medium which allows us to recognize our rigidities (lead) and facilitates our healing and expression of our full creative potential (gold). That medium is the ever-flowing river of our consciousness which can only be expressed through imagery.
Solutio
This liquid form of the Philosopher's Stone--Universal Solvent--has a twofold effect: it causes old forms to disappear and new regenerate forms to emerge. Through "creative regression," the generic form of ego death, consciousness recycles by recursively bending back upon itself. The direction is a recapitulation of, a re-experiencing of sequences from earlier life, conception and birth, ancestral awareness, generic and physiological recognitions, molecular and atomic perceptions, and quantum consciousness.
The fractal nature of imagery encodes, enfolds, or compresses the informational content of the whole. Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Nonlinear systems change radically through their feedback: the plurality, fragmentation and disintegration (ego death), the surrender to the alchemical dissolution (solve) and the getting it together again (coagula).
Emergent consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Rather, it is the transformational process of non-manifest, undifferentiated consciousness emerging into manifestation. Random iterations or repetitions of imagery are more efficient than direct transformation replacement.
We find the attractor, and stay on it as we transform. The changes we make become the new self image. They key is the self referential repetition of the process over and over, such as reiterating dream images. This liquification symbolized by water possesses the power of resuscitation.
Liquification of consciousness implies a return to the womb for rebirth, baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. It lays bare that which is below. It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring or de-stratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state that brings dream-like information into waking life.
The essence of the transformative process is revealed in the fractal nature of imagery. In each dream journey we encounter a state of consciousness that is personal experience of primal chaos. The disorienting, dizzying surrender to the chaos is an experience of no-form, total confusion, and disorientation.
The personal, subjective responses within this state are visceral as well as sensory imagery. The closer one is to the chaos field the more undifferentiated the imagery becomes, dissolving into impressionistic colors, intuitive perceptions, vague awareness, even total blankness of being overwhelmed by sensations. Another perception is characterized as a spiral or vortex. It exerts a magnetic draw on the journeyer who is drawn into it.
Strange attractors condition and govern the transformative process through the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper often cause intense dizziness and disorientation. There may be feelings of entering a long dark tunnel, or flying apart in fragmentation or dismemberment becomes invisible because it is not-yet-visible.
Reaching the most primal state, one has the sense of deep transformative processes at work--a feeling of almost palpable relief, a sense of peacefulness and security which is the essence of the journey itself--timelessness, boundarylessness, tingling, effervescence--the ground state of being. Here we are simultaneously everything and nothing.
We are not separate from the universe: both science (holism, new physics, philosophy) and mystics (shamans, saints, and gurus) tell us so. And it can be experienced directly. The whole is reflected in the part and the part is seamlessly unified with the whole. Chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior, and senstive dependence on initial conditions.
We 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--self-organized emergent order. A vortex is remarkably stable to fluctuations and change, but under the right perturbations, it may either spontaneously disintegrate or evolve into a new form.
"The most deconstructed archetypal forms are vortexes, toroids, solitons, and singularities. The most fundamental archetype of process is the Field. The quantum vacuum is a dynamic massless scalar field. Scalars are just active information; a hologram is pure information. Entanglement is a property of nonlocal quantum information exchange. The central spiral vortex crossover point (all adjoining toroidal fractal involved fields) is what physicists call a "twistor" or a "wormhole"
Extensions, i.e. projections, emerge from a common source. They interface, entangle, and create a series of standing waves appearing as patterns made apparent within certain pre-conceived constraints. Visceral intentions are afforded the opportunity and potential to materialize within self-construed fields of virtual energy made accountable only to the observer, i.e. the original source. Not all “events” are tangible or recognizable in 3D space/time. Without a source there can be no observation, no designation, no extension, no field, no energy transmission, no light, no information, no creation and no expansion of awareness.
The Process:
A focal point emerges from an unknown field of virtual energy (unconscious). This phenomenon becomes evident as a center, a source, a unit and in essence, a position created for observation and reference based within the framework of an unchartered field.
Qualities that distinguish this source from its field of origin appear to be extensions of energy/light/information that qualify it as a field within a field; a holographic domain permeated with conditions that are shared and appear to be a part of a common source. These discharges of energy penetrate the same virtual field from which the source emerged, i.e. the same mysterious field that gave birth to the zero point/unit/source.
This process could also be described as a quest, an exploration, an inquiry into self through a series of holographic representations that constitute the virtual field of its very origination, i.e. projections patterned around a focal point of being-ness. These experiences are made apparent to the observer by taking relative “form” in the design process, which in reference to humanity, poses as a particular reality in 3D spacetime.
Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow. They include roles, game patterns, defense strategies, rackets, scripts, interpretations, complexes, "old" myths and "frozen" energy surrounding traumas which manifest as fear and pain. De-structuring transformative processes can dissolve them into an expanded awareness of the Whole. As consciousness explores and expands, ego dissolves.
Pure consciousness, the fundamental luminosity, is the ground state of unborn form. The generic purpose of ego death is to liberate our embodied being. When all forms finally dissolve into unconditioned awareness, the ground state of the nature Mind is revealed as the mystic Void, the womb of creation. The Universal Solvent dissolves the problems, heals, allows life to flow in new, creative patterns, and this free-flowing energy is capable of self-organization. Re-creational ego death provides for periodic destruction of outmoded systems and implies the value in recycling consciousness through death-rebirth experience.
