To Hillman, such conformity is tantamount to giving up one's freedom to imagine. He writes: "If we are willing to accept internal controls upon the imagination, we will have succumbed already in soul to the same authoritarianism that would dominate the body politic."3 Hillman insists that our relations to images must be one that gives them full credit; the imaginal, the realm of the soul as we saw earlier, "does not mean [the] literal re-institution of idolatry but rather restoring the image in our sight--not so much in what we see but in the way we see it."4 Thus we must give up our egocentricity, "that capital I appearing in the monotheism of consciousness (Jung), in monotheistic science and metaphysics, and in the root of all: the monotheism of Christian humanism with its tolerance for but one historical, unique divine personification."5 To Hillman we must "dethrone the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity....It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of self."6 By doing this we may find ourselves no longer alone in our subjectivity. Furthermore, the notion of self as separate and purely rational will no longer provide the only model upon which our houses are built.
Hillman's approach to the imagination and fantasy has been informed by such thinkers as Edward Casey and Henri Corbin. From Casey, Hillman gains a phenomenology of the imagination and from Corbin Hillman adopts the notion of the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. This will then be followed by a discussion of an aesthetic paradigm that Hillman suggests psychology adopt--i.e., aesthetics grossly understood as the response of the heart to what is presented to it. For Hillman, the heart, as the seat of the soul, thinks aesthetically; it is the heart that allows us to feel the world and interact in a meaningful way. I follow with a discussion of the role of community and a sense of meaningful connection to the anima mundi, the Neo-platonic idea of the world soul.
Hillman's appreciation of the role of imagination in the project of re-articulating selfhood indicates an emerging understanding of subjectivity that is deeper and richer than that provided by Enlightenment metaphors of mechanism and rationalism. For Hillman, the imagination is the primary activity of the soul. Starting with the Jungian notion that "image is psyche,"7 Hillman writes that "the soul is constituted of images, [and] that the soul is primarily an imagining activity...."8 From this perspective, soul is understood to be the source of images--dream, fantasy, and the poetic response. Furthermore, image-making is thought to be a self-generating activity of the soul. For Hillman, the imagination and image are all; there is nothing to which they can be reduced.
Although images are considered the primary data of the soul, they are not necessarily visual--i.e., they need neither be visually seen nor need they be heard as in the case of a poetic passage. To Hillman "such notions of "visibility" tend to literalize images as distinct events to be presented to the senses."9 For this reason Hillman emphasizes that images are not something that a persons sees, but rather a perspective, the way one sees. Consequently, an image experienced through the imagining perspective "can only be perceived by an act of imagining."10
That an image can only be perceived by an act of imagining leads Hillman to suggest that images are independent of the subjective imagination which perceives them. He suggests that images are much more than limited to subjectivity, they are shared at least insofar as they do enter the public sphere. This is to say that like dream images, which come and go as they will, the imaginal, the field of images are "undetermined by personal psychodynamics."11 It appears that Hillman suggests that there is more to our imagination that the mere subjective exercise of one's personal imaginative capabilities. Because Hillman indicates that soul is structured by an expanded idea of imagination much like poetic language, dreams, and images are, he claims that "one is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul's native dominants of fantasy structures."12 This is to say that such "fantasy structures dominate our subjective perspectives and organize them into `stances'."13 What emerges in this picture of the imagination as more than the merely subjective is the idea that imagination is somehow shared, it works interactively in both subjective and objective experience.
A further characteristic of imagination is expressed by the idea that images provide 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."14 Their value, he concludes, lies in their "theophanic natures" and in their "virtuality or potentiality which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits."15 What does this mean? Hillman suggests that the value found in images is in regard to how they present the gods, to us not so much as concrete appearances but rather in what the deities represent to us as metaphors constructed by human imagination. Hence, a field of images belonging to a specific cultural situation represents a way of being in which certain images or archetypes help to not only structure the soul but also to model social reality. In one sense we might conclude that Hillman is saying images can be seen as being involved in the social construction of self. But, he insists that some images are `impersonal' and `transcendent,' which suggests that they structure the soul but the soul cannot structure such `impersonal' and `transcendent' images. I am moved to question, however, that if it is true that Western society's patterns of thought are so influenced by Greek thought as Hillman and Miller claim, could we not argue that the ideals, the images, the values implied by our Grecian intellectual and religious heritage could function as such `impersonal' and `transcendent' forces? Could it not be that these images are impersonal and transcendent merely because they have been part of a particular culture for so long? Does Hillman mean to say that such images are impersonal and transcendent because they are a priori to the human condition?
These questions are important because Hillman never makes explicit what he means when he declares images to be timeless and transcendent. In fact, he neatly avoids Jung's problematic assertions that archetypes are `instinctual'16 by emphasizing the phenomenal image over speculation about a "non-presented archetype per se."17 Rather than concerning himself with genetics, Hillman concentrates on how images "offer... an affective relationship" which demands a response --"moral, erotic, intellectual, aesthetic"--as well as their capacity to bear messages to those who experience and work with the images presented to them.18 There is nothing in this that does not suggest that Hillman's archetypal images are not constructed by human imagination at both the individual and the societal levels. In fact, an argument can be made (and probably should be made) from the perspective of archetypal psychology about how social and personal realities help construct `archetypal' images as much as how such images help to influence our perspective of the world.
Nonetheless, Hillman believes that images, like the gods and goddesses of archetypal psychology, are autonomous and operate according to their own will and their own structures. By recognizing that images operate on their own accord, with their own rhythm, in their own contexts, we may come to understand that "the mind is in the imagination rather than the imagination in the mind."19 This assertion that the mind is in the imagination, rather than the imagination in the mind, is profound albeit ambiguous. It requires us to understand the concept of mind and the various ways that mind is structured by myths and philosophies, for instance, as something that is not only rooted but also located in the imagination. We need to learn to see the mind as something that is constructed by the images presented to us through our heartfelt connection to Hillman's anima mundi. Yet we are left with the conundrum raised by the philosophical difficulties that are brought out by the differentiation of the rational and the imagination. Certain strands of Western philosophy, rationalism in particular, have for the last few hundred years been uncomfortable with giving the imaginative capacity the elevated respect that has been given to the rational capacity of human cognition.
A survey of psychological and philosophical approaches to the imagination can help to illustrate this point. Edward Casey, in Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, notes that in the West there has been a tendency not to take the imagination seriously.20 This is a result of the nebulous character of the imagination which "renders it resistant to conceptual specification of a precise sort."21 This is to say that an imagined object does not remain present as a perceived object would. Therefore, we are required to constantly re-imagine the imaginal object in order to keep it within our mental gaze.22
Casey also points out that there is a great deal of confusion about what we mean when we use the word imagination. Imagination sometimes refers to perceptual illusions, "where we mistake one perceived object for another"; at other times it is used in reference to hallucinations--there is no perceived object to begin with yet nonetheless a hallucinated object is taken to be real; and, finally, imagination is used to refer to a fantasy or delusion of persecution.23 These attitudes towards the imagination all reflect the notion that there is something faulty involved in imaginative apprehension.
Casey also points out specific psychological approaches to imagination. First, there is the associationist approach. This approach has a basis in cognitive and behavioral psychology which excludes a distinction between imagination and other mental acts. All higher mental acts, including imagination, must obey the laws of association: contiguity and resemblance. That is, the imagination can only work through association with objects already apprehended and must represent things through some resemblance to the perceived object.24
A second psychological approach is Freud's. Although Casey claims that Freud in one sense distinguishes between imagination on the one hand and fantasy and hallucination on the other, Freudianism regards all such acts as wish fulfilment via the mechanisms of the primary process. Consequently, imagination, fantasy, and hallucination are grouped together as various ways of providing sublimated satisfactions for basic wishes. Furthermore, any autonomy given to imagination is secondary in nature--that is, it is structurally dependent upon the autonomy of the primary process. Hence there is no real way to distinguish between imagining and hallucination, for instance, in Freudian thought.25
A third approach, exemplified by developmental psychology and espoused by such individuals as Piaget, attempts to subsume imagination under the symbolizing powers of the mind. It becomes an aid to symbolizing which is regarded as a transitional stage in a child's development and as such is denigrated as a mental activity not necessary in later life. Developmental psychology, then, appears to be the least interested in the human capacity of imagination.26
Not content with a mere analysis of psychology's attitudes towards imagination, Casey also identifies two basic philosophical approaches: 1) confusion with allied mental acts--fantasy, memory, and hallucination--as well as with non-normal mental acts; and, 2) denial of its importance. Hence, Casey concludes that philosophical approaches see the imagination as 1) something that needs to be either subordinated or as an activity to be overcome; 2) as a mediator between perception and intellect which is even made necessary to the latter--the idea that the soul never thinks without an image; or, 3) as superordinate (as in German Romanticism) such that imagining is seen to be "primary creative capacity of the human mind--not only in art."27 Yet, as Casey cautions, such approaches as that represented by German Romanticism have always tended towards exhortation and enthusiasm rather than toward a "deepened understanding of the activity of imagining itself".28
After discussing the psychological and philosophical approaches to imagination, Casey comes to this conclusion: so long as the mind is understood as a "mere processor of perceptions or as a graduated series of successively higher functions, imagination will be denied a genuinely distinctive role of its own."29 "What is needed," he continues, "is an approach that respects essential, and not merely contingent, differences between mental acts and that attempts to account for each in its own right and without recourse to a preestablished hierarchy of acts."30 Therefore, we must remain open to the "multiplicity of the mental" while refusing any hierarchical structure, seeing, instead, "only a proliferation of unforeclosable possibilities."31 Imagination must be understood as non-derivative and as a "phenomenon to be evaluated on its own terms."32 As we can see, Casey advocates a method of investigating the imagination which dovetails nicely with Hillman's epistemological dictum: "stick to the image." Casey, in fact, claims that what is needed is a "scrupulous account of imagination [which] is the reporting of examples in an unmodified form and precisely as they present themselves to the imaginer."33
Robert Avens agrees with Casey regarding the philosophical approaches to imagination. In "Heidegger and Archetypal Psychology," Avens not only favourably compares Hillman with Heidegger, he also points out that the Enlightenment's representational theory of truth has led to "usurpation of all light and intelligibility by reason."34 Avens understands Western metaphysics as something that conceives imagination at best to be a handmaiden to reason. "What has been forgotten in this process," he writes, "is that neither reason (spirit) nor things (matter) can have their proper place in the scheme of reality without first being rooted in something (a thing-of-some-sort) that is common to both."35 This forgotten `something' is what Avens identifies as an "ontologically prior relation between the physical and the spiritual, thing and man [sic], i.e. the soul without which all these opposites are nothing more than artificial abstractions."36
Avens also points out that a more recent approach to the psyche has been to separate consciousness from the unconscious. This has resulted in the stigmatization of the imagination, fantasy, and dream as unconscious.37 Because Hillman attempts to deinstitutionalize the association of unconscious and non-rational and the imaginal, Avens understands Hillman, like Heidegger, to argue for the end of the tradition of reason as it is embedded in the West and a return to the pre-socratics. That is, Hillman is thought to ground personal life in the impersonal and the non-human as opposed to the personalistic and humanist biases of Modern psychology.38 Hence Avens notes that, for archetypal psychology, the unconscious is no longer a "container filled with `unknowable' archetypes but mainly a tool for deepening, interiorizing the psychic imagery."39 This is what I understand Hillman to mean when he refers to the archetypes as being eminently personalized as the gods and goddesses.
