"Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making."
- James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology
James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is inspired by Carl
Jung, yet Hillman, in the spirit of Jung himself, moves beyond
him to develop a rich, complex, and poetic basis for a psychology of
psyche as "soul." Hillman's writings are of the most innovative, provocative
and insightful of any psychologist this century, including Freud
himself. What makes Hillman's work so important is its emphasis on psychology
as a way of seeing, a way of imaging, a way of envisioning being human.
His work is truly originary and involves a radical "re-visioning" of psychology
as a human science. Hillman's roots are mostly classical, but in the service
of retrieving what has been lost to psychology and, thus, in the service
of psychology's future disclosure of "psyche" or "soul." The power of Hillman's
thought, however, has more to do with how he approaches phenomena
rather than what he has to say about it. Soul-making is a method,
a way of seeing, and this cannot be forgotten. Hillman's roots include
Renaissance Humanism, the early Greeks, existentialism and phenomenology.
His thought is rhetorical in the best sense of the word; thus, imaginative,
literary, poetic, metaphorical, ingenius, and persuasive. If nothing else,
one cannot read Hillman without being moved.
Hillman's work is "soul-making" and, in this sense, psychological (the
"logos" of the "psyche") in the truest sense of
the word. Hillman listens to the saying of the soul, and it speaks
in his writing through him. Of Hillman's use of the
term "soul," Thomas Moore writes:
"Hillman likes the word for a number of reasons. It eludes reductionistic
definition: it expresses the mystery of
human life; and it connects psychology to religion, love, death, and
destiny. It suggests depth, and Hillman sees
himself directly in the line of depth psychology, going all the way
back to Heraclitus, who observed that one could
never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths one
traveled, so profound in its nature. Whenever
Hillman uses the forms psychology, psychologizing, and psychological,
he intends a reference to depth and mystery."
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being
polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world
of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly
drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into
trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of
life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it
seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and
harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance,
a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.
This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences
between ourselves and everything that
happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there
is a reflective moment -- and soul-making
means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining
substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or
ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity,
ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul
appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed.
Though I cannot identify soul with anything
else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because
it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like
the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar
and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the
sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it
is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies
of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of
life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers
to that unknown component which makes
meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in
love, and has a religious concern. These four
qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun
to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with
psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am
adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the
deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul
makes possible, whether in love or in religious
concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by
soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our
natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image,
fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all
realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
Links
James
Hillman Web Site (Has everything!)
Interview
with James Hillman, on Force of Character (10/2/99)
"Archetypal
Psychology," excerpts from The Cambridge Companion to Jung
Worldguide
interview with Hillman
"Authenticity,
Character, and Destiny": An Interview with James Hillman
James
Hillman at Pacifica
Christine
Nordstrand on Hillman
Archetypal Psychology
"Corporatism,
Efficiency, and the Work of Imagination" by Larry Allums
"Hamlet
and the Grief Counselors" by Larry Allums
"Against
the Rules: Poetry, Form and Play" by Glenn Arbery
"Misfits,
Complacencies, and the Gods of Violence" by Glenn Arbery
"James
Hillman: The Thought of the Soul at Work" by Adriana Bottin
"Five
Questions to James Hillman" by Fabio Botto
"James
Hillman: From the Road of Soul-Making to the Re-Vision of Philosophy" by
Fabio Botto
"Snakes
and Ladders" by Erik Davis
"Calling
Forth the Soul" by Tammie Byram Fowles
"The Opposition
of 'Individual' and 'Collective' -- Psychology's Basic Fault" by Wolfgang
Giegerich
"Reply
to Greg Mogenson" by Wolfgang Giegerich
"Ontogeny
= Phylogeny? A Fundamental Critique of Erich Neumann's Analytical Psychology"
by Wolfgang Giegerich
Review
of Wolfgang Giegerich's The Soul's Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion
of Psychology
"Rhetoric and Philosophy"
by Ernesto Grassi
"Reflections on the
Duende" by Rafael López-Pedraza
"A
Stone Bridge North: The Meaning of an Ordinary Life" by Kate Maloy
"Doorways" by A.