The Universal Solvent is not ordinary water, but "philosophical" water--the transmutational water of life-aqua permanens. It is also the panacea, elixir vitae, tincture, or universal medicine. To periodically dip into these healing waters has a tonic, rejuvenating effect which pervades all aspects of being, acting like a soothing balm. This divine water signifies a return of The Feminine, a reflective consciousness with inner awareness and archetypal spiritual perceptions.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and for. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary and Gaian Consciousness. It is a rebirth of ancient, ecstatic, communal consciousness. It is the psychobiological basis of deep ecology and the flow of relationships.
Anima is the projector of psyche. We are contained within Her fantasy, not She within ours. She is the fluid, mobile basis of consciousness. Mystic ecstasy, or the (non-drug induced) psychedelic state is mind-manifesting, consciousness expanding.
It dissolves the identification with our histories, bodies, emotions, thoughts, and even beliefs. We are free to explore myriad identifications, structures, and patterns or to rest in that unborn, unconditioned, unmodified healing state. We imbibe the life-giving qualities of this "water" through mind-expanding experiential contact with deep consciousnesss.
There are seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism, as outlined by Edinger in Anatomy of the Psyche: 1) return to the womb or primal state; 20 dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; 3) containment of the a lesser thing by a greater; 4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; 5) purification ordeal; 6) solution of problems; and 7) melting or softening process.
The ego's confrontation with the unconscious brings about solutio. The alchemists Paracelsus said, "He who enters the Kingdom of God must first enter his mother and die." That death-like silence is also our mother, the virgin womb of the imagination. They dynamics of "creative regression" are common to mystical experience, psychedelic exploration, and therapeutic consciousness journeys. All lead to immersion in the flow of the stream of consciousness.
Creative regression is a generic form of the myth of the eternal return, chronic recurrence, reiteration. This spiritualizing instinct is a recursive "bending back" of instinct toward that which is primordial and divine.
Experiential therapy typically recycles, recapitulates or reiterates cascades of impressionistic transformations spanning the entire spectrum of archetypal experiences--morphological transformations. These include but are not limited to childhood, birth, embryonic development, ancestral, mythic, genetic, evolutionary, universal, and quantum consciousness.
That information which is most vital to the whole self emerges in the stream of consciousness as virtual unconsciousness, repeating the basic issues in yet another creative way. Stan Grof has catalogued an extensive taxonomy of these states in The Adventure of Self-Discovery. Such experiences of cosmic consciousness constitute a "return to the Mother," the blissful fusion of primal union, at both the personal and universal levels.
The imagery is fundamental or primal, appearing as a dance of energy, matter, and consciousness--the body-ego's conscious experience. These images are close to the stuff of our creation--the prima materia--of our existence. We may experience it as free-floating: a paradox of chaos and a deep-felt sense of flowing and peace. The imagery here is psychedelic -- consciousness-expanding -- an automatic manifestation of imagination.
The panoply of ceaseless transformation of energy may overwhelm the senses, leading to a sense of total chaos. There is nothing to do but let go, surrender to it, merge with it, flow with it. The dancing energy waves and patterns are perceived as deep whorls, spinning spirals, black holes, infinite voids, gray clouds of nothingness. There is melding of the senses -- synesthesia -- such as tasting music, seeing sound, etc.
Simple throbbing and other extremely primitive sensations may be experienced. Experience of this state produces a new acceptance of the original conditions of conception, and re-sturcturing of the primal self image. We go into the primal chaos to begin the process of reformation from our pre-structural beginning. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated into the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source.
The direction of this dynamic process is recursive, bending back through deep time, ontology, and phylogeny. It echoes the semantic roots of the words religion and yoga, which imply a "linking backward" in the bond between gods and man, a craving for ecstasy, and transcendence of the limitations of physical form. So, Jung called it an opus contra naturam, a work against nature.
But chaos theory shows it is actually quite organic, natural and instinctual to de-stratify and de-structure each level of organization when diving deep inside toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state. This is the amniotic bliss of the Void, the Cosmic Womb.
Zdzisław Beksiński
Enter the Void
The void for Hillman is transparency, vision in transparency. So the knowledge of the psyche, freeing its images from the barriers dictated by cultural stereotypes and the dominion of the Herculean ego becomes seeing the plots of our psychic inclinations in transparency, allowing them to be consumed in their own manifestation.
The experience of the void thus becomes what everyone, Jungians, Taoists, Zen and archetypists, are looking for: the creative, the creatio continues, that last condition where the structure falls and a bright awareness remains.
Rather than transcending the imagination to resolve itself into pure spirituality, Hillman would have chosen to remain in the middle world, in the pure psychic, rectifying its contents following the inspiring principles of a certain Persian philosophy. Attention to the psychic, almost a form of devotion, responds to an aesthetic need that in my opinion Hillman believed to be peculiar to our culture and that makes Archetypal Psychology artistic: the psyche sublimates itself in pathos and transcendence is achieved in giving a shape to suffering.
Hillman's work sought to rediscover the inspirations offered by the Orient in the cultural horizon closest to us, giving new reality to the Greek world and its influences spread up to Renaissance thought. Its originality lies in the fact that it set the discourse within the problems formulated by contemporary clinical psychology thus giving a new concept of soul salvation and therapy distinct from materialistic and religious approaches. A typical intermediate vision and more similar to the way of knowing Eastern thought than to modern Western thought.
Riccardo Brignoli
The void for Hillman is transparency, vision in transparency. So the knowledge of the psyche, freeing its images from the barriers dictated by cultural stereotypes and the dominion of the Herculean ego becomes seeing the plots of our psychic inclinations in transparency, allowing them to be consumed in their own manifestation.