What Avens and Casey bring to the conversation is the consideration that we must learn to approach soul or self from a perspective that does not insist on hierarchizing consciousness and the unconscious, rational and imaginative thought, the noetic and the imaginal. This is something that Hillman is attempting to do when he positions the soul as the root metaphor for psychology. With soul as the basis of psychological theorization, we find it is possible to reassess the relationship between imagination and rationality. Soul, as we know, is considered by Hillman to encompass more than the rational and the non-rational. It is something connected to anima mundi through an affective relationship. Furthermore, Hillman's emphasis on a polytheistic model for psychology responds to Casey's call for a psychology that pays heed to the `multiplicity of the mental.'
Because archetypal psychology is freed from the need to strive to control and guide images, of the need to codify the psyche, its approach to the imagination and images is one that permits us to begin to deinstitutionalize self. Rather than continuing to be imprisoned in the materialistic imagination of Cartesian subjectivity, excessive Enlightenment rationalism, and Christian theology, archetypal psychology offers an alternative perspective that has a basis in Romantic thought. By avoiding the scientific, literalistic, and narrow focus of traditional understandings of the psyche's dynamics, archetypal psychology views the deep recesses of the soul as places from which the soul speaks about itself.
Furthermore, Hillman thinks that the Cartesian ego is a direct result of human imagination: it was originally created by Descartes' own imagination. For this reason, archetypal psychology is able to make the claim that whatever the soul imagines has as much a claim to legitimacy as does the heroic ego or that which it imagines. As Hillman puts it, "Archetypal psychology examines the judgments about the image imagistically, regarding them as its further specifications and as psychological statements not to be taken literally from a spiritual...purely noetic, vantage point detached from the context of the image judged."40 Hence, archetypal psychology "sticks to the image" because it is the primary datum of the soul.41 Moreover, we might conclude that because images and the imagination are no longer considered to be in the mind, we find that, as a product of human imagination, every image, every ideology, and every myth is potentially as valid as any other.
Archetypal psychology approaches the imagination as the basis of soul. For this reason it is never right to confront the soul and its images from a literal perspective. As we know, Hillman insists that any language that would speak to the soul must speak with the grammar of the soul: image, symbol, myth, and dream. Furthermore, because 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,"42 its use of the imagination as the starting place to investigate the psyche demands that we acknowledge that all ways of looking at the world are primarily imaginative in nature.
This is a perspective that allows us to look at Enlightenment and modern notions of subjectivity as things that have a basis in specific fantasies. This viewpoint is one that relativizes Enlightenment claims to authority in regard to defining self. Once we understand the Modern world view as having emerged from the imagination of specific persons in specific temporal and spatial contexts, we understand that its claims to an authoritative expression of self and cosmos are not necessarily more valid than any other. Furthermore, we also learn that it is acceptable to base our own understandings of self and cosmos in other fantasy systems, myths, and imaginations. As Hillman reminds us: "The most fecund approach to the study of the mind is thus through its highest imaginational responses where the images are most fully released and elaborated."43
According to Hillman, the basis of archetypal psychology's understanding of the imagination comes from Henri Corbin's notion of the mundus imaginalis. Corbin, considered the "second immediate father of archetypal psychology,"44 characterizes the mundus imaginalis as a distinct field of `imaginative realities' that requires methods and tools of investigation different from those of the empirical as well as the spiritual world. Hence the mundus imaginalis is theorized as a means of locating the archetypes, considered to be fundamental structures of the soul, which are "transcendent to the world of sense in their value if not their appearance."45 As noted, the value of images lies in their theophanic nature and in their potentiality "which is always ontologically more than actuality and its limits."46 Hence the mundus imaginalis provides a "cosmic grounding" when needed that is different from such bases as "biological instinct, eternal forms, numbers, linguistics and social transmission, biochemical reactions, genetic coding, etc."47
For Hillman, a consideration more important than an ontological location of archetypes appears in a "double move" made by Corbin: "(a) that the fundamental nature of the archetype is accessible to the imagination first and first presents itself as image, so that (b) the entire procedure of archetypal psychology as a method is imaginative."48 Hence archetypal psychology "must be rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning not logical" and its therapeutic aim being "neither social adaption nor personalistic individualizing but rather a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities."49 The aim of therapy, then, is the cultivation of the soul.
In this regard, the mundus imaginalis is considered to represent that state of mediation that is connected to visionary experiences. This is so because there are no direct sensory stimuli involved in the imaginal act, just are there are no direct sensory experiences involved in visionary events.50 Hillman refers to Corbin's comment that the imaginal field is one that requires "methods and perceptual facilities different from the spiritual world beyond it or the empirical world of usual sense perception and naive formulation."51 This is to say that, in following Corbin, Hillman argues that the way into the imagination requires something more than what is traditionally required by theology, philosophy, and empiricism--i.e., faith, logic, morals, or empirical sensations are not the desired means of apprehending the imaginal.
Even if there is a connection between the mundus imaginalis and visionary experiences, this is not to say that the imaginal is strictly mystical in nature. Andrew Samuels notes the imaginal also operates as a means of allowing communication between people because it plays a role in symbolizing reality.52 To Corbin, as Samuels informs us, the mundus imaginalis is a "`fully objective real world with equivalents for everything existing in the sensible world without being perceptible by the senses'."53 Consequently, Samuels concludes that the mundus imaginalis presupposes a "pre-existing environment for images that are produced relevantly and spontaneously. Images pertaining to one person crop up in the experience of another person because, on the imaginal level of reality, all images pertain to both."54 There are two conclusions we can draw from Samuels: one, that the imaginal field is a pre-extant space in which images operate inasmuch as Samuels finds the mundus imaginalis a "pre-existing environment" for images. This is to say that, the imaginal field acts as some sort of intermediary, it is the space which is already present when images are produced, it is the space where images emerge. Second, images and objects in the imaginal field are both personal and transpersonal. Such images and objects appear in an imaginal field that reaches past subjective, or internal, experience into objective, or external experience.
For Edward Casey, the content of imaginative experience is psychically real in the sense that it "encompasses and transcends both perceptual and self-dramatized realities."55 Thus, imagining posits "real being" in such a way as to surpass "the empirical existence characterizing the objects of natural science as well as the strictly subjective existence pertaining to those purely personal experiences that form the focus of so much psychological analysis."56 Hence, Casey argues that the content of our imaginative experiences is rooted "outside of human consciousness" whether we identify consciousness as ego or the Self. "Therefore, just at the point where personal consciousness has reached its physical zenith, psyche itself is surpassed."57 We surpass the understanding that imagination is primarily subjective: it is also transpersonal. Hence, the imaginal field is the space at which the personal encounters the transpersonal. Casey also allows for the conclusion that the imaginal is a space from which images present themselves to human apprehension, and that the imaginal operates as a intermediator between the personal and the transpersonal.
This notion of the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal as a space, is something that recalls Hillman's tripartite model of human agency. As we know, Hillman posits the soul, the seat of the imagination, as an intermediary between mind and body as well as between person and world. In this sense, the imaginal operates as a tertium between not only the personal unconscious and a person's consciousness, but also as a mediatrix between the personal and the impersonal, the individual and the world, the anima mundi. For Thomas Moore, this tripartite construction of the human being places soul "midway between understanding and unconsciousness."58 I understand this to suggest that the soul, or the imaginal, operates as that space that colors first the perception and then the cognition of the things we apprehend.
