HILLMAN, JAMES – FINDINGS

A) Emotion : A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy (1961)

· Emotion is the only mode of apprehending, cognizing and experiencing certain aspects of existence. Examples would be the numinosum or the love-encounter where the other is grasped through the emotions. It is only through emotion that we are led to higher spiritual and aesthetic awareness, and to God.

Practically, this point of view means that there is so much hatred, fear and depression in our lives because there is so much to hate, fear and be sad about. The emotions only cognize the real facts. These real facts are in the social world and not only subjective ideas and images within the personal psyche of the perceiver. And so these emotions are not conditions to be medicated and cured away for the sake of normalcy. Such a therapeutic approach to the negative emotions is, in fact, a perversion of man’s relation to his world which is objectively given as evoking hatred, fear and depression.

On this view, normalcy itself takes on another meaning: what is normal and real is what is presented by emotion. The concept of normalcy then becomes based on importance, on meaning, on value and not on collections of data. With this concept of normalcy, or reality, therapy would consist not in the adaptation of the patient’s emotion to his (or the therapist’s) view of normal reality, but in adaptation of the patient to his emotion which, as the vision of the psyche, tells the truth about the world. Such an adaptation would mean living an emotional life, with all its hatred, fear and depression, which in turn might well lead, as some writers suggest, to the higher life of art and morality and to God.

· If emotion is reason - if it signifies, expresses and communicates - the fundamental form of therapy is education. Education of the emotions, like all education, would aim at refining the modes of communication, expressions and apprehension of the world, involving primarily a transformation of values, of meanings, of the sense of importance. In therapy, modern man in search of spirit might turn to his emotions and his psychosomatic symptoms to see what spirit might be distilled from them.

· Emotional behaviour corresponds with the symbolic aspect of objective reality. There is emotion because the world is being apprehended and lived through a symbol. The symbol is thus the emotion itself in the aspect of an exciting image.

· Emotion is the total pattern of the soul.

· As Freud, James and Watson each point out, an essential fact of emotion is that it terminates in the subject’s own body. Whether one likes this or not the fact remains, as psychosomatic symptoms demonstrate. Therefore, the very first step in the development of emotion is going with the “downward discharge”. One chooses the gross demonstrations of the body which by this choice becomes less autonomous and are given the dignity of consciousness. This is living emotion in terms of its final cause: to love one’s own body. A fall into ‘the flesh’ is at the same time a discovery of spiritual riches. Emotion is a gift of both flesh and spirit; as well, emotion is also a danger, for any gift can be a curse or a blessing, or a blessing in disguise. Since the psyche as a whole is not grasped by consciousness alone, emotion is always a risk element. To be known, emotion must be lived.

B) The Myth of Analysis (1972)

· One is incapable of working in the psychological field of another person unless one works through one’s own soul as an instrument.

· As Jung often said, we can only go with another as far as we have gone with ourselves, and vice versa.

· The world and its humanity is the vale of soul making.

· Homer’s psychic intervention, Socrates’ ‘inner voice of warning’ or the Onians’ ‘individual genius’ translates - in Christian contexts - as the still, small voice of the immanent God –i.e. conscience.

· Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity can be born. Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for its revivication. Aristophanes writes even of their mating. Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and confusions which are its nest. It renews itself in affective attacks, jealousies, fulminations and turmoil. It thrives close to the dragon.

--- The mythic relation of Eros and Chaos states what academic studies of creativity have long said, that chaos and creativity are inseparable.

· ‘Transference reactions’ and ‘transference neurosia’ are resistances and counter action by the analysand to the effects of ‘eros’ coming from the analyst. Such is the alpha and omega of the creative work. (Examples being the moods and arguments brought against Socrates by his pupils – i.e. the torpidity of the ‘receiver’ soul to modification.)

(Quote from Jung –“Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously torpid, conservative. Only acute necessity is able to arouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force of inner or outer fatalities.”)

Until one’s own daimon has caught fire there is the legitimate need for the other’s spark of eros for my own self-development.--- As in any creative work, the ‘opus’ has its effect on the operator. The analyst himself is transformed. --- Love may melt one down, but it must burn deep and very long to transform and educate the historical level of one’s unconscious soul patterns.