The experience of the void thus becomes what everyone, Jungians, Taoists, Zen and archetypists, are looking for: the creative, the creatio continues, that last condition where the structure falls and a bright awareness remains.
Rather than transcending the imagination to resolve itself into pure spirituality, Hillman would have chosen to remain in the middle world, in the pure psychic, rectifying its contents following the inspiring principles of a certain Persian philosophy. Attention to the psychic, almost a form of devotion, responds to an aesthetic need that in my opinion Hillman believed to be peculiar to our culture and that makes Archetypal Psychology artistic: the psyche sublimates itself in pathos and transcendence is achieved in giving a shape to suffering.
Hillman's work sought to rediscover the inspirations offered by the Orient in the cultural horizon closest to us, giving new reality to the Greek world and its influences spread up to Renaissance thought. Its originality lies in the fact that it set the discourse within the problems formulated by contemporary clinical psychology thus giving a new concept of soul salvation and therapy distinct from materialistic and religious approaches. A typical intermediate vision and more similar to the way of knowing Eastern thought than to modern Western thought.
Riccardo Brignoli
ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
Primacy of the Psyche
"This one supreme God's transcendence means there are no gods in the doorways as in old Time, no gods in the gardens, in the cupboards of houses. There are no audible presences of the god: the owl's hoot (which is Athene), the blasts of north wind (which is Poseidon), in the sudden flame of erotic passion (which is Eros's arrow striking flesh). So evidently present in the animation of life where life is lived in myths, these gods do not need belief."
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
"The way we imagine our lives is the way
we are going to go on living our lives." --James Hillman
"It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation." James Hillman
Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn how to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels. Hillman, Healing Fiction
"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.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
Hillman abandons metanarratives of wholeness, yet endorses others, like the world soul. He calls himself a bricoleur, aligning with the notion of the soul as a process by which life gains beauty in difference rather than with the Jungian notion of the Self as an integrative process of
wholeness. Hermes or Dionysos consciousness becomes our guide, rather than the Self.
Hillman says, it may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. The gods return to us as archetypes. This may be a move beyond the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious.
This can be backed up by Hillman's soul-making approach that a singular interpretation of a dream stops the process cold, in a perhaps erroneous, if resonant idea of what it means. For Hillman, dreams are underworldly (from the viewpoint of death/the dead) commentaries on or critiques of our waking life. We don't need to determine how our dreams help us achieve our goals, as much as discover what the dream-self thinks of those goals.
Hillman refuses to make meaning of dreams, preferring to follow the uncertainty. There is no attempt at a cure or even enrichment. In genealogy the mythic root informs us about human behavior. This happens naturally, unconsciously and doesn't need to be driven by a therapeutic or self-development agenda. It's not about the past, present, or future but about the soul-world. In the Red Book, Jung says, "Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language."
Hillman locates dreams in the mysterious and hidden House of Hades (Pluto), a journey through the Underworld much like Orpheus. He deals with the dream in relation to the soul and death. He considers them messengers of the Underworld and of soul that first dissolve and then transform us. There is inherent multiplicity of perspectives and meaning in the images themselves, rather than a single truth. It is the soul that takes on meaning, rather than an image that reveals meaning to the ego or narrative. The dream remains alive.
We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present.
"We understand this pathologized language to be intentionally not speaking of human perfection, or even about the complete human being carrying his wounds and his cross; rather the psyche is telling us about its lacunae, its gaps and wasteland. And we believe that the tale told in these images is not even about us, men and women, not about human being mainly, but about itself, about psychic being; so that the deformation of human images with maimings, breaks, and suppurations decomposes our humanistic icon and our spiritual vision of the perfectibility of man, cracks all normative images, presenting instead a psychological fantasy of man to which neither naturalism nor spiritualism can apply. Both spiritual man and natural man are transformed by being deformed into psychological man." (James Hillman; Revisioning Psychology, p. 89)
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that 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."
Psyche is a loose unity of the multiplicity of psychophysical phenomena. It is the source space where we meet the god's deep space gaze where each unique thing reflects all the others. They perform their own particular drama under the same proscenium arch, repeating their mythic roles in the eternal cosmic drama. "The question is not what you look at but what you see," as Thoreau suggests.
Such stories in oral, literary, and cinematic forms have been with us from the earliest paleolithic campfires. Later, alchemists watched the transformations in their retorts or alembics like televisions noticing they matched their own. The only failure of imagination is the assumption that something can't be done.
Soul-making is attentiveness to imagination as we confront our personal demons, passions, and destiny. The Great Work is aspirational, and thus we entreat Anima Mundi, Sophia, Shekinah, or Psyche:
"Oh soror, assist me with the work, for it is not for the sake of "I" but for the stone, and though I am unworthy of the art, I am also foolish, and so I go again to the prima materia dark and laden in mist and of unknown origin. Help me to transform you unknown one to achieve the stone and to be transformed by it."
Imagination can be anything just beginning, an inception, the establishment or starting point of any activity. Synonyms: foundation, founding, start, origin, formation, initiation, setting up, origination, inauguration, opening; beginning, starting point, outset; birth, dawn, genesis, rise; debut.
The stories work when we give them our hearts with emotional vibrancy and intellectual vigor. Our denial of an approach we never tried, or the path we haven't walked is based in ill-informed assumptions. The stories of our own existence unfold continuously before us.