Casey notes that the notion of the imagination as a mediator "has been an ongoing and largely unchallenged assumption within Western epistemology since the Greeks."59 One consequence of not challenging this epistemological assumption, as Casey informs us, is that this intermediary characteristic most often has been a means of denigrating the efficacy of imagination.60 This state of affairs is the result of a certain style of theorizing about knowledge that restricts valid forms of cognition to the "survey of sensible particulars."61 Casey suggests, however, that if we enlarge this notion of cognition to include the possibility that imagination is also as valid as `sensible particulars,' then the imaginal will be granted "its own cognitive value, its own specific way of knowing."62
To Hillman, the soul is the via regia into the world. Imagination and feeling are the means by which we come to apprehend and connect ourselves with those objects, persons, images that surround us. Casey informs us that the notion of the mundus imaginalis as an intermediator represents an "intermediate world...teeming with transmuted substances, stylized sensuous forms, and legions of figures each with a proper place....It is a world no longer human--or at least not exclusively or primarily human. It is another world, with another kind of reality...."63 For Richard Avens, in comparison, Hillman's notion of the soul as transhuman refers to a "realm of between or metaxy" and has the primary function of connecting "the human with the non-human world or, in the terms of the later Heidegger, to integrate earth and sky, the gods and mortals."64
As I pointed out in Chapter One, Hillman, like Jung, believes that everything we know and feel, everything we say and write is fantasy-based, or derives from psychic images that inhabit this in-between world of the imagination.65 Hillman, however, employs the concept of fantasy images in a poetic sense, i.e., images are considered to be the "basic givens of psychic life, self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns."66 Thus fantasy 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."67 That is, all human activities proceed from a fantasy image. From this perspective, Hillman can and does conclude that humanity is psychological first and foremost. This suggests, of course, that Hillman's psychology of the soul is based upon the logos of the image and the process of imagination. In this sense it is understood that the image takes precedence over the physical: "first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality."68 Hence, image-making is considered to be the "royal road" to soul-making and it is another task of psychology to be at home in the imaginal. It must be able to deal with the "differentiation of the imaginal, discovering its laws, its configurations and moods of discourse, its psychological necessities."69 Until we know these things, we are forced to call the soul's activities `pathologies,' which "condemns the imagination to sickness and the persons of it to making their appearances mainly through pathological manifestations."70
If psychology and society, however, refuse the fantastic nature of our lives and if they refuse the notion that their understanding of self is based in the metaphors and images fashioned by soul, then we "become fastened into a constant forced literalism, ourselves as real, the Gods dead."71 If we are able properly to apprehend the fantastic side to our natures, Hillman continues, we must be able to shatter the illusion of psychic literalism, of egocentricity, of heroic consciousness, and of a Self separated from itself and the world. In fact, Hillman points out that any style of consciousness that is based on the hero and egocentricity will give credit to problems and devalue fantasy. By denigrating fantasy, psychology presents them as problems to be solved. Making and solving problems, Hillman writes, "reinforces the defensive literalistic screen against fantasies."72 Most people fall into the literalistic fallacy because it is easier to believe in the truth of facts than it is to believe in the truth of images.73 By refusing images their due, Western society limits the possibility of creating, of imagining, and of acting upon alternate realities. By neglecting the imagination, I believe, we not only literalize soul, we also institutionalize self. That is, by refusing to recognize the role of the imagination in social institutions and perspectives, we set up norms of behaviour and being, we develop styles of discourse that institutionalize experience, and we consider any deviation to be abnormal, ill, or false. For this reason it is necessary for society to usurp the literalistic, unified fantasy of the Self that pervades the West. In fact, Hillman notes that we must "dethrone the dominant fantasy ruling our view of the world as ultimately a unity....It also means that we would abandon a notion of our personality as ultimately a unity of the self."74
Dethroning the dominant fantasy of a unified Self is precisely what Hillman has attempted to do through his work as an analyst who speaks about analysis to analysts. Hillman points out that unity is itself a fantasy goal. It is not an empirical reality and, therefore, not a part of the material world.75 If the soul is paradoxical in nature, then it must be understood to be diverse and not isolated from the world that surrounds it. Hillman suggests that in order to make soul, it is absolutely necessary to get away from theories of an autonomous, self-enclosed individual. Soul-making, he argues, need not be identified with introversion or the denial of the physical world. "You make soul by living life," he writes, "not by retreating from the world into the `inner work' or beyond the world in spiritual disciplines and meditation...."76
If fantasy images are, as Hillman suggests, the basis of consciousness, we must turn to them for basic understanding of the human soul. Therefore, "becoming conscious" now would mean becoming aware of fantasies and the recognition of them everywhere and not merely a `fantasy world' separated from `reality.' Consequently, "fantasy images now become the instrumental mode of perceiving and insighting."77 This is to say that rather than analyzing images, we must learn to analyze by means of such fantasies. But, as Hillman informs us, many psychologists have yet to leave behind the Cartesian split between the inner and the outer, the living and the dead.78 One of the tasks of psychology and psychotherapists, therefore, is to help make the tangible and intangible things of the psyche felt.79 Stated differently, it is necessary to allow that which makes up the psyche, including the physical world, to enter the community reflected in one's soul, to allow them to matter and not just be matter. This is precisely where aesthetics as a paradigm for psychology enters the picture.
As I have noted, a polytheistic perspective is not the only paradigm that Hillman offers psychology. In his most recent publication, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, Hillman makes explicit that which he had implicitly addressed in his previous works: that psychology should also approach the soul through an aesthetic mode.80 Psychology's adoption of an artistic or aesthetic approach to psyche does not necessarily mean that psychology and psychologists should approach soul literally as art or as artists, but rather that psychology should approach the psyche from a perspective which appreciates the imagination, beauty or ugliness, and the passion characteristic of the arts and aesthetics. Hillman suggests this paradigm because it satisfies three requirements: "First, art forms madness rather than represses it. Second, the arts often act as the sensitive antennae of social justice and moral outrage, keeping the soul awake to hypocrisy, cant, suppression, and jingoism. And third, the fundamental enemy of all art is mediocrity."81
To Hillman, the connection between soul and things is found in symptoms. Pathology, he claims, always leads us to new unknowns; objects in the world are animated by one's symptoms, by one's imaginings of the world. Thus, he notes that our "suspicions and [...] precautionary rituals announce that [the `I' that] I am [is] living in an animated world."82 This appreciation of the aesthetic, of an animate world suggests a sense of appreciating the natural world as if one were embedded in it in a way similar to Catherine Keller's notion of the connected self which will be explored in Chapter Three. For Hillman, symptoms bring the physical world into the psychic world, they demonstrate the connection between the physical and the spiritual. Hillman points out that symptoms emerge not only from the material cause of things but also out of their formal cause. He writes that "...we are being harmed as much by the form of things as by their material, where form means the aesthetic quality."83 If it is the case that the form of things is what is affecting us, then it must be the task of therapy to notice noxious forms.
A consciousness of form or aesthetic consciousness, Hillman argues, would make us aware of how we are assaulted by thoughtless ideas in things, i.e., by poor aesthetics. By paying attention to form, Hillman claims, we can bring back a positive aesthetics that help to enhance the world in which we live and the self that we imagine. One consequence of reimagining therapy as an aesthetic activity is that the clinical hierarchy, which places depth therapists on top and art therapists at the bottom, will be turned upside down. "Everything to do with forming--speech, theater, dress, athletics, movement, gesture--would become indications of improvement rather than insight, understanding, emotional balance, and relating."84 Thus therapeutic work would embrace the task of de-anaesthetizing, of awakening, of lifting the state of psychic numbness indicative of our times. An aesthetic approach would put life back into the world, it would re-animate the physical, re-sacralize the world. If this does not happen, Hillman continues, therapy will remain Victorian in nature. It will continue to be stuck in its nineteenth-century model of moral individualism and maintain its intrinsic distrust and denigration of the physical world. "Each time therapy suggests for a client to make a commitment or decision in order to promote "maturity" and "control"," Hillman writes, "the heroic ego resurrects--the grim jawed, determined puritan for whom the pleasure principle is a dragon to be slain."85
In Re-Visioning Psychology and elsewhere, Hillman makes it plain that so-called pathological symptoms can be understood in the context of "the whole psychic field" as assertions against the notion of a central authority and the individuality of parts. In other words, pathology can be understood to challenge the status quo, egocentricity, and the monotheistic perspective.86 Furthermore, many symptoms belong to the body politic, not only to the individual patient. "Maybe the system has to be brought into line with the symptoms," Hillman muses, "so that the system no longer functions as a repression of soul, forcing the soul to rebel in order to be noticed."87 The middle ground over which this is to take place is the arts. It is in the arts, Hillman notes, that symptoms can be understood as that which informs soul, that drives the psyche to the edge away from the normalcy and mediocrity of traditional notions of selfhood.88 To Hillman, the primary activity of humanity is in imagination--not in building communities, cities, or in using tools, but rather in imagining their possibilities. We imagine irrepressibly, he claims, and those musings that are repressed return as symptoms "so that our symptoms are actually the irrepressible imagination breaking through our mediocrity."89 This is one reason why in Hillman's thought it is through our pathologies that we find our salvation.
Hillman argues that if the soul is seen from an aesthetic or poetic starting point, therapists will be forced to view the individual from a perspective rooted in an aesthetics of pathology, not from a viewpoint based in preprocessed and statistical norms.90 Hence, the political role of therapy is to work with the pathological unrest in the body politic. The implication is, of course, that if this is the case, then compliance with normalization subverts therapy's political task and institutionalizes selfhood while ignoring the problems inherent in the paradigms of traditional psychology. By not adhering to the task of depth therapy, which has been understood to be one of freeing the analysand from the restrictions of societal and personal life, psychologists run the risk of reaffirming and, hence, institutionalizing the human condition as based in a specific norm, that forecloses the possibility of any modification. In telling people that they are `O.K.,' therapists reduce the analytical challenge to know oneself in favor of covering us over with a mask of normalcy and submission. In other words: "If therapy imagines its task to be that of helping people cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel), to normalize their oddity, and to accept themselves "and work within your situation; make it work for you" (rather than refuse the unacceptable), then therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebs."91 Therapy is thus a mechanism of social adaptation, of the institutionalization of self. It is compliance with the rules of the system and "as long as therapy is engaged in adaptation, it is denying the raging lust and animal appetites that claim life is worth living."92 It denies us the freedom to rebel, to protest, to say that what is offered is not what I want.
Hillman claims that it is in the addictions of our times that we learn that the needs we have are not being cared for by this "white bread society." Even so, addictions cannot provide the means of finding soul, but they do offer the possibility of doing so. Hence, he concludes, our system is "hell-bent on stamping out everything extreme, especially the extremes of pleasure, which come closest to fulfilling desire."93 An example of this need to expunge self of sources of pleasure is found in Freud's hypothesis of a pleasure-unpleasure principle which suggests that maturity emerges as one learns to defer the gratification that the non-rational and the somatic aspects which the psyche brings to one's attention.