· Man, it is said, was created in the divine image; the psyche of man somehow mirrors or clings to the Divine.

· History as reflection – during the period 1934/38 the 4 intrusive psychiatric treatments (insulin coma, cardiozal convulsion, pre-frontal lobotomy and electroshock) were introduced/initiated in the respective Fascist countries of Austria, Hungary, Portugal and Italy.

· Psychopathology is the reason’s own mythic system, with which it grasps the demons of the soul, differentiates its voices, produces an intelligent account.

· The babble of inner voices produces contradictions of will, florid fantasies, the spectra of view points, the conflicts and choices; the inner Babel means we cannot comprehend ourselves. --- The Church faced the question of multiple souls and voices in its Catechism which states “The three powers of my soul are my memory, my understanding and my will – the likeness of the Blessed Trinity.”

· Try as we may, we cannot make insights with reason or will. Something imaginative is needed.

· Depression and suffering belong to consciousness and are part of its composition, not afflictions coming to it unconsciously, making it unconscious, dragging it down and away, lowering its level. Depression is thus not a sign of inferiority or defect.

· Depression may be a crisis of both mood and energy; also it is a crisis of belief. By believing in the God and believing that - as He always goes away - so will He always return, the movements can be respected as natural and necessary to libido itself.

· Hysterical reactions are the psyche’s desperate attempts to re-find nature, the body, to incarnate and find initiation into life.

C) “We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse” - Co-author Michael Ventura (1992)

· Therapy – i.e. abreaction (getting it out) comprises “You’re in IT (the Problem) for a while, then you’re with it for a while, and then you VISIT it.”

· The primary activity of the psyche is imaging. --- What we are, REALLY, and the reality we live, the psychic reality, is the poetic imagination going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such stuff as dreams are made of.

--- If at the soul’s core we are images, then we must define life as the actualization over time of that originating seed image - and that image - not the time that actualized it - is the primary determinant in your life.

· I am NOT caused by my history – my childhood, my parents and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image. Ventura observes - The disruption people feel at the entrance of a child into their lives is that they’re feeling the pull and influence of its own momentum, its own destiny, which may in the long run have very little to do with theirs. The fantasy of a child’s blank slate, of innocence, is an attempt to ignore, minimize and/or control that momentum.

· Your life is the ongoing operation of imagination; you imagine yourself into existence, or, let’s say, an image is continuing to shape itself into the oak tree you consider your reality.

· Time is not the primary factor; AN IMAGE IS NOT CUMULATIVE, AND THE LATE STAGES OF LIFE ARE NOT THE FULLEST AND FINEST PRESENTATION OF ONE’S SEED.

· To try to keep life essential, in accord with the seed, one exercises sensitive responses in the daily round.

· MICHAEL VENTURA’S concept of THE WATCHER – that sense of a constant companion, who is you yet more than you, and who seems always with you, watching from a slight distance --- always a bit older than you, usually silent, features indistinct – not actually passive but rarely active. Its action is to watch. It’s outside of you (glimpsed in the mirror sometimes). Anyone who travels alone is aware of this companion – the sense of being in the company of oneself, - the presence from which comes the mood of your solitude. It is necessary to befriend one’s Watcher – not make an enemy of it, nor a judging ‘conscience’. Then despite one’s own dislike of oneself (for one’s tabooed actions and thoughts) your Watcher will be calm, non-judgmental and a friend to one’s solitude.

Notwithstanding the lack of formal recognition for the ‘Watcher’ entity (as a cultural concept) the sense of it is so common that it is taken as a given. During bad times one’s relationship with one’s Watcher is critical. It may be all one has then. The Watcher does not appear to care about society or morality or the idea of good or evil. The Watcher cares about YOU, and if it’s on your side to begin with, it’s all the way on your side.

(Reference to Robert Bly from ‘Iron John’ – “When we do look into our own eyes (in the mirror)---we have the inescapable impression, so powerful and astonishing, that someone is looking back at us---that experience of being looked back at sobers us immediately---someone looks back questioningly, serious, alert and without intent to comfort; and we feel more depth in the eyes looking at us than we ordinarily sense in our own eyes as we stare out at the world. How strange! Who could it be that is looking at us? We conclude that it is another part of us, the half that we don’t allow to pass out of our eyes when we glance at others - and that darker and more serious half looks back at us only at rare times.”)