We get a glimpse of who is pulling our strings behind the scenes, of mythology, and poetic intuition. In archetypal psychology, the gods not the ego take precedence when habitual consciousness collapses into openness to possibility. Creativity is a basic instinct like hunger and sex.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman suggests, "it is not about my detection, but of the daimon's; it is not my destiny that cares about the Gods, but the way I take care of the psychic people entrusted to my assistance during my life. It's not life that matters, but the soul and the way life is used to take care of the soul." (PP. 297-298)
This journey doesn't mean leaving for anywhere, but giving each key its own validity as transitional phases of the life cycle. They are capable of many dramatic configurations, demonstrating the inner meaning of cosmos and our instinctual life or primary awareness.
The nature of entanglement is that cause and effect happen at the same time. Soul is an active intelligence because myth leads to practical moves. Entanglement is revealed in the god's rather leaky, promiscuous, incestuous natures. They violate each other and our boundaries, interbreeding and shifting shapes, merging, converging, and influencing the fluid phenomenal world from the all-pervasive boundlessness of the unconscious.
Soul is made through suffering the process and by taking up myth as a poetic perspective – a dramatic complexity of multiple metaphorical and symbolic dimensions of experience. The narration is one of life’s possibilities, of our alternative selves as realizable potential, including discordant elements, into meaningful story.
James Hillman says, "It's only in the stories, our stories that the gods will still show." “… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios.” (Hillman, 1976, p. 22)
Like metaphor, soul is an ambiguous phenomena, an alembic of chaotic material which resolves into the aesthetics of transformation and mystery. If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit. Phenomenology itself is the unveiling of psyche, the fountain-head of our story, which helps us stay fluid.
We engage in uncovering the fateful aspects of the soul given to each of us, as revealed in our psychodramatics. "The soul returns by the same door as its exile" (Hillman 2010, 290) -- enter Stage Right of our own personal mystery play.
“Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation - in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.” (Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves)
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale. It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life — lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
Thus, Hillman concedes, “It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that 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.” (The Dream and the Underworld)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Mystery Play
In Healing Fiction, Hillman notes, “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions; it is a theater,” the “theatrical logic” of “the dreaming soul” and its “theatrical poetics.” Healing or catharsis comes as “freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play” of our particular life which overflows with a plurality of persons.
Hillman claimed, psyche's dramatic structure, nature and content can be "read as theater.”
Resolution comes through dramatic tension, the polyphonic, theatrical, and “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. Consciousness itself is multivalent, with a variety of actors invoking numerous gods through multiple masks. Hillman suggests Renaissance Neoplatonism provided a "theater of the mind," an imaginal world or vessel to contain and provide structure for the archetypal images in their souls [HRP 199].
This is a Romantic pastiche with an aesthetic approach, that is, non-rational and passionate. The interplay of graphics transforms the visual field. The creative center of the film should work on us slowly after grabbing us by the gut and intuition. We are provoked further by engaging with our responses to it and their immersive qualities -- imagination, memory, and experience.
Whether we see the gods as inside or outside makes very little difference to the notion of their existence. Wisdom, knowledge and self-knowledge was holy in the ancient world -- hearing the voices of the heavens. With a mythic sense, we discern what literal eyes cannot. Life feels its way along toward the larger system which emotionally nourishes it.
Archetypal images are the means by which we imagine and by which we 'see through' to the archetypal core of being. The archetypal approach restores the image as "that which gives psychic value to the world. Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary." 218-221 --Hillman, Archetypal Psychology
Images work for, through, and against us. The images are also voices. We allow the phenomena to speak by letting the multitude of voices speak -- a multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche. "...The very point of vulnerability is where the surrender takes place -- that is where the god enter. The god comes through the wound." (Marion Woodman (1993).“Conscious Femininity)
A poetic approach to psyche as “soul” forms an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious. Being on the way is a way of being within the multiplicity of psyche.
We can begin by watching ourselves, dramatically seeing through psyche's eyes the living presences of direct encounter with Mystery. it is looking THROUGH the mind rather than WITH or FROM the mind. Engagement with archetypal material as image is esoteric, initiatory, gnostic, revelatory, and numinous.
Images surround us, clamoring for attention, for us to attend to a moment that resonates or illuminates our experience. Thomas Moore plainly states, "the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry." Every artform and oracle partakes of this process. Psyche is rooted in imagination and heart when we tend and cultivate soulful lives.
′′ Healing is not due to the fact that you are whole, integrated and unitary, instead comes from a consciousness that breaks through dismemberment. ′′ Hillman, Essays on the Puer, p. 46
′′ What brings healing is an archetypical consciousness... and this notion of consciousness is definitely not based on the self... Maybe this is what Socrates meant by his last dark words about the sacrificial rooster due to Asclepius. Once the rooster has been sacrificed, the pride that every awakening announces the dawn of a new day, that's the instinct of tomorrow is crushed. Death, then, is cure and salvation, and no longer the last and most serious stage of the disease. Rooster singing at dawn also announces the resurrection of light. But the victory over sickness and the new day begins only when we lay on the altar the ambition of winning. The disease that the experience of death cures is the overkill of living... ′′
James Hillman, Blue Fire, pp. 70,107
At this point in our discussion, spirit and soul part company and the paths of spiritual discipline and psychological development diverge. This divergence is usually not understood, since the complexes of the psyche too easily volatize into the rarefactions of spiritual formulae.
Then we seek spiritual guidance for psychological tangles, confusing psychotherapy with yoga and the analyst with the master. Although spiritual disciplines may begin with personifications of the goal and may stress the importance of community and the master, these personifications must later be dissolved in experiences of higher abstraction and objectlessness. Persons and involvements are at best secondary.