Such theories, it could be argued, function to placate our understandings of what is happening to each of us when the rational "I" is not dominating the psyche. Because such ideas dominate psychotherapy, Hillman makes the following statement: "I want theories that blow the mind, as art can, not settle our minds. And the value of a psychological theory lies in its capacity to open the mind, take the top of your head off like a good poem or voice in a song."94 What this implies is that which is eccentric, deviant, marginal, and so on is that which "rattles the cage" of the institutionalized self. Things that `blow the mind' like art can and must challenge the accepted ways of perceiving and expressing the human condition. If we are to alter traditional understandings of selfhood, we must begin to theorize, to imagine the world from positions that are subversive of and are located far from the centre of accepted discourse or traditional fantasies of self and cosmos. To neglect to do so is to run the risk of accepting the same old psychological dogmas and be complicit in re-affirming traditional understandings of the human psyche. The call for re-visioning traditional psychological thought implies that it has become necessary to look at those aspects of humanity that have traditionally been neglected, vilified, and marginalized in order to be able to draw out and articulate an alternate idea of self. What may be emerging is an idea of selfhood that responds to the anomalies of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm that is causing such dissatisfaction in the postmodern West.
Hillman would have archetypal psychology look to the mythical possibilities of such dissatisfactions. Archetypal psychology understands the mythos/pathos connection as a means of finding "`the God in the disease.'"95 To Hillman it is the eye attuned to pathologies, the eye of the artist-analyst, that helps to prevent the "phenomena of the soul from being naively understood as merely natural."96 In this respect archetypal psychology is close to the antipsychiatry of Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, which regards "`abnormal' conditions as existentially human and hence fundamentally normal."97 But archetypal psychology is said to make three further moves: first, it analyzes the `normalizing' perspective of psychology and finds that it is `abnormal' or pathological in its own way; second, "unlike Szasz and Laing, archetypal psychology maintains the real existence of psychopathology as such, as inherent to psychic reality"--it neither denies it nor attempts to locate pathology outside the soul;98 and, third, it recognizes that pathology, because it is inherent to soul, is also necessary.99
Because pathology and fantasy are natural to psyche, fantasy or imagination is perhaps the most appropriate way to approach the language of the psyche. For Hillman, the fantasy in which a problem is set "tells more about the way the problem is constructed and how it can be transformed (reconstructed) than does any attempt at analyzing the problem in its own terms."100 The figures of the imagination, the images that make up the polytheistic psyche, are considered to be neither merely parts of the personality nor internal projections. Instead, they are given their due as independent beings. As psychical entities, images, which are neither metaphysical nor physical, are "`as real as you'".101
Another move of archetypal psychology has been to focus on the "sensate world of perceptual objects and habitual forms" in order to lead to the "recuperation of the anima mundi or soul of the world by scrutinizing the face of the world as aesthetic physiognomy."102 That is, archetypal psychology calls for the proper attention to our interactions with the external world, both psychologically and aesthetically, as carriers of soul in the attempt to return value and meaningfulness to a world that Enlightenment thought proclaimed to be lifeless and purely materialistic. This move takes therapy out of the consulting room in which two individuals privately sit face to face. Archetypal psychology now would take on "the larger task of re-imagining the public world within which the patient lives. This notion of therapy attempts to realize the poetic basis of mind in actuality, as an imaginative aesthetic response."103
It is in The Thought of the Heart that Hillman's argument for the necessity of returning aesthetics to psychology first emerges in a comprehensive way. He writes that "We are led already to see that a full depth psychology expressing the nature of psyche must also be a depth aesthetics. Further, if we would recuperate the lost soul, which is after all the main aim of all depth psychologies, we must recover our lost aesthetic reactions, our sense of beauty."104 Hillman notes that psychology has ignored the role of beauty and ugliness by reducing aesthetics to diagnostic attributes. Yet, he argues, beauty, for instance, must be given its due in psychological work, otherwise the soul's means of realization are crippled.105 Beauty, as Hillman defines it, is the "supreme theophany, [the] divine self-revelation" of the soul.106 Beauty is the manifestation of the soul and appears wherever soul appears. Furthermore it is not an attribute of something. Rather it is an epistemological necessity that reflects the ways through which we are touched by the gods and goddesses--i.e., through our imaginings and our feelings. Moreover, beauty is also an ontological necessity insofar as it grounds the sensate particularity of the world; it is the impetus that employs the senses to ground ourselves in the physical world.107 It is through an aesthetic approach that the soul and its imaginative activities are returned from the unreality of the metaphysical realm. This is so, Hillman suggests, because our spontaneous, aesthetic reactions are the responses of our feelings which are located in the heart--the physical, immediate, and mundane side of our lives.
To Hillman, the heart is the organ that perceives beauty, and that which perceives the sacred. Rather than respond to images in terms of values and morality, Hillman would have us apprehend images according to the heart's response. It is in our heart's or our soul's response to "what is presented to the senses"108 that we find the significance of images. Aesthetic reactions are responses to the many faces of beauty and ugliness. Moral responsibility is said to begin in these responses of delight or disgust--thus morality can be understood to consist of spontaneous judgments made by the heart. Hence the question of evil, like ugliness, refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart--a heart which experiences no reaction to what it faces. Such an anaesthetized heart turns the variegated sensuous faces of the world into monotony, sameness, and oneness. This is the "desert of modernity".109
The preceding paragraph outlines an examination of one fantasy of the heart--an imagination that can be characterized as Romantic in nature. Yet Hillman points out that there are several other imaginations of the heart that have influenced psychology in the past and still do so today. These imaginations include the Heart of Augustine and the Heart of Harvey. The Augustinian heart, as Hillman portrays it, has affected psychology most profoundly. It is described as the heart that is the core of being, that is intimacy, that is the `real self.' It is the heart in which one's personal truth resides, it is the heart of the emotions, the place of Angst, conflict, Gemüt, and leisure. To Hillman, this heart is the heart of the Christian imagination, not the heart of the Hebrews, the Persians, or the Greeks. Hillman feels that the emphasis of this Christianized heart in psychology has been devastating. He writes:
By personalizing the heart and locating there the word of God, the imagination is driven into exile. Its place is usurped by dogma, by images already revealed. Imagination is driven into the lower exile of sexual fantasy, the upper exile of metaphysical conception, or the outer exile of objective data, none of which reside in the heart and all of which seem heartless, mere instinct, sheer speculation, brute fact. When imagination is driven out there remains only subjectivity--the heart of Augustine.110
The issue, then, surrounds the confessional mode in which we are compelled to interpret all our feelings through the subjectivism of the Augustinian heart. When we enter the confessional mode of being in relation to the heart, Hillman suggests, we are required to struggle to find the true `me' hidden in the closet of one's personal feelings. It becomes a matter of accounting for events experienced rather than accounting for experiencing. The result is the dissociation of our tendency to identify with our experiences, something confession is said to reinforce. Thus our experience of ourselves must necessarily be understood in relation to Augustine's God and to the notion of the secret seat of the soul which is the heart.111 It is this imagination of the heart that biases psychology to understand the soul in terms that presuppose there is a hidden self in each of us that is more `real' or `true' than the selves we experience daily. This fantasy of the heart claims that all manifestations of self that do not fall within Augustine's imagination of God and soul are necessarily false, deviant, and must be ultimately rejected.
The Heart of Harvey, by contrast, is one that furthers the mechanization of the physical body. This means of imagining the heart comes from the seventeenth century manuscript, "An Anatomical Dissertation Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals." This heart, Hillman informs us, is imagined as a prince in a kingdom that rules all. This heart is thought of as the original foundation from which all power is derived. Nonetheless, Harvey's Heart differs fundamentally from the heart of Augustine and that of beauty in that Harvey's heart is one of visible demonstration: it is the heart of mechanics, it is the heart of hydraulics, the heart of the scientific imagination of the seventeenth century. As such, the images of Harvey's heart consist of such notions as hardness, smallness, muscular tenseness, and as an over-stressed pumping machine. It is the heart that can be held in one's hand, it is the literal heart of the scientific imagination, and it is the heart of biology and medicine.
Hillman believes that this transformation of the heart into a mechanical wonder was a necessary precondition for the transfiguration of western culture into an industrially based economy. Thus this metaphor of the heart includes intimations of the machine, spare and interchangeable parts, which reflect the Enlightenment fascination with mechanization and scientific categorization. Today, all we carry in our breasts is the dead, soulless heart of Harvey's scientific imagination.112 Such an imagination of the heart could only contribute to the fantasy of the psyche as composed primarily of chemical reactions and of material substances. If the body has been mechanized, then medical science might conclude that an effective means of dealing with its diseases is to replace deteriorated parts, to keep it running properly, and occasionally to give it a `tune-up.' Through this fantasy of the human being, our hearts, our bodies, and our souls, too, are imagined and reduced to dead, mechanical wonders that can be mapped with the intent of eventually re-engineering them to run better.
For Hillman, then, the recovery of the imaginal first requires the recovery of its organ: "the heart, and its kind of philosophy."113 Yet the education of one's heart and of one's feelings has had no real place in modern society.114 Hillman asks where the heart is to go to become educated? He notes that the emphasis on the rational mind makes us less able to cope with feelings--the spontaneous response of the heart to that which is presented to its aesthetic senses--because thinking and feeling seem to develop more or less at the expense of the other.115 To Hillman, "feeling requires an education through faith; it begins to function only when we can trust it to function and allow it its errors."116 Consequently, we must learn to lift the repression weighing down our feelings, learn to trust our feelings, and be courageous psychologically in order to allow the soul the necessary fortitude and determination to encounter itself and the surrounding world.117 For "the thought of the heart is physiognomic. To perceive it must imagine....the heart's thought personifies, ensouls, and animates the world."118
As noted, Hillman turns to the heart as a metaphor for the seat of our imagination.119 The heart that Hillman is speaking of is neither the heart of mechanism, nor the heart of christianity, but the heart of the animal, the feeling heart of Michelangelo's immagine del cuor.120 The understanding that the heart is the seat of the imagination permits us to come to a deeper appreciation of the role that soul has in imagination. In other words, imagining is understood to be an aesthetic activity that addresses itself directly to human feeling, for, as Hillman reminds us, images always imply context, mood, and scene.121
This particular emphasis on imagining as an activity of both aesthetics and feeling can be seen as further evidence that one of the things in which Hillman is involved is a struggle against the rationalistic bias of contemporary systems of thought about self and subjectivity. Rather than confront the imagination from an instrumental standpoint, archetypal psychology would approach the imagination from a more egalitarian perspective. That is, when images are understood to be irreducible, there is no attempt to gain control over them. By allowing images and imagination to speak for and of themselves, by understanding the imagination to be a way of seeing rather than something seen, there is no aspiration to dominate images and force them to conform to preconceived notions of psyche and reality.