· Ventura queries “In the madness contexting/running sexual relationships, one asks oneself ‘What are the people saying? Do my friends like her; can they talk to her? Does she like them? Does my family like her – or, if I’m trying to break with my family, do they NOT like her? If we’re thinking of children, do I really want something of her father in my son? How do I feel when I walk down the street with her? What are the people saying?’”

Hillman’s response – “There’s a communal aspect to love. Love does not simply exist as a private tryst or trust between two people in a personal relationship; it’s a communal event.” and “The people are thinking/saying ‘Is this good for us all?’ and this is different from ‘Is it good for you?’ They ask ‘Is this good for us? Is this going to bring fruit and benefit to us? Or is this going to bring new disturbances to us?’”

· Hillman -“I am working toward a psychology of the soul that is based on a psychology of IMAGE. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the processes of imagination.”

D) The Dream and the Underworld (1979)

· At variance with ideas of repression (Freud) or of compensation (Jung), dreams are imagined in relation with soul, and soul with death. The entire procedure of dream interpretation aimed at more consciousness about living (interpretive or predictive purposes) is radically wrong – (wrong = harmful, twisted, deceptive, inadequate and mistaken).

· Only the way of soul can lead to true insight. Soul-making is an operation of plumbing the depths for “understanding”; penetrating into depths that makes insights as one proceeds, increasing insight dimension thereby; hidden connections within deeper dimensions.

· By the call of soul to Hades, I refer not to literal death, but to the sense of purpose that enters whenever we talk about soul. What does it want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individual process going? If we stare these questions in the face, of course we know where our individual process is going – to death. The ultimate goal is the one absolutely sure event of the human condition. Hades is the unseen goal and yet absolutely present.

· Each dream is a child of Night’s brood, affiliated closely with Sleep and Death, and with forgetting all that the daily world remembers. Dreams have no father, no call upwards. They come only from Night, and have no home other than in that dark realm. [Hesiod’s ‘Brood of Night’ comprises the twin brothers Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), and their siblings Old Age, Envy, Strife, Lamentation, Destiny, Deceit and Dream.]

· Dreams are akin to deceits and conflicts, to the lamentations of aging, to the doom of our destiny – in a word: depression. The dream takes us downward – to the corresponding mood of the slowing, saddening, introspective feeling of depression.

· Dreams reflect an underworld (Hades) of essences rather than an underground (Demeter or Ge) of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becoming.

· To consider the dream as an emotional wish (Thymos/aspiration) costs soul; to mistake the chthonic (underworld) as the natural loses psyche. We cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream images in terms of drives or desires.

· Physicians are more prone to suicide than men in other occupations, and at the top of the suicide list of medical specialists are psychiatrists.

· In the underworld [soul/dream] is a place without light in which shadows move. Shadows without light?? Trying to catch a glimpse of the shadow behind the scenes, to tune into what else is going on in what seems to be a natural action or simple conversation is precisely ‘trying to see shadows in the dark.’ It is to notice the fantasy in the moment, to witness the psyche’s shadow play in our unconscious daily living. Consciousness of this sort is reflective, watching not just the physical reality in front of the eyeballs and by means of them, but seeing into the flickering patterns within that physical reality, and within the eyes themselves. It is a perception of perception, or as Jung says about images: they are the self-perception of instinct. Our blind instinctual life may be self-reflected by means of imagining, not after or before events in the closet of introspection, but as an eye or ear that catches the image of the event as it occurs.

· In the underworld, with thymos (blood/vitality) gone, and with it physical space and the world of action, here in DEATH there is space enough to take in the same physical world but in another way – for the soul to regain contact with all that is lost in life. Shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld.

· The experience of having one’s life judged by one’s shadow makes life seem ‘as if it had been a dream’. What goes on in the life of the ego is merely the reflection of one’s deeper essence contained in the shadow.

--- Rather than viewing the soul as the expiator in a nightworld for our shady actions in the dayworld, we may imagine dayworld actions to be expiations for shadows we have not seen. As long as we act in the heroic mode, we are driven by guilt, always paying off.