The psyche, with its emotions, images and anthropomorphic attachments, is fundamentally a disturbance. Besides in spiritual disciplines even the community and the master are ultimately transpersonal abstractions. People are never as real as spirit. The vale of the world is transcended through retreat, meditation and prayer. The spirit calls one up and out; we shall overcome, transcending even the 'we'.
But psychological development stops in isolation; it seems unable to forego the context of other souls. Thus the psychologist delights in clinical fantasies, his cases, their families; his fascination with social and personal details reflects at the first and personal level his involvement with the opus......; --James Hillman
The Myth of Analysis
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
"The way we imagine our lives is the way
we are going to go on living our lives." --James Hillman
"It's very important for men to look downward, to the next generation." James Hillman
Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to learn how to know ourselves. We need history, for the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels. Hillman, Healing Fiction
"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.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
Hillman abandons metanarratives of wholeness, yet endorses others, like the world soul. He calls himself a bricoleur, aligning with the notion of the soul as a process by which life gains beauty in difference rather than with the Jungian notion of the Self as an integrative process of
wholeness. Hermes or Dionysos consciousness becomes our guide, rather than the Self.
Hillman says, it may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. The gods return to us as archetypes. This may be a move beyond the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious.
This can be backed up by Hillman's soul-making approach that a singular interpretation of a dream stops the process cold, in a perhaps erroneous, if resonant idea of what it means. For Hillman, dreams are underworldly (from the viewpoint of death/the dead) commentaries on or critiques of our waking life. We don't need to determine how our dreams help us achieve our goals, as much as discover what the dream-self thinks of those goals.
Hillman refuses to make meaning of dreams, preferring to follow the uncertainty. There is no attempt at a cure or even enrichment. In genealogy the mythic root informs us about human behavior. This happens naturally, unconsciously and doesn't need to be driven by a therapeutic or self-development agenda. It's not about the past, present, or future but about the soul-world. In the Red Book, Jung says, "Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language."
Hillman locates dreams in the mysterious and hidden House of Hades (Pluto), a journey through the Underworld much like Orpheus. He deals with the dream in relation to the soul and death. He considers them messengers of the Underworld and of soul that first dissolve and then transform us. There is inherent multiplicity of perspectives and meaning in the images themselves, rather than a single truth. It is the soul that takes on meaning, rather than an image that reveals meaning to the ego or narrative. The dream remains alive.
We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present.
"We understand this pathologized language to be intentionally not speaking of human perfection, or even about the complete human being carrying his wounds and his cross; rather the psyche is telling us about its lacunae, its gaps and wasteland. And we believe that the tale told in these images is not even about us, men and women, not about human being mainly, but about itself, about psychic being; so that the deformation of human images with maimings, breaks, and suppurations decomposes our humanistic icon and our spiritual vision of the perfectibility of man, cracks all normative images, presenting instead a psychological fantasy of man to which neither naturalism nor spiritualism can apply. Both spiritual man and natural man are transformed by being deformed into psychological man." (James Hillman; Revisioning Psychology, p. 89)
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that 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."
Psyche is a loose unity of the multiplicity of psychophysical phenomena. It is the source space where we meet the god's deep space gaze where each unique thing reflects all the others. They perform their own particular drama under the same proscenium arch, repeating their mythic roles in the eternal cosmic drama. "The question is not what you look at but what you see," as Thoreau suggests.
Such stories in oral, literary, and cinematic forms have been with us from the earliest paleolithic campfires. Later, alchemists watched the transformations in their retorts or alembics like televisions noticing they matched their own. The only failure of imagination is the assumption that something can't be done.
Soul-making is attentiveness to imagination as we confront our personal demons, passions, and destiny. The Great Work is aspirational, and thus we entreat Anima Mundi, Sophia, Shekinah, or Psyche:
"Oh soror, assist me with the work, for it is not for the sake of "I" but for the stone, and though I am unworthy of the art, I am also foolish, and so I go again to the prima materia dark and laden in mist and of unknown origin. Help me to transform you unknown one to achieve the stone and to be transformed by it."
Imagination can be anything just beginning, an inception, the establishment or starting point of any activity. Synonyms: foundation, founding, start, origin, formation, initiation, setting up, origination, inauguration, opening; beginning, starting point, outset; birth, dawn, genesis, rise; debut.
The stories work when we give them our hearts with emotional vibrancy and intellectual vigor. Our denial of an approach we never tried, or the path we haven't walked is based in ill-informed assumptions. The stories of our own existence unfold continuously before us.
We get a glimpse of who is pulling our strings behind the scenes, of mythology, and poetic intuition. In archetypal psychology, the gods not the ego take precedence when habitual consciousness collapses into openness to possibility. Creativity is a basic instinct like hunger and sex.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman suggests, "it is not about my detection, but of the daimon's; it is not my destiny that cares about the Gods, but the way I take care of the psychic people entrusted to my assistance during my life. It's not life that matters, but the soul and the way life is used to take care of the soul." (PP. 297-298)
This journey doesn't mean leaving for anywhere, but giving each key its own validity as transitional phases of the life cycle. They are capable of many dramatic configurations, demonstrating the inner meaning of cosmos and our instinctual life or primary awareness.
The nature of entanglement is that cause and effect happen at the same time. Soul is an active intelligence because myth leads to practical moves. Entanglement is revealed in the god's rather leaky, promiscuous, incestuous natures. They violate each other and our boundaries, interbreeding and shifting shapes, merging, converging, and influencing the fluid phenomenal world from the all-pervasive boundlessness of the unconscious.