Images are thus allowed to speak for themselves, rather than being codified into a predefined, literalized system of apprehension. It cannot be emphasized enough that by responding to and working with images as metaphorical and significant, rather than from a perspective that would literalize or call them fanciful, we are allowed to understand the soul's activities, imagination and image making, as fecund,122 providing meaning, and as worthy of our appreciation and participation.
Furthermore, in recognizing the inherent value of images, we not only bring meaning to them, but also to those things which they embody: our lives and the material world. Hillman claims that this perspective allows us to evade the trap inherent in much of western psychology that claims there is a "true" self or imagination as opposed to a "false" self or imagination, i.e., between the real and the not-real. Hence, images are no longer approached from a position that presumes they have an intrinsic moral value.123 Rather, images are valued for their ability to evoke feeling, elaboration, speculation, and transformation.
Hillman believes that the language of traditional academic psychology insults the soul's capacity to feel. It makes us ill, he says, because it is itself ill.124 He points out that the language of academia or the language of television are what we have been taught is the correct expression of experience and thought.125 We have been trained to believe in the objectivity and scientific validity of academic language and thought. The same is true in regard to the communicative role that television plays in western society. Yet, as Hillman has argued, all perspectives about the world are based in fantasy, and who is to say that one fantasy is less fantastic or less real than another? Furthermore, the root fantasies of traditional Western discourses about self and human experience are ultimately dehumanizing. That is, the roots of medical psychology and rational-materialist philosophy are found in the notion that each person is radically separated from the body, from the community, from the so-called non-rational, and from the aesthetic response to one's feelings. Such means of speaking, that assume objectivity is the index of reality have established a status quo in which self is imagined to be singular, separated, and the only animated or valued thing existing in an otherwise dead world. Because there is an epistemological crisis in regard to how self is now perceived and spoken about, it is presently more necessary than perhaps ever before not only to re-imagine self but also to reform the languages and discourses we use to articulate self.
Hillman claims that Confucius suggested "the reform of society begins in the reform of its langauge." In this light Hillman suggests that "so long as therapy does not attend to language, which I contend it cannot do..., therapy cannot reform our society as it intends. In fact, therapy contributes to the decline of the civilization whose reform begins in the reform of language."126 Moreover, Hillman argues that therapy actually invites barbarians--those who cannot speak the language of their culture.127 In fact, many of the words that therapists use to characterize people involve a naive perspective on society. Such words as those found in various psychological typologies are now generally considered to be taboo because of their racist and sexist connotations as well as their inability to account for the diversity of humanity and the uniqueness of individual persons. Rather than approach language through a metaphorical or aesthetically attuned ear, an ear that hears and appreciates many levels of meaning, Hillman bemoans the scientific approach which has preferred so-called objective or literalistic language that classifies people in scientific, non-human, mechanistic or dehumanizing categories. Consequently, our perception of others has moved from such notions of a lower race, birth, and regions to the idea of a low body.128 That is, through the nominalist appropriation of language, Cartesian notions of the world have reduced our aesthetic appreciation of and our feelings about the world and the human body as is indicated by the Harvian metaphor of the heart. As Hillman puts it: "clearly the simplification of words aids the reduction to types."129
The reduction of language also leads to literalism. Literalism is said to prevent the appreciation of mystery and uniqueness by limiting the "multiple ambiguity of meanings to one definition."130 It would classify and absolutize all the mysteries that make up life and make it more interesting and meaningful. To Hillman, literalism is the natural result of the tendency of monotheistic consciousness to demand singleness of meaning. It is this monotheism of meaning, he suggests, that hardens the heart, the seat of the imagination, and keeps us from entering into the mystery of fantasy.131 Literalism, however, refers also to what Hillman calls logophobia: the fear that words might harbour reality. Logophobia is a consequent of nominalism which has been instrumental in depersonalizing our world. To nominalists, words have no inherent substance of their own. Consequently, the nominalist idea of language has devastated the psyche by "insisting that big words were labels given by the mind, with only subjective reality."132 The belief was that "only madmen were supposed to see the figments of the mind as real, and [furthermore] the content of madness has become defined in part by the subjects nominalism has rejected."133 What nominalism fears most is that words might become personified.134
Because the nominalist perspective has been so influential in the human sciences, Hillman calls for a new `angelology of words.' That is, Hillman wants us to learn to have faith in words again. He argues that words must become like angels in that they must bear meaningful messages once more--messages that evoke an aesthetic response, a response of the heart instead of the mind. We must recognize that words are carriers of soul between people, and that they have an invisible power over us.135 Hillman points out, however, that it is not an issue of finding new terms to replace the old ones as much as it is a matter of seeing the old terms differently. We must shift away from nominalism and realism, he argues, and move toward a metaphorical or heartful way of speaking.136 In fact, Hillman suggests that "By treating the words we use as ambiguities, seeing them again as metaphors, we restore to them their original mystery."137 In other words, Hillman wants us to reject the deadened, monotheistic, and literal ways of speaking in preference for living, polytheistic, and metaphorical forms of discourse--a style of discourse that puts life back into the world and the soul's heart. We must develop a language that can adequately speak about and to a psyche that has many faces. "The psyche is not only multiple," Hillman writes, "it is a communion of many persons, each with its specific needs, fears, longings, styles and languages."138 A rhetorical style of speaking is repetitious, Hillman informs us, because "the way of the soul...is the way of the circle."139 Academic language is death to the rhetoric of the soul because it cannot hear the meaning behind the words that it uses. It denies that the language we use is multi-layered and multi-determined, providing a variety of meanings and contexts. Academic language insists that there is one way and only one way, a straight-and-narrow fantasy of how to speak about the world and, by extension, soul.
The circular fashion of speaking that the soul employs, Hillman notes, is also the way our symptoms speak. The soul's main concern is not in discriminating or formulating definitions, "but with shaping the imagination itself into words."140 Thus, Hillman believes, we must bring back the magic inherent in verbal imagination "and the therapeutic incantional power of words."141 Rhetoric is method, he claims, yet it is the fashion of academic psychology to use a language that is soul killing. This is a language that has inherited the deadening capacities of nominalism and scientific materialism.142 If we would engage a diverse psyche, our words must allow for a variety of ways for speaking about our imaginings of self and world. It is the metaphorical nature of mythical terms, for instance, that cannot be literalized because a sense of the fantastic is built into them, for they are open to multiple interpretations. Words adequate to the soul must be able to see through themselves. Hillman writes that "a good term must inherently imply that it is not literal."143 What he suggests is that we need to substitute a more literary way of speaking and understanding self and the world for the clinical and scientific language of psychology and science. He would trade "mathematical exactness for imaginative precision," the literal, scientific approach for artistic understanding. He claims that the scientific approach to psychological investigation "and the reliance upon socio-psychological testing instead of moral-characterological scrutiny" have contributed to the decline of our "psychological perception of the individual person, and thus to our age of psychopathology."144 That is, the reified and objectified approach to the world has been superimposed onto humanity and other living things, reducing the living to the dead and resulting in the anaesthetization of humanity and the surrounding world.
As I see it, the importance of Hillman's exposition of these fantasies of the heart and the languages of each is found in the power that imagination has to influence our perception of humanity, divinity, and the cosmos. In the metaphors of the Augustinian and Harvian hearts we find two different yet intermixed imaginations of humanity: that humans are subject to the morality of Augustine's God and that the physical body is a mechanical wonder that has spare parts that can be removed and, sometimes, replaced. Both of these styles of imagining self have been instrumental in the development of modern psychology; both have contributed to the notion of the separated or autonomous human being; both have led to the objectification and mechanization of the ways we speak about the world, the soul, and the body; and, hence, both have been detrimental to community. That is, one result of the notion that all of us are subject to the moral will of a transcendent, non-physical being and that we are in some way validated by this same transcendent entity, is that we find ourselves further removed from the physical world in which we exist, as well as from our physical manifestations which permit human interaction and community. Furthermore, an imagination of humanity as machines cannot provide the sensitivity, compassion, and understanding--the heart--reserved for life and living creatures that is found in communities of living beings.
How does Hillman make the move from soul and heart into community and the world? This is an important question for those concerned with re-visioning the human condition in contemporary western thought. For the traditional notion of the Self is something that is separated not only from its feelings but also from the community of living beings and the world in general. Although Hillman has only recently begun to address these problems systematically, it is possible to find such considerations in his earlier works. The subject-object dichotomy characteristic of modernity can be addressed in Hillman's discussion of the role of the heart and feelings. Hillman, as we have seen, suggests that the seat of the soul is in the heart. Furthermore, it is the thought of the heart in relation to the images found in both the soul and the world that bring a meaningful response--a feeling response.
To Hillman, feeling has its own rationality--something that is generally denied in traditional psychology. Feeling is a psychic process that evaluates, is always in motion, and gives or receives feeling tones. Therefore, feeling serves to connect the subject to the object (by imparting value) and object to subject (by receiving it within the subjective value system). Consequently, feeling is understood as implying relation, or connection of the soul to the events of the world and the world to the events of the soul. In this way feelings are often identified as "the function of relationship."145 Hence, one uses the heart to perceive the unique, to perceive a soul immediately in the person before one's eyes, as concrete and present.146 This is another way of saying that soul, contrary to spirit, concerns itself with the mundane, the physical, the physiognomic, that soul is rooted firmly in the actual world.