· According to Freud, hate has the same objective as love – both seek pleasure, for which hatred uses the ego to destroy pain.

· The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is a numen .The underworld images are visible only to what is invisible in us, i.e. the psyche.

· A dream is not made by something other elsewhere. Rather, the “I” who searches for the causal conditions of the dream is myself of such stuff as dreams.

· Dreams are homeopathic by nature, i.e. they present in a simple image what we see in the language of opposites. In dreams of medically terminal patients (those upon whom the physician has prophesied death) the psyche seems to refuse to break itself apart into the opposites of life and death. The psyche sees no such distinction.

· The ways of the hero (ego) are in the service of a principle beyond the ‘will to power’ (Alfred Adler) – this is the principle of distinctions, whereby the soul clarifies ITS reality, limning lighter against darker to discern the sharper, the clearer.

· The pathological design of nature “to finally kill us” is evident in the effects of dreams (REM sleep) in heightening anxiety, blood pressure and even resulting in nighttime heart attacks: according to dream researchers, dreams are preponderantly unpleasant.

· Dreams can be killed by interpreters – the direct application of the dream as a message for the ego is probably less effective in actually changing consciousness and affecting life than is the dream still kept alive as an enigmatic image. --- Images, by satisfying instinct, will in themselves alter the way we live. The dream works upon consciousness and its dayworld by digesting the day-residues into soul-stuff – weaving the dayworld into another story. Only such changes that are changes in soul can affect the psychic aspect of one’s actions and relations.

· “De-formative activity of the imagination” is fundamental to alchemy – the hand of the God who takes things out of nature and into psyche through “de-forming” from our conscious life (memories) those elements necessary for the “soul-work”.

· That forgetting and dreaming have so close a relationship implies that dreaming itself is a process of forgetting, of removing elements out of life so that they no longer hold such interest, of letting slip, washed downstream, a movement out of ego into psyche.

· In the dream, we are not in ‘story-time’ but in ‘image–space’, where chicken and egg mutually require each other and are simultaneous correlatives. Notions of origin and of causality are also invalid constructs in an underworld perspective, for which time does not enter and the image presents an eternal (always going on, repetitious) state of soul.

· The self depicted in a mandala is a differentiated pattern of polytheistic persons and places, and not a simple monotheistic circle, ring, or sphere corresponding with Western desires for a unitarian monism.

· As a piece of objective nature, dreams have no moral axe to grind.

· If psychopathy belongs to the psychological underworld, then investigations of it begin where Freud left off: the death drive – not morality.

· In the Egyptian concept of the Ba, the idea depicted is not one of the soul living from the body’s matter, an epiphenomenon of diet (you are what you eat) but rather we are shown that the body draws on the soul for its nourishment. The life of the body needs the soul stuff of images.

E) The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling:

· The “acorn” theory of one’s innate image; each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. Each person enters the world “called”. (Ref. – Plato’s Republic X)

· When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason YOU are here---to make a world receptive to your own daimon. Bearing witness to your own daimon, then set civilization straight so the child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life.

· When a child substitutes for your daimon you will resent that child, even grow to hate it, despite goodwill and high ethics. Like the vampires that so fascinate them, children in our culture - sentimentalized for their innocence and neglected on account of the bother they cause - drain away the blood of adult life.

· From R.M. Rilke

Sometimes a man stand up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his house,

dies there, inside the dishes and the glasses

so that his children have to go far out in the world

toward that same church, which he forgot.

· The secret of the source of the perceptive eye is that it is the eye of the heart. Something moves in the heart, opening to perceiving the image in the heart of the other. --- Seeing is believing – believing in what you see - and this instantly confers belief to whoever, whatever receives your sight. The gift of sight surpasses the gifts of insight. For such sight blesses; it does transformative work.Therapy promises the great delusion of insight. Better, it would be to display oneself as a phenomenon.