Soul is made through suffering the process and by taking up myth as a poetic perspective – a dramatic complexity of multiple metaphorical and symbolic dimensions of experience. The narration is one of life’s possibilities, of our alternative selves as realizable potential, including discordant elements, into meaningful story.
James Hillman says, "It's only in the stories, our stories that the gods will still show." “… our life is less the resultants of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios.” (Hillman, 1976, p. 22)
Like metaphor, soul is an ambiguous phenomena, an alembic of chaotic material which resolves into the aesthetics of transformation and mystery. If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit. Phenomenology itself is the unveiling of psyche, the fountain-head of our story, which helps us stay fluid.
We engage in uncovering the fateful aspects of the soul given to each of us, as revealed in our psychodramatics. "The soul returns by the same door as its exile" (Hillman 2010, 290) -- enter Stage Right of our own personal mystery play.
“Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation - in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.” (Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves)
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale. It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life — lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
Thus, Hillman concedes, “It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that 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.” (The Dream and the Underworld)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Mystery Play
In Healing Fiction, Hillman notes, “The unconscious produces dramas, poetic fictions; it is a theater,” the “theatrical logic” of “the dreaming soul” and its “theatrical poetics.” Healing or catharsis comes as “freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered…never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play” of our particular life which overflows with a plurality of persons.
Hillman claimed, psyche's dramatic structure, nature and content can be "read as theater.”
Resolution comes through dramatic tension, the polyphonic, theatrical, and “Dionysian” hermeneutic of enactment, personae, movement, and flow. Consciousness itself is multivalent, with a variety of actors invoking numerous gods through multiple masks. Hillman suggests Renaissance Neoplatonism provided a "theater of the mind," an imaginal world or vessel to contain and provide structure for the archetypal images in their souls [HRP 199].
This is a Romantic pastiche with an aesthetic approach, that is, non-rational and passionate. The interplay of graphics transforms the visual field. The creative center of the film should work on us slowly after grabbing us by the gut and intuition. We are provoked further by engaging with our responses to it and their immersive qualities -- imagination, memory, and experience.
Whether we see the gods as inside or outside makes very little difference to the notion of their existence. Wisdom, knowledge and self-knowledge was holy in the ancient world -- hearing the voices of the heavens. With a mythic sense, we discern what literal eyes cannot. Life feels its way along toward the larger system which emotionally nourishes it.
Archetypal images are the means by which we imagine and by which we 'see through' to the archetypal core of being. The archetypal approach restores the image as "that which gives psychic value to the world. Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary." 218-221 --Hillman, Archetypal Psychology
Images work for, through, and against us. The images are also voices. We allow the phenomena to speak by letting the multitude of voices speak -- a multiple, or “polytheistic” approach to the psyche. "...The very point of vulnerability is where the surrender takes place -- that is where the god enter. The god comes through the wound." (Marion Woodman (1993).“Conscious Femininity)
A poetic approach to psyche as “soul” forms an inherently mystical, erotic, and transformational dimension of the unconscious. Being on the way is a way of being within the multiplicity of psyche.
We can begin by watching ourselves, dramatically seeing through psyche's eyes the living presences of direct encounter with Mystery. it is looking THROUGH the mind rather than WITH or FROM the mind. Engagement with archetypal material as image is esoteric, initiatory, gnostic, revelatory, and numinous.
Images surround us, clamoring for attention, for us to attend to a moment that resonates or illuminates our experience. Thomas Moore plainly states, "the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry." Every artform and oracle partakes of this process. Psyche is rooted in imagination and heart when we tend and cultivate soulful lives.
′′ Healing is not due to the fact that you are whole, integrated and unitary, instead comes from a consciousness that breaks through dismemberment. ′′ Hillman, Essays on the Puer, p. 46
′′ What brings healing is an archetypical consciousness... and this notion of consciousness is definitely not based on the self... Maybe this is what Socrates meant by his last dark words about the sacrificial rooster due to Asclepius. Once the rooster has been sacrificed, the pride that every awakening announces the dawn of a new day, that's the instinct of tomorrow is crushed. Death, then, is cure and salvation, and no longer the last and most serious stage of the disease. Rooster singing at dawn also announces the resurrection of light. But the victory over sickness and the new day begins only when we lay on the altar the ambition of winning. The disease that the experience of death cures is the overkill of living... ′′
James Hillman, Blue Fire, pp. 70,107
At this point in our discussion, spirit and soul part company and the paths of spiritual discipline and psychological development diverge. This divergence is usually not understood, since the complexes of the psyche too easily volatize into the rarefactions of spiritual formulae.
Then we seek spiritual guidance for psychological tangles, confusing psychotherapy with yoga and the analyst with the master. Although spiritual disciplines may begin with personifications of the goal and may stress the importance of community and the master, these personifications must later be dissolved in experiences of higher abstraction and objectlessness. Persons and involvements are at best secondary.
The psyche, with its emotions, images and anthropomorphic attachments, is fundamentally a disturbance. Besides in spiritual disciplines even the community and the master are ultimately transpersonal abstractions. People are never as real as spirit. The vale of the world is transcended through retreat, meditation and prayer. The spirit calls one up and out; we shall overcome, transcending even the 'we'.
But psychological development stops in isolation; it seems unable to forego the context of other souls. Thus the psychologist delights in clinical fantasies, his cases, their families; his fascination with social and personal details reflects at the first and personal level his involvement with the opus......; --James Hillman
The Myth of Analysis
From Revisioning Psychology by James Hillman
(p. 67-70)
Quote
An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit
Here we need to remember that the ways of the soul and those of the spirit only sometimes coincide and that they diverge most in regard to psychopathology. A main reason for my stress upon pathologizing is just to bring out the differences between soul and spirit, so that we end the widespread confusions between psychotherapy and spiritual disciplines. There is a difference between Yoga, transcendental meditation, religious contemplation and retreat, and even Zen, on the one hand, and the psychologizing of psychotherapy on the other. This difference is based upon a distinction between spirit and soul.