Contrary to traditional therapy's concern with personal feelings and the concurrent reduction of images to feelings, Hillman, in re-considering feeling, attempts to release therapy "from the inevitable narrowing into personalism by the identification of soul with feeling."147 Such personalism, Hillman informs us, not only perpetuates "the Cartesian division of ensouled subject/lifeless object" but also "fosters the delusion of ownership of emotion."148 To Hillman, the "narrowing, monocentric effect upon consciousness" of personalism supports the monotheistic bias of psychology to identify the ego with its experiences. That is, when emotions and feelings are considered primary by psychologists, images must play a secondary role: "they are considered to be derivative and descriptive of feelings."149 Archetypal psychology, by contrast, reverses the relation of images and emotions: "feelings as considered to be...`divine influxes,' accompanying, qualifying, and energizing images. They are not merely personal but belong to imaginal reality, the reality of the image, and help make the image felt as a specific value."150 This implies that "any event experienced as an image is at once animated, emotionalized, and placed in the realm of value."151 Consequently, we are brought to the conclusion that feelings are within us as much as we are in feelings. That the soul residing in the world causes us to feel as much as our own personalized soul may.
Finding soul in the world is also not an entirely new task for archetypal psychology. One can find intimations of the world soul in Hillman's early works. In "An Essay on Pan," Hillman notes that fantasy, the activity of the soul, is also physical. This is another way of saying the activities of psyche are the same in both the unconscious and the conscious minds, for dreams and rational thought are both based in human imagination and fantasy. But there is a more important consideration: one cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behaviour and physical behaviour exist in a symbiotic relationship. Yet this union of fantasy and behaviour suggests that there is no objective behaviour as such, which allows for the conclusion there is no strict division between subjective and objective worlds.152 Although there are early indications of the lack any division between the internal and the external in archetypal psychology, it is in the late 1980s that the task of relating the personal soul to the anima mundi emerges as a prominent theme in Hillman's thought.
Always attempting to free psychology from its repressive and restrictive intellectual inheritance, Hillman, in "From Mirror to Window: Curing psychoanalysis of its Narcissism," suggests that the way out of psychology's romanticism is the turn to what is left out: "the unidealized, the immediate given, actual world of urbane and mundane things."153 In this article, Hillman admits to a long-standing misunderstanding of Keats' phrase: "`Call the world, if you will, a vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world'."154 Hillman originally had understood this phrase as a suggestion to use the world in order to make one's own soul. Hillman now considers such work a "narcissistic enterprise." Instead, he turns this narcissistic approach to the world on its head. He now claims that one is to go through the world in order to make its soul, thereby making our own.155 We are to participate in the world--the living world, living in the world, and the world living in us. We are to "re-spect, in-spect all of its perspectives."156 When we are `in' the world, he concludes, "we find the via regia of soul-making."157
To Hillman worldliness implies "working on the world, in the world, for the world as the path of soul making."158 This suggests that the means to make soul is through participation in the world. The notion of anima mundi suggests, to Hillman, that one of the tasks of psychology "is to hear the psyche speaking through all things of the world, thereby recovering the world as a place of soul."159 Rather than continuing to emphasize the journey inwards (a task which helps to maintain the Cartesian view that the world outside consists of dead objects and the world inside is alive), we must look to the physical world in order for us to feel connections with others and with the cosmos itself.160
For Hillman, the call to make soul "does not have to be away from the world or rest on a theory of self-enclosed individuals."161 In other words, soul-making need not be identified with introversion or the denial of the physical world or, we might also conclude, the body itself. Hillman writes: "you make soul by living life, not by retreating from the world into the `inner work' or beyond the world in spiritual disciplines...."162
This suggests that Hillman understands the need to give meaning back to the physical world, to encourage his readers to find value in the idea of immanence, in our attachments to the physical world. To Hillman, the neglect of the environment, "the body of the world," is involved in our personal insanity. Because it is necessary to work toward the restoration of the world's body which "must be restored to health, for in that body is also the world's soul."163 Psychiatry, if it would work to help individual souls, must be involved in the compassionate healing of the world's soul. If psychology is to help soul, it must account for the gestalt, the physical and worldly context in which souls reside.164
In order to do this, Hillman claims, psychology must first find a logos of the soul--one based in metaphor, image, fantasy, and feeling--and then learn to listen to the psyche. If, he continues, the psyche is understood as related to anima mundi, the Neo-platonic world soul, psyche can be heard speaking through the world, an idea which will allow us to recover "the world as a place of soul."165 This idea suggests that Modern western attitudes towards the mystery of the world, the fecund aspects of mundane things must be re-evaluated in order for us to reimagine selfhood and to make soul.
An image-based therapy must be "extended into the sensate world of perceptual objects and habitual forms--buildings, bureaucratic systems, conventional language, transportation, urban environment, food, education."166 Such a project, he claims, "has no less ambition than the recuperation of the anima mundi...."167 A recuperation of the soul of the world is accomplished by examining the forms of the world as aesthetic physiognomy, as the heart-felt reaction of the outward appearances of the world. Hence, archetypal psychology makes a move which calls for a vision of therapy which is much more than just an "encounter of two persons in private and takes on the larger task of re-imagining the public world within which the patient lives."168 In other words the task of therapy becomes one of realizing "the poetic basis of mind in actuality, as an imaginative, aesthetic response."169 The intent is to extend "the notion of the `psychological' to the aesthetic and the notion of therapy" from the hours spent in the consulting room so that it is recognized as a continual imaginative activity in the world.
For Hillman, the liberation of therapy from the consulting room requires that we re-evaluate psychology's identification of the individual with emotion--an idea which has characterized all schools of psychotherapy since Freud. Hillman would release "therapy, and psychology itself, from the inevitable narrowing into personalism occasioned by the identification of soul with feeling."170 His argument against the confessional mode of therapy is already familiar. To Hillman, this confessional mode of therapy places the psyche under a monotheistic umbrella which brings with it singleness of expression, imagination, and self. Furthermore, he notes that the personalized confessional mode of therapy perpetuates "the Cartesian division of ensouled subject/lifeless object" which "fosters the delusion of ownership of emotion, as belonging to the proprium."171 According to Hillman the "intensified singleness that emotions bring, their narrowing monocentric effect on consciousness, gives support to the already monotheistic tendency of the ego to appropriate and identify with their [emotional] experiences."172 What is more, "when emotion and feeling are conceived as primary, images play a secondary role. They are considered to be derivative and descriptive of feelings."173
By developing a logos of the soul--images and feelings--it becomes possible to hear the soul speak through the world. It is through our felt connections to such images that we feel our connection to the soul in the world, to the anima mundi. In this sense images return meaning and value to the world, and a polytheistic psychology that is based in images and aesthetic responses is directly concerned with this activity. It is through the images of the world and our imagining the world, Hillman suggests, that world is revealed to our aesthetic responses, thus connecting us to the physical world.
By better accounting for our feelings in regard to the world we can turn our gaze from the interior, narcissistic tendencies of psychopathology and connect our feelings to life, to anima mundi.174 It is the heart's passionate thoughts as opposed to the "cool thoughts about cold reality" of the mind (which is said to be the basis of traditional western psychology), that Hillman would have us re-evaluate.175 For Hillman it is imperative that we begin to approach the soul from a perspective that accounts for our feelings that relates us to the world and body and gives the meaning and value.
As noted, a recent move for archetypal psychology has been to extend its area of consideration to the physical world of "perceptual objects and habitual forms." This move is one that lends a great deal of potential to the future of archetypal psychology. It offers the possibility of removing itself even further from the traditional Jungian ethos which is primarily concerned with the objects of the personal psyche over the objects in and the events of the world. By extending the notion of soul to the physical world in the form of the Neo-Platonic idea of the anima mundi, Hillman has opened a new vista for investigation that, for instance, can help in re-imagining the role played by the body in our understanding of selfhood--a concern of primary interest to many feminists.
Hillman's early (1967) approach to the body is similar to his approach to dreams: we are to befriend the body in order to develop the necessary intimacy with our self that activates our imagination.176 Such intimacy might, for instance, empower us to imaginatively consider and re-vision the metaphors we use to speak about the heart. When we are incapable of such intimacy, Hillman continues, we cannot mend the mind-body split and we run the risk of sliding into the Kantian mistake of overvaluing mental events.177 For Hillman, the "resurrection of this flesh, from a psychological point of view, refers to the transformation of flesh into body, parallel to the transformation of egoistic will and rationality."178 That is, the reconsideration of the body generated by archetypal psychology is one that transforms the body as object, the body as materia, the dreaded body into a body which is sacred, valued positively, and contains a multitude of meanings. This attitude toward the body parallels archetypal psychology's revaluation of the psyche as something that is not essentially rational or subject to ego control but rather sees the rational and ego as merely parts of soul. So, "instead of the usual notion of psyche in body," Hillman muses, "the body...is in the psyche. The world itself is a psychic body; and our bodies as we move, stand, look, pause, turn, and sit are performing an activity of psychic reflection, an activity we formerly considered only mentally possible in the mirror of introspection."179
To Hillman, the notion that the body is psyche brings about a change in the way we conceive individuality: "individuality is within community and takes its definition from community...Individuality is therefore more visible within the estranged separateness and close similarity, for instance, of family than in trying to be `different' from family."180 This is to say that one finds his or her individuality because he or she is indivisible from the communities in which he or she takes part. Hence, individuality comes to connote "in connection," "in communion," existing within a community rather than in the isolation characteristic of psychology's idealized "heroic consciousness."