· ‘To be’ is first of all to be visible. Passively allowing yourself to be seen opens the possibility of blessing. So we seek lovers and mentors and friends that we may be seen, and blessed. Beyond the phenomenal are interpersonal reserves and shadows, which are not invisible. They show in reticence, in circumlocutions and euphemisms, in shaded, averted eyes, in slips, in hesitancies of gestures, second thoughts, avoidances. There is nothing plain about a face, or simple about a surface. The supposedly concealed is also on view and subject to keen sight, making up part of what any event affords to a good looker. The image that a mentor spots in a pupil or apprentice is neither all hidden behind, neither a false self nor a true one; there is no real you other than the reality of you in your image. The mentor perceives the folds of a complexity, those convex-concave, topsy-turvy curves of implication that are the truth of all imagination, allowing us to define an image as the COMPLETE HOW OF A PRESENTATION. Here I am, right before your eyes. Do you read me? --- The invisibility of the ‘acorn’ occurs in the How of a visible performance – in its traces, if you will. The invisible is thoroughly visible all through the oak and is not elsewhere or prior to the oak but acts like an implicate order enfolded all through the visible, like the butter in a French croissant or the fragrant air in risen bread: invisible, not literally as such, but the invisible visible. To see the acorn requires an eye for the image, an eye for the show, and the language to say what we see. Failures in our loves, friendships and families often come down to failures in imaginative perception: as the vision clouds, so do sympathy and interest.

· The eye of the heart that “sees” is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentation to an invisible core.

· The only possible unshared and unsharable phenomenon that is always around and impinging on my life is the uniqueness of the daimon and the individuality of my relation with it, and it with me.

· As caretakers, parents cannot also be mentors. The roles and duties differ. It is enough for a parent to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, and to get you up and off to school. Providing a cave of security, a place for regressions is no small job. Freed of these tasks, the mentor has only one: to recognize the invisible load you carry and to have a fantasy about it that corresponds with the image in the heart. One of the most painful errors we make is to expect from a parent a mentor’s vision and blessing and strict teaching, or expecting from a mentor shelter and concern for our human life.

· The phrase “I Love You” parroted between child and parent, without ideas, indignation, anxiety, fantasy, but only as an anesthetic, may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas and anxieties. There would be an avenging sensibility, a sense of real moral right and wrong, of judgment of good or bad weighing over the family. In families lacking love, the members have no fears, no desires, no strong angers or ambitions, no pity and no terror, no images nor language for their expression. They do share one fantasy: denial. It is not ultimately parental control or parental chaos that children run away from: they run from the void of living in a family without any fantasy other than shopping, keeping up the car, and routines of NICENESS.

· The ‘acorn’ or eternal twin holds all at once because its life is not in time.

· The craft of the soul’s ‘growing down’ into life is the wisdom of watching things with an eye to their effects.

· What determines eminence is less a call to greatness than the call of character, that inability to be other than what you are in acorn, following it faithfully or being desperately driven by its dream.

· You find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you’re estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will only get what you see; to see sharply, so that you can discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

· As you conduct your life, so you are and so you shall be. It’s quite illusory to hang onto a private, hidden, truer self apart from how you really are even if therapy promotes this grand illusion and profits from it.

· The capacity to deny, to remain innocent, to use belief as a protection against sophistications of every sort – intellectual, aesthetic, moral, psychological – keeps the American character from awakening.

F) PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARY to Gopi Krishna – “Kundalini – Evolutionary Energy in Man” (1971):

We have evidence that the development of ego and the development of awareness are separate matters. Gopi Krishna’s external ego situation in fact deteriorated in that he no longer had a job and was reduced to living upon the sacrifices of his wife, nor did he feel himself to be of any use even in the realm of therapy with all those who came with problems. Straightforwardly he tells the limits of the enlightened one: such a one may be of value in teaching or helping others who are on the same path, but he is not a miracle man. To assume this role would be to misuse the experiences. Gopi remained aware of his human limits, and he chose to remain within those limits.

By giving credit to his wife, he acknowledges an archetypal aspect of this path. It is not taken alone; there is always the ‘other’ – master, disciple, pupil, wife, friend, beloved – who is the silent partner, who represents the human love and care, who carries the other side, gives encouragement by believing, and is the mortal twin to the immortal urge.

The instinct of individuation, as the evolutionary energy in man, is given to every man.

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

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