Today we have rather lost this difference that most cultures, even tribal ones, know and live in terms of. Our distinctions are Cartesian: between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition, and in others too, was the place of soul.
This world of imagination, passion, fantasy, and reflection is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm psyche has its own "logic psychology”which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things. Psychological pathologies also belong to this realm. Approaching them from either side, in terms of medical sickness or religion's suffering, sin, and salvation, misses the target of soul.
But the threefold division has collapsed into two, because soul has become identified with spirit. This happens because we are materialists, so that everything that is not physical and bodily is one undifferentiated cloud; or it happens because we are Christians. Already in the early vocabulary used by Paul, pneuma or spirit had begun to replace psyche or soul. The New Testament scarcely mentions soul phenomena such as dreams, but stresses spirit phenomena such as miracles, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and visions.
Philosophers have tried to keep the line between spirit and soul by keeping soul altogether out of their works or assigning it a lower place. Descartes confined soul to the pineal gland, a little enclave between the opposing powers of internal mind and external space. More recently, Santayana has put soul down in the realm of matter and considered it an anti metaphysical principle.
Collingwood equated soul with feeling and considered that psychology had no business invading the realm of thought and ideas. The spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.
Philosophy is therefore less helpful in showing the differences than is the language of the imagination. Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyche, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of "spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.
They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negative. "Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried. For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.
But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.
Rejoining Soul and Symptom
Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a transaction, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.
These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We can catch the unconscious only in pathological material.†And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salome wrote: ". . . he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . . ."
*
Because our tradition has systematically turned against soul, we are each unaware of the distinctions between soul and spirit-therefore confusing psychotherapy with spiritual discipline, obfuscating where they conflate and where they differ. The traditional denial of soul continues within the attitudes of each of us, whether Christian or not, for we are each unconsciously affected by our cultures traditions, the unconscious aspect of our collective life. Ever since Tertullian declared that the soul(anima) is naturally Christian, there has been a latent Christianity, and antisoul spirituality, in our Western soul. This has led eventually to a psychological disorientation, and we have had to turn to the Orient. We place, displace, or project onto the Orient our Occidental disorientation. And my task in this lecture is to do what I can for soul. Part of ths task, because it is ritualistically appropriate, is th point out C. G. Jung's part in prying loose the dead fingers of those dignitaries in old Turkey, both by restoring the soul as a primary experience and a field of work and by showing us ways-particularly through images-or realizing that soul.
From the essay Peak and Vales, The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline found in Puer Papers, p. 55
QUOTE --
"...with suicide fantasies we must ask them precisely what world is coming to its end. An answer comes hard because we take the fantasies so literally that we can barely sit with them for more than a moment. Anesthesia: Robert J. Lifton calls it “psychic numbing.” And we are drugged not only by the industry of distillers, dope runners, pharmaceutical firms, and pill-prescribing physicians. We are anesthetized as well by the subjectivism of psychotherapy, as if the end-of-the-world were an “inner problem.” The very literalism of the catastrophe fantasies hint at what world is coming to an end. They fulfill the Christian apocalyptic vision, and they fulfill all too literally the doctrine of a world already declared dead by the Western tradition, a world over whose autopsy the Western, Northern mind has been presiding since Newton and Descartes. Can we now see what Blake always knew: the apocalypse that kills the soul of the world is not at the end of time, not coming, but apocalypse now; and Newton and Locke, Descartes and Kant are its Horsemen. The fantasies of the literal end of the world announce, however, the end of this literalist world, the dead, objective world. As such, the catastrophe fantasies also reflect an iconoclastic process of the psyche that would smash the soulless mechanical idol of the world we have worshiped ever since Christ said his Kingdom is not of this world and left it to the legions of Caesar, so that the aesthetic, imaginative, polytheistic animation of the material world was cursed into demonism and heresy, while psychology allowed psyche only to self-reflective confessional egos, inflating them to titanic monstrosity. That vast insensate edifice–the doctrine of a soulless world–now streaked with acid rain and stained by graffiti”
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World by James Hillman
(p. 67-70)
Quote
An Excursion on Differences Between Soul and Spirit
Here we need to remember that the ways of the soul and those of the spirit only sometimes coincide and that they diverge most in regard to psychopathology. A main reason for my stress upon pathologizing is just to bring out the differences between soul and spirit, so that we end the widespread confusions between psychotherapy and spiritual disciplines. There is a difference between Yoga, transcendental meditation, religious contemplation and retreat, and even Zen, on the one hand, and the psychologizing of psychotherapy on the other. This difference is based upon a distinction between spirit and soul.
Today we have rather lost this difference that most cultures, even tribal ones, know and live in terms of. Our distinctions are Cartesian: between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition, and in others too, was the place of soul.
This world of imagination, passion, fantasy, and reflection is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm psyche has its own "logic psychology”which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things. Psychological pathologies also belong to this realm. Approaching them from either side, in terms of medical sickness or religion's suffering, sin, and salvation, misses the target of soul.
But the threefold division has collapsed into two, because soul has become identified with spirit. This happens because we are materialists, so that everything that is not physical and bodily is one undifferentiated cloud; or it happens because we are Christians. Already in the early vocabulary used by Paul, pneuma or spirit had begun to replace psyche or soul. The New Testament scarcely mentions soul phenomena such as dreams, but stresses spirit phenomena such as miracles, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and visions.