Because therapy's definition of the Self, as pointed out in Chapter One, comes from the Protestant and the Oriental traditions, "Self is [imagined to be] the interiorization of the invisible God beyond."181 Hillman would rather imagine or redefine self as the interiorization of community. He believes that if we make this move, we must necessarily see self and the world differently. For
if the self were defined as the interiorization of community, then the boundaries between me and another would be much less sure. I would be with myself when I am with others. I would not be with myself when I'm walking alone or meditating or in my room imagining or working on my dreams. In fact, I would be estranged from myself.182
From such a perspective, "other" would not merely imply other people, "because community, as I see it, is something more ecological, or at least animistic."183 The description of community as "ecological" suggests that Hillman has a conception of community that involves the environment in which we live, and, one that is "animistic," that it is animated, meaningful, and contains soul. This is a conceptualization of community that is a necessary consequent of archetypal psychology's emphasis on aesthetics, polytheism,184 and anima mundi. Hence, our perspective would not be a case of Descartes' cogito: rather, one is because one is in community.185 Instead of saying `I think, therefore I am,' we might proudly proclaim, "we interact, therefore we are."
Yet there is a tendency in the West to imagine community in terms of socialism and communism--things that bring to the fore the horrifying fantasy of fascism. Hillman wonders why it is that we do not use other images of community that encourage individuality within the group, rather than requiring conformity to some idealized form. There are, he declares, images of "self as community that aren't totalitarian and in which individuality is respected."186 Furthermore, we must also avoid oppositional imaginations of self as being part of a mindless cog or of a self in absolute control of its existence. These kinds of fantasies, Hillman says, "keep us afraid of community. [They] lock[...] us up...[and we see ourselves as] separate selves all alone and longing for connection. In fact, the idea of surrendering to the fascist mob is the result of the separated self"187--something that Keller passionately speaks about in From a Broken Web, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Hillman believes that it is necessary to think of community in an altogether different way. Community is not a mob. Rather, as he puts it, "Community to me means simply the actual little system in which you are situated, sometimes in your office, sometimes at home with your furniture and your food and cat, sometimes talking in the hall with the people in 14-B. In each case your actual self, just as it is in each situation, a self among, not a self apart."188 For this reason, Hillman claims that it is "absolutely necessary for our spiritual life today to have community where we actually live."189
As noted, it is no longer sufficient for those of us living in the contemporary west to see ourselves as separated from nature, separated from each other, and separated from community. For Thomas Moore, a writer on archetypal psychology, "the psyche is not only multiple, it is a communion of many persons, each with specific needs, fears, longings, styles and languages. The many persons echo the many gods who define the worlds that underline what appears to be a unified human being."190 One of the soul's strongest needs is for community. Yet community from the soul's point of view is different from community in its social forms. Moore writes that "soul yearns for attachment, for variety in personality, for intimacy and particularity. So it is these qualities in community that the soul seeks out, and not likemindedness and conformity."191
To Moore, as with Hillman, the way to resolve our lack of community is found in not merely joining organizations "but by living through feelings of relatedness--to other people, to nature, to society, to the world as a whole. Relatedness is sign of the soul."192 Hence we find Moore agreeing with Hillman in suggesting that by admitting into the soul the inner and outer persons of the communities in which we are located, we come to understand community as serving as an impetus to the emergence of a sense of belonging in our lives.193 It is by locating in the soul an interiorized community and by locating the soul in an exterior community of animated things, that we give a sense of sacredness or fecundity to self as something founded in relationship as opposed to separation. Community, as it is depicted here, then, helps to further the deinstitutionalization of self while it breaks the distinction between interior and exterior, self and other, secular and sacred.
Andrew Samuels also notes that archetypal psychology is about relationship. He writes: "Hillman has produced a psychology that speaks directly of ordinary, human personal relationships, especially the childhood ones that it apparently eschews as its subject matter."194 To Samuels "the psychology of the soul turns out to be about relationship."195 If soul is indeed the means of connecting not only mind and body but also individual and world, and if polytheism gives space and value to all the things in the world and in the imagination, then we must conclude that archetypal psychology's fantasy necessarily includes community and relationship.
In the preceding paragraphs, we find that Hillman is continuing his critique of traditional psychology. He points out that most psychologists have yet to have left behind the traditional modern paradigm of the human condition as requiring separation and individuation as opposed to being embedded in an interrelated community made up of soul, body, and world. Hillman, as is demonstrated in Chapter One, has always taken a critical, even subversive approach to the notion of the unitary self, yet it is only in his most recent work that the idea of community has become predominant. As suggested above, this move towards community can be seen in his reaction to the concept of individuation--what Hillman calls a literalized Jungian fantasy of the process of unifying the Self; individuation is considered a process that may ultimately result in the reification of Self. To Hillman, the only way to justify using the word individuation today is to extend its meaning so that it refers to the "individuation of each moment in life, each action, each relationship, and each thing."196
Individuation, Hillman claims, must no longer reflect the inner journey that draws one away from the world, that takes concern away from the environment. By rejecting the traditional Jungian notion of individuation, we are beginning to be able to actualize the potential of the world. Thus a revised notion of individuation "begins with noticing, paying attention to the specifics of what is actually there so that it can become fully what it is. This is simply what therapy has been doing all along, only that its attention has been held exclusively to humans."197 Individuation, to many therapists, as Hillman points out, has traditionally reflected the belief that one's life will have more integrity if one is "whole" or made to be such. In my opinion, the basis of this fantasy of wholeness is found in the belief that we are born unified and our passage through life fragments or destroys that sense of unification--a theological bias in psychology which I suggest has roots in the belief in the theological doctrine of original sin. A consequent of this fantasy is that we must find a way of recuperating our sense of wholeness. But, Hillman asks, what if we were not born whole? Furthermore, "what if the quality of wholeness is not located in the individual but in a community that includes the environment?"198
With the exception of those following objects relations theory, therapists tend to ignore community. Hillman argues that "the basic frame of therapy is to withdraw from all of that, not to have `dual relationships'."199 In other words, the feelings involved in friendships are not supposed to even enter the sterile patient-analyst relationship. This means that therapy no longer speaks about love or eros; it is no longer a conversation about a real relationship. Nonetheless, it is one of psychotherapy's traditional tasks to bring love back into the world. Yet, the way that this is done almost always depends upon the Western fantasy of romantic love, in the heterosexual sense. But, as Hillman argues, this notion of romantic love serves the purpose of separating a couple from their community. If the invention of "romantic love" cuts us off from community, he argues, and if therapy deals with that relationship in such a way as to help cut you off from each other, then we could say that the notion of a personal relationship is a symptom of our separated culture. Hillman suggests, for instance, that our obsessive sexual fantasies come straight from Descartes. He writes that "Because Descartes, the good Jesuit-trained Christian that he was, declared to Western civilization that only human persons have souls,"200 there are no souls to be found anywhere else. "And, since love always seeks soul, you've got to have a `significant other,' as psychology calls it."201
Yet the West's popular images of the perfect man and woman are always found in an isolated setting. A setting of dead objects, of a de-souled world.202 Hillman claims that "sex addictions," as they have been called, are the end result of the Cartesian imagination: sex addictions are the soul trying to get out and love something other than itself; sex addictions are the soul attempting to find love in a predominantly dead world.203 He suggests that the West's excessively marketed desire for sexual gratification "is the drive in the human, not only for a significant other, which makes it too personal and Christian, but for communion with something wider. With the community itself, the soul."204 Hillman notes that we are not isolated selves, it is the notion of individualism that makes us feel separated.205 To Hillman this is the importance of community. He claims that it is necessary for the therapeutic enterprise to learn a language that communicates with the world--a language that allows therapists to imagine and approach all life as being embedded in and connected to the world. That is, there is a need to develop a language that includes the community, a language that makes community rather than fragments it,206 a language that makes community of the soul. For Hillman, "psychology has to recognize community because the psyche is a community."207 We cannot separate the soul in the individual from the soul in others and in the environment.208
By making a connection between soul and anima mundi, Hillman makes it possible to imagine selfhood anew in a similar manner to feminist concerns regarding a self that feels its connections to the external world. To provide a bridge between archetypal psychology and the thoughts of certain contemporary feminist thinkers about religion, in regard to selfhood and spirituality, it is necessary to outline some feminist criticisms of traditional paradigms of self, including such notions as the unified or separated self, Christian monotheistic biases in interpreting selfhood, the emphasis on the mind-body separation, as well as the excessive rationality of Enlightenment thought. If the critiques between Hillman and contemporary feminist thinkers are compatible, it is possible to initiate efficacious dialogue in regard to selfhood between archetypal psychology and contemporary feminist thought.
1 James Hillman. "A Note on Story." Loose Ends: Primary papers in Archetypal Pscyhology. (New York: Spring Publications, 1975), 2.
2 Ibid., 28.
3 James Hillman. Re-Visioning Psychology. (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 39.
4 Ibid., 41.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 42.
7 Carl Jung, The Collected Works. Volume 13. Translated by R.C.F. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), paragraph 75. (Cited in Hillman, Archetypal Psychology. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1988, 6).
8 James Hillman. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1988, [1983]), 6.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 24.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 11-15.
17 Ibid., 13.
18 Ibid., 14.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 Edward Casey. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 7.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 10.
24 Ibid., 10.
25 Ibid., 12-13.
26 Ibid., 13.
27 Ibid., 16.
28 Ibid., 17.
29 Ibid., 19.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 25.
34 Robert Avens. "Heidegger and Archetypal Psychology." International Philosophical Quarterly. June 1982 22(2):186. It is interesting to note that Avens makes the favourable comparison between Hillman and Heidegger on the basis of both men's approaches to the non-rational aspects of the psyche: soul and imagination. (183) Avens writes: "it is precisely this insight into the complicity of all thinking with a residual non-rational substrate that make possible a genuine dialogue between Heidegger and archetypal psychology."(184)
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 186.
38 Ibid.,188-189.
39 Ibid., 191.
40 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 9.
41 Ibid.
42 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, xi.
43 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 10.
