James Hillman  

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James Hillman (1926 - 2011) was an American psychologist who worked within archetypal psychology.

Biography

Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926. He identified himself as Jewish and European in ancestry. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944–1946, after which he attended the Sorbonne in Paris and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1950. In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst's diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969. In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978. His 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, was on The New York Times Best Seller List that year. His works and ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularized by other authors such as Thomas Moore. His published works, essays, manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence (through 1999) reside at OPUS Archives and Research Center, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.

Archetypal psychology

Archetypal psychology, Archetype

Archetypal psychology is a polytheistic psychology, in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths (gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals) that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. The ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. It is part of the Jungian psychology tradition and related to Jung's original Analytical psychology but is also a radical departure from it in some respects.

Whereas Jung’s psychology focused on the Self, its dynamics and its constellations (ego, anima, animus, shadow), Hillman’s Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the ego and focuses on psyche, or soul, and the archai, the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991).

Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology

By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced” (p. xvii).

The development of archetypal psychology is influenced by Carl Jung's analytical psychology and Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Indeed, Hillman’s influences are many, and include other artists, poets, philosophers, alchemists, and psychologists. One could easily include in this list Nietzsche, Heidegger, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for psyche.

Psyche or soul

Psyche (psychology), Soul

Hillman has been critical of the 20th century’s psychologies (e.g., biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. Main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman’s oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to what he believes to be "its proper place" in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, in fantasy, in myth and in metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or the soul’s suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman’s thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies.

Archetypal Psychology: A brief account was written in 1983 as a basic introduction to the psychology that Hillman has created. It covers the major themes set out in his more comprehensive work, Re-Visioning Psychology. The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place. Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture. This draws from a sense of images as that which a person is drawn to and looks at in a meaningful way. Indeed the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning. Further to Hillman's project is a sense of the dream as the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in "the Dream and the Underworld." In this text Hillman suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head. The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but rather there is a world full of images that this I inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology. He stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces it out of a medical understanding into a poetic one. In this idea sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon becomes known.

Dream analysis

Dream analysis

Because archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with “secret” meanings of how one should live, as did Jung. Rather, “dreams tell us where we are, not what to do” (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman’s approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image “something other” than what it appears to be in the dream). His famous dictum with regard to dream content and process is “Stick with the image.”

For example, Hillman (1983) discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake. The dream work would include "keeping the snake" and describing it rather than making it something other than a snake. Hillman notes that "...the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions" (p. 53). One would inquire more about the snake as it is presented in the dream and by the psyche. The snake is huge and black, but what else? Is it molting or shedding its skin? Is it sunning itself on a rock? Is it digesting its prey? This descriptive strategy keeps the image alive, in Hillman's opinion, and offers the possibility for understanding the psyche.

The Soul's Code

Hillman's 1997 book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the 'acorn theory' of the soul. This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It describes how a unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human being, and is displayed throughout their lifetime, and shown in their calling and life's work when it is fully blossomed or actualized.

It argues against the 'nature and nurture' only explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul, is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration, and achievement. It also argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth, including the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns. While acknowledging the importance of external factors in the blossoming of the seed, it argues against attributing all of human individuality, character and achievement to these factors. The book suggests reconnection with the third, superior factor, in discovering our individual nature, and in determining who we are and our life's calling.

Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn. He has written that he is to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He complements the notion of growing up, with the notion of growing down, or 'rooting in the earth' and becoming grounded, in order for the individual to further grow. Hillman incorporates logic and rational thought, as well as reference to case histories of well known people in society, in whose daimons are considered to be clearly displayed and actualized, in the discussion of the daimon. His arguments are also considered to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul of the individual.

Bibliography

• A Blue Fire - Selected Writings By James Hillman, Harper-perennial; Later Printing edition (2010)
• City and Soul, Uniform Edition, Vol. 2 (Spring Publications, 2006)
• Senex and Puer, Uniform Edition, Vol. 3 (Spring Publications, 2006)
• Archetypal Psychology, Uniform Edition, Vol. 1 (Spring Publications, 2004)
• A Terrible Love of War (2004)
• The Force of Character (Random House, New York, 1999)
• The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling (1997)
• Dream Animals, (with Margot McLean). (Chronicle Books, 1997)
• Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses (1995)
• Healing Fiction (1994)
• We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse (with Michael Ventura) (1993)
• The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992)
• A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman introduced and edited by Thomas Moore (1989)
• Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (1985)
• Inter Views (with Laura Pozzo) (1983)
• The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (1983a)
• The Dream and the Underworld (1979)
• Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)
• Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (1975a)
• Pan and the Nightmare (1972)
• Suicide and the Soul (1964)

See also

• Archetypal psychology
• Carl Jung
• Sigmund Freud
• Analytical psychology
• Polytheistic myth as psychology
• Wolfgang Giegerich