Philosophers have tried to keep the line between spirit and soul by keeping soul altogether out of their works or assigning it a lower place. Descartes confined soul to the pineal gland, a little enclave between the opposing powers of internal mind and external space. More recently, Santayana has put soul down in the realm of matter and considered it an anti metaphysical principle.
Collingwood equated soul with feeling and considered that psychology had no business invading the realm of thought and ideas. The spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.
Philosophy is therefore less helpful in showing the differences than is the language of the imagination. Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyche, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."
The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of "spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.
They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negative. "Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried. For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.
But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.
Rejoining Soul and Symptom
Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a transaction, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.
These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We can catch the unconscious only in pathological material.†And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salome wrote: ". . . he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . . ."
*
Because our tradition has systematically turned against soul, we are each unaware of the distinctions between soul and spirit-therefore confusing psychotherapy with spiritual discipline, obfuscating where they conflate and where they differ. The traditional denial of soul continues within the attitudes of each of us, whether Christian or not, for we are each unconsciously affected by our cultures traditions, the unconscious aspect of our collective life. Ever since Tertullian declared that the soul(anima) is naturally Christian, there has been a latent Christianity, and antisoul spirituality, in our Western soul. This has led eventually to a psychological disorientation, and we have had to turn to the Orient. We place, displace, or project onto the Orient our Occidental disorientation. And my task in this lecture is to do what I can for soul. Part of ths task, because it is ritualistically appropriate, is th point out C. G. Jung's part in prying loose the dead fingers of those dignitaries in old Turkey, both by restoring the soul as a primary experience and a field of work and by showing us ways-particularly through images-or realizing that soul.
From the essay Peak and Vales, The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline found in Puer Papers, p. 55
QUOTE --
"...with suicide fantasies we must ask them precisely what world is coming to its end. An answer comes hard because we take the fantasies so literally that we can barely sit with them for more than a moment. Anesthesia: Robert J. Lifton calls it “psychic numbing.” And we are drugged not only by the industry of distillers, dope runners, pharmaceutical firms, and pill-prescribing physicians. We are anesthetized as well by the subjectivism of psychotherapy, as if the end-of-the-world were an “inner problem.” The very literalism of the catastrophe fantasies hint at what world is coming to an end. They fulfill the Christian apocalyptic vision, and they fulfill all too literally the doctrine of a world already declared dead by the Western tradition, a world over whose autopsy the Western, Northern mind has been presiding since Newton and Descartes. Can we now see what Blake always knew: the apocalypse that kills the soul of the world is not at the end of time, not coming, but apocalypse now; and Newton and Locke, Descartes and Kant are its Horsemen. The fantasies of the literal end of the world announce, however, the end of this literalist world, the dead, objective world. As such, the catastrophe fantasies also reflect an iconoclastic process of the psyche that would smash the soulless mechanical idol of the world we have worshiped ever since Christ said his Kingdom is not of this world and left it to the legions of Caesar, so that the aesthetic, imaginative, polytheistic animation of the material world was cursed into demonism and heresy, while psychology allowed psyche only to self-reflective confessional egos, inflating them to titanic monstrosity. That vast insensate edifice–the doctrine of a soulless world–now streaked with acid rain and stained by graffiti”
The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World by James Hillman
“Acorn“, Io Miller, 2017
In James Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ of soul we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life’s work when fully actualized. Our calling in life is inborn and our mission in life is to realize its imperatives. The "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. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world.
Klages says "No man of depth can comprehend himself conceptually. Life is mystical. Life can never be frozen into rigid concepts".
"When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed.". --James Hillman
Four pathological patterns of attachment–Compulsive Self-Reliance, Compulsive Care Giving, Compulsive Care Seeking, and Angry Withdrawal
Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/pedi.1988.2.2.153
In James Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ of soul we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life’s work when fully actualized. Our calling in life is inborn and our mission in life is to realize its imperatives. The "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. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world.
Klages says "No man of depth can comprehend himself conceptually. Life is mystical. Life can never be frozen into rigid concepts".
"When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed.". --James Hillman
Four pathological patterns of attachment–Compulsive Self-Reliance, Compulsive Care Giving, Compulsive Care Seeking, and Angry Withdrawal
Read More: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/pedi.1988.2.2.153
Archetypal psychology has an entirely different approach and orientation than the tired individuation heroic striving of Jung's analytical psychology. Aesthetic rather than developmental which both east and west share in their metaphysics. Hillman offers a mythic approach that is rooted in love of the soul and in giving soul love, a genuine sensitivity to the soul.
Psychic Realism is a perspective on interpretive metapsychology.
Transformation renews natural philosophy.
Psychic Realism is a perspective on interpretive metapsychology.
Transformation renews natural philosophy.
"Vocation is a very inflating spiritual idea. One to one. God to me. Notice how our idea of Renaissance man is a polytheistic fantasy. He does all kinds of things. But vocation addresses the ego and makes it a specialist-then you "believe in yourself"-and that's another trap of that devil, belief-because who is believing in whom? I am believing in myself-all ego, and then I have a mission. Now that fantasy of the farm is polytheist, and who is to say what is THE important thing of a farm: the man who buys eggs from me would like more eggs and sees the time I spend chopping wood a waste. "Have a secretary do it. You have the best eggs around. Produce more, and even better ones." Specialization: the best egg man around; and that's monotheism and mission and early death!" -- James Hillman