44 Ibid., 3. Jung is, of course, the first immediate father of Hillman's archetypal psychology.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 4.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Andrew Samuels, The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father. London: Routledge, 1989), 163.
51 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 3.
52 Samuels, The Plural Psyche, 163.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 170.
55 Edward Casey. "Towards an Archetypal Imagination." Spring 1974: 21.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 23.
58 Thomas Moore. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. (San Francisco: HarperPrennial, 1992), xiii.
59 Casey, "Towards an Archetypal Imagination," 26.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 27.
64 Avens, "Heidegger and Archetypal Psychology," 185.
65 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, xi.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 23.
69 Ibid., 37.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 209.
72 Ibid., 135.
73 Hillman writes the following: "As truths are the fictions of the rational, so fictions are the truths of the imaginal." Ibid., 152.
74 Ibid., 41.
75 When I refer to the material world I do so as to indicate the empirical, physical, corporeal, and tangible world in which we are embedded. Furthermore, it is this mundane, physical world to which Hillman claims the soul reacts; it is to the mundane world that the aesthetic response, the thought of the heart, refers.
76 James Hillman & Michael Ventura. We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 50.
77 James Hillman. Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), 95.
78 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 51.
79 Ibid., 31.
80 Hillman writes the following: "I've been straining for decades to push psychology over into art, to recognize psychology as an art form rather than a science or a medicine or an education, because the soul is inherently imaginative." Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 154.
81 Ibid., 159.
82 Ibid., 125.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 128.
85 Ibid., 130.
86 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 25.
87 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 154.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 155.
91 Ibid., 156.
92 Ibid., 159.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., 69. Hillman also points this out in The Dream and the Underworld where he writes that "imagination works by deforming and forming at one and the same moment." That is, imagination works by pathologizing the world. It is the absurdity, fright, and delight caused by images that tear us free of our familiar, codified thoughts and memories of the world and ourselves. (James Hillman. The Dream and the Underworld, New York: Harper and Row, 1979, 128).
95 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 40f.
96 Ibid., 40.
97 Ibid., 41.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid., 45.
101 Ibid., 46.
102 Ibid., 47.
103 Ibid.
104 James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart. Eranos Lecture Series 2. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981), 26.
105 Ibid., 26.
106 Ibid., 28.
107 Ibid., 29.
108 Ibid., 36.
109 Ibid., 40f.
110 Ibid., 18.
111 Ibid., 20-23.
112 Ibid., 11-14.
113 Ibid., 3.
114 Thomas Moore agrees with Hillman: he writes that "religion and theology show us the mysteries and the rites that inform every piece of modern life. Without education in these fields we are mistakenly led to believe that the world is as secular as it appears to eighteenth-century Enlightenment eyes. As a result of this secular philosophy, the divine is met only in our personal psychological and physical illnesses....Therefore, a revival of the world view known as anima mundi is essential for the renewal of psychology and for genuine care of the soul." Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, 282.
115 James Hillman. "The Feeling Function." Lectures on Jung's Typology. With Marie-Louise von Franz. (New York: Spring Publications, 1972), 130.
116 Ibid., 131.
117 Ibid.
118 Hillman, Thought of the Heart, 28.
119 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 7.
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 8.
122 Ibid., 8.
123 Ibid., 8.
124 James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 121.
125 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 141.
126 Ibid., 93.
127 Ibid.
128 James Hillman. Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique. Eranos Lecture Series 4. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1986), 9.
129 Ibid., 10.
130 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 149.
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid., 6.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., 10.
135 Ibid., 9.
136 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 42.
137 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 150.
138 James Hillman & Thomas Moore. A Blue Fire. (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 37.
139 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 212.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid., 213.
142 Ibid., 214.
143 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 41.
144 Hillman, Egalitarian Typologies, 41.
145 Hillman, "The Feeling Function," 90.
146 Hillman, Egalitarian Typologies, 3.
147 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 47.
148 Ibid., 48.
149 Ibid.
150 Ibid.
151 Ibid.
152 James Hillman. "An Essay on Pan." Pan and the Nightmare. With W.H. Roscher. (New York: Spring Publications, 1972), xxxix.
153 James Hillman. "From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism." Spring 1989 (49):68.
154 Ibid., 70.
155 Ibid.
156 Ibid., 71.
157 Ibid.
158 James Hillman, "How Jewish is Archetypal Psychology?" Spring 1992, 53:129.
159 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 16.
160 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 12.
161 Ibid., 50.
162 Ibid.
163 Ibid., 51.
164 Still, Hillman can be criticized for not emphasizing the body's role in all of this. He needs to make the connection that soul-making not only occurs in the world but also in the body.
165 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 16.
166 Ibid., 46.
167 Ibid., 47.
168 Ibid.
169 Ibid.
170 Ibid.
171 Ibid., 48. Hillman gets the idea of the proprium from Gordon Allport's Terry Lectures Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). For Allport personality is part of our sense of self. It includes "habits and skills, matters of fact and cultural values, that seldom or never seem warm and important. But personality includes what is warm and important also--all the regions of our life that we regard as peculiarly ours, and for the time being I suggest we call the proprium. The proprium includes all aspects of personality that make for inward unity." (40) The proprium is said to consist of eight interrelated aspects to our sense of what makes who we are, including: bodily sense or coenesthesis--which provides an anchor to our sense of self; self identity--awareness of one's existence, identity and actions; ego enhancement--self assertion and the emotions of self-satisfaction and pride; ego-extension--characterized as an extension of a sense of self by identifying with the objects making up our world, animate or inanimate; the rational agent in which the ego "has the property of synthesizing inner needs and outer reality;" self image, of which there are two forms: how one perceives oneself now, and how one would like to be; the ego ideal, propriate striving or motivation that is based in the ego's attempts at achievement in regard to the future; the knower, "...a cognizing self--a knower, that transcends all other functions of the proprium and holds them in view...." (41-50) For Allport the interaction of all eight aspects of the self are involved in self-actualization, or becoming and, hence, increases the breadth of learning. (58) I am not sure why Hillman refers to the proprium in this regard. Perhaps Hillman must consider such notions as a `cognizing self,' which oversees all aspects of personality too similar to the rationalistic ideal of humanism and developmental psychology. Furthermore, this proprium overemphasizes the mythological theme of the hero, or Senex.
172 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 48.
173 Ibid.
174 Moore, Care of the Soul, 135.
175 Ibid., 158.
176 James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion. (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1967), 124.
177 Ibid.
178 Ibid.
179 Hillman, "From Mirror to Window", 71.
180 Ibid., 72.
181 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 40. I would point out that in this case Hillman begins to use the term `self'. This is a new move in his thought, and it is one that he neglects to explain sufficiently in his most recent work. Upon contacting him for clarification, I received an apologetic refusal to do so--he had his own projects and deadlines. The only clue Hillman could give me was to be careful of defining the characteristics of self, lest I involve myself in a `Senex' activity of categorizing and literalizing.
182 Ibid.
183 Ibid.
184 Before entering into a discussion of Hillman's thoughts about the relationship between polytheism and community, there are a couple of criticisms that need to be considered. First, Kenneth Lambert, in "Reflections on a Critique of Hillman's Approach to the Dream by W.A. Sheiburne," wonders whether the individuals that Hillman identifies as having a monotheistic temperament actually exist. Lambert believes they may be "`men of straw,' invented, perhaps, out of Hillman's provocative style to give us a jolt, lest deep down there could be more of the heroic-ego in all of us than we would like to admit." (Kenneth Lambert. "Reflections on a Critique of Hillman's Approach to the Dream by W.A. Sheiburne." Journal of Analytical Psychology 1984 29(1): 61-62).
This is an interesting comment. It plays on our awareness of Hillman's emphasis on the soul as primarily imaginative in nature. Lambert could be read as trivializing the heroic ego as a part of Hillman's imagination. It may well be that Hillman has overemphasized the role of the heroic ego, but in light of Keller's deconstruction of the separated self in regard to psychotherapy, theology, and philosophy it is hard not to be moved by the possibility that the monotheistic hero is not merely a `man of straw.' Although it may be an ideal or a metaphor belonging to imagination, literature, myth, and symbol, it still influences how we conceive ourselves.
A second critique of Hillman's thoughts about polytheism comes from Bernie Neville in "The Charms of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard, and the Postmodern Condition" in which he writes "Unfortunately, we are somewhat unpractised in polytheism. We don't know how to acknowledge all the squabbling gods together....When one god lets us down we tend to redirect all our worship to another." Although Neville may be right in claiming that we do not really understand polytheism as a culture, there is no reason to assume that we do not need such perspectives in our lives (Neville, in fact, suggests that polytheism is something we desperately need in contemporary society). The idea of polytheism can, for instance, provide a road into the understanding that we are not separated, that there are more things in the world than the monotheistic ego or god, and that we are connected to one another and not separated by a vast sea of metaphysical nothingness. (Bernie Neville. "The Charms of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard, and the Postmodern Condition." Journal of Analytical Psychology 37(2):351).
185 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 40.
186 Ibid., 42-43.
187 Ibid., 43.
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid.
190 Hillman & Moore, A Blue Fire, 39.
191 Moore, Care of the Soul, 92.
192 Ibid., 94.
193 Ibid., 95.
194 Samuels, The Plural Psyche, 17.
195 Ibid.
196 Hillman & Ventura, Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, 52.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid., 76.
199 Ibid., 177.
200 Ibid., 177.
201 Ibid., 178.
202 Hillman notes that we are taught to believe that romantic love offers us salvation from this isolation. Yet this is not to be the case, because as soon as a couple pair off in the Western fantasy of romantic love, they separate themselves from the rest of community. Thus, Hillman argues that "intimacy means anticommunity. And if the self means, as I define it, the interiorization of community, then finding the one and only, the significant other, only reinforces individualism." (Ibid., 180).
203 Ibid., 178.
204 Ibid.
205 Ibid., 179.
206 Ibid.
207 Ibid., 84.
208 Ibid., 53.