W. Metcalfe
"The Bricoleur
in the Tennis Court: Pedagogy in Postmodern Context" by David L. Miller
"The Nose
Knows Values: Character and the Daimonic Education" by David L. Miller
"Dilemmas
in the Rhetoric of Assessment and Accountability" by David L. Miller
"Nothing Almost Sees
Miracles! Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion" by David L. Miller
"The Mythology
of a Consumerist Culture" by David L. Miller
"The Fire is in
the Mind" by David L. Miller
"The Legacy of
Joseph Campbell to the Postmodern History of Religions" by David L. Miller
Interview
with Thomas Moore at Amazon.com
Thomas
Moore Interview
"Anxiety
and Depression: A Philosophy Investigation" by Petra von Morstein
"The Knot between
Ricoeur and Derrida: A Look at Rhetoric in the Human Sciences" by Rex Olson
"Rhetoric
of the Masculine" by Marcus Quintaes
"Nous,
Ananke and Eros" by Marcus Quintaes
"What Does
'Archetypal' Mean?" by Stanley Richards
"The Charms
of Venus" by Stanley Richards
"Dark Angels" by
Stanley Richards
"The Gardens
of Maybe" by Stanley Richards
"You're Good
for Me" by Stanley Richards
"Eros,
Master of Perversity" by Stanley Richards
"The Troubadors and
Courtly Love" by Stanley Richards
"The Myth
of Normality" by Stanley Richards
"The Gates
of Hades" by Stanley Richards
"Altered States"
by Stanley Richards
"Spirit and Soul
in the Therapeutic Relationship" by Brent Dean Robbins
"Archetypal
Psychology" by Brent Dean Robbins
"Madness and Liberation:
A Journey to Cader Idris" by Brent Dean Robbins
"The Psychotic
Dr. Schreber: A Critique of Freud's Theory of Paranoia" by Brent Dean Robbins
"A Story of
Children's Stories" by Brent Dean Robbins
"Review of Pathways
into the Jungian World" by Brent Dean Robbins
"On the History
of Rhetoric and Psychology" by Brent Dean Robbins
"The Image" by Brent
Dean Robbins, Claire Cowan-Barbetti and Victor Barbetti
"Psychology is
Useless; Or, It Should Be" by Robert Romanyshyn
"The
Dream Body in Cyberspace" by Robert Romanyshyn
"Interview
with Robert D. Romanyshyn, Part 1" by Dolores E. Brien
"Interview
with Robert D. Romanyshyn, Part 2" by Dolores E. Brien
"Facing
the World with Soul" (excerpt) by Robert Sardello
"Spiritual
Psychology of Work" by Robert Sardello
"The Psychological
in the Neighborhood of Thought and Poetry" by Michael Sipiora
"Doorways, Divestiture
and the Eye of Wrath: Tracking an Archetype" by Evans Lansing Smith
"Approaching
the Dream" by Barry Stephenson
"Opposing
Selves--Roles and Masks" by Joanne Stroud
"Dreamages, A Primer"
by Timothy Tate and Barrett Golding
The
Divine at Play with Itself: Feng Shui with Feeling" by Gail Thomas
"Fairy
Tale Education" by Frederick Turner
Dallas Institute of Humanities
and Culture
Soulful Psychotherapy
The Salt Journal
Green Street
Janus Head
New Perspectives
Parabola
Soul Work: Cliff Bostock's site
James Hillman
thesis by Marc Fonda
Archetypal Astrology
Jonathon Young's
Mythic Realm
Alan Pert's
Home Page
"The Imminent
Renaissance and the Search for the Postmodern Odysseus" by Paul Firenze
Spring Publications
Ares Press
C. G.
Jung Page
Recommended Readings
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A
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Spring
56 (No 56. Issn 0362-0522.)
by James Hillman (Editor), Charles Boer (Editor)
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by James Hillman, Laura Pozzo
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Archetypal
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(Editor)
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by Benjamin Sells (Editor), James Hillman, Thomas Moore
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by Karl Kerenyi, James Hillman, Jon Solomon (Translator)
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Audio Cassettes
The
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by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, James Hillman
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