Topic: James Hillman
Below, I have posted an article on psychology from a newly begun conversation w/ a xanga friend (now the 2nd person on xanga i’ve met in person). First of all, I wonder how many people think about life on this kind of level. My guess is it’s more people than you think, since it’s really phenomenal the differences between real life conversation, and the conversations that occur here. If I was in a room w/ 10 people I knew from xanga, I’m sure I wouldn’t get half the conversation that I may stir up by simply asking this, “Why is it (or is this not the case?) that the writing and dialogue that goes on on xanga, is so unlike what you get on a day-to-day basis?
For me personally…I feel more comfortable writing here, than I do any other means of expression. I think one reason is it’s mostly a one-way conversation. While people do reply, I basically control the tempo, I can write and say whatever I please, without having to be concerned w/ an immediate reaction from anyone.
At one point…when my mind was bursting w/ ideas about education, I imagined a class where every student was assigned to blog. Probably best for smaller classes, but just imagine the possibilities! Suddenly, a student w/ no interest in the class, could read what’s going on in the head of that student who is soaking it all up, and perhaps, some of that would carry over. Essentially, this would create a 24/7 classroom.
If I pursue this professional counseling thing a bit more, I hope that I’ll have the potential to still infuse some of my educational philosophy. I wouldn’t want a patient (hmmm…what’s a better word for that?) to feel that after 40min., time was up. One of my old campers had a blog going, and it was hilarious to read her thoughts about her therapist. It would be like reading the thoughts of a student who couldn’t stand going to class. I think creating a real relationship between a counselor and client would be essential, and perhaps trying something innovative such as a blog, would allow the counselor to have much clearer access to the inner working of their client, thus giving them more of an opportunity to help.
Even if you don’t read the entire interview below…I just wanted to share some thoughts that I got from reading it.
First of all…I think people, such as Hillman, need to stop believing in utopia. Mental health problems have existed for all of eternity, and will continue to. In some ways, I’m sure humanity is better because of it. It’s the whole, “you need pain and suffering to enjoy pleasure and joy,” thing. So…while our modern society could certainly be structured in a way lessened mental health issues, we cannot simply wish that, “the system was fixed.” We can blame schools, we can blame capitalism, we can blame bad people in the world who make things worse for everyone else…but we can’t start from the premise that, “we can’t keep fixing the leaks, we need to fix the faucet.”
For a while…I wanted to fix the faucet. Until education was radically changed, nothing else matters. Well…the reality is clear, education will not change radically, and a new reality has evolved, other things do matter. It comes down to making the best of what we have. Hillman says, “you can’t fix the person until you fix society.” He is critical, I think, of therapy because it tries to fix the person. Again…therapy is making the best of what we have…and i’m sure Hillman is supportive of those therapies that don’t tell clients, “you’re not normal,” but that instead help them to thrive in a difficult world.
The hardest thing for me, is to think more in terms of, “how do I thrive in this world,” versus, “this world isn’t meant to be thriven in.”
***from the interview***
London: You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we’re dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul’s code.
Hillman: I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one’s well-being on earth.
“Are we so miserable as a culture…” Wow!!! That’s a pretty powerful claim. Are we a miserable culture? Assuming he’s speaking about America, or implying a culture exists that is not miserable, or less miserable? Hillman goes right after our economics…and I slightly disagree. As I heard well-put in a recent capitalist car commercial, “you work 40hrs. a week, the weekend is 48hrs.”
The problem i have w/ Hillman, are his generalizations, “no one has any leisure.” And…the things is, I know where he’s coming from, but I think it’s important to use less radical language. It’s like saying, “everyone hates school.” You need to take the black and white together.
I think Hillman does address an important point regarding work.
London: What is the first step toward understanding one’s calling?
Hillman: It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.
I think the first step is the realization that each of us has [a calling]. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before.
I think reading this might be useful for me. The two things I do that are useful to others and I think people want from me
1) writing and 2) inspiration/thoughtprovoking/listening/discussing…
Now…while I am still trying to figure out how to make a living from this, I can at least relish the fact that I do somewhat achieve that here. These 2 things contribute to me feeling somewhat, “whole,” and I do think it’s important to feel this way as much as possible in our lives.
On Soul, Character and Calling:
An Interview with James Hillman
James Hillman has been described variously as a maverick psychologist, a visionary, a crank, an old wizard, and a latter-day philosopher king. Poet Robert Bly once called him “the most lively and original psychologist we’ve had in America since William James.”
He studied with the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1950s and went on to become the first director of studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich. After returning to the United States in 1980, he taught at Yale, Syracuse and the universities of Chicago and Dallas. He also became editor of Spring Publications, a small Texas publisher devoted to the work of contemporary psychologists, and wrote twenty books of his own.
In spite of these achievements, Hillman is anything but an establishment figure in the world of psychology. If anything, he is looked upon by many in the profession as a profoundly subversive thinker, a thorn in the side of respectable psychologists.
As the founder of archetypal psychology, a school of thought aimed at “revisioning” or “reimagining” psychology, Hillman believes that the therapy business needs to evolve beyond reductionist “nature” and “nurture” theories of human development. Since the early 1960s, he has written, taught, and lectured on the need to get therapy out of the consulting room and into the real world. Conventional psychology has lost touch with what he calls “the soul’s code.” Overrun with “psychological seminars on how to clean closets or withhold orgasms,” psychology has become reduced to “a trivialized, banal, egocentric pursuit, rather than an exploration of the mysteries of human nature,” he says.
One of the greatest of these mysteries, in Hillman’s view, is the question of character and destiny. In his recent bestseller The Soul’s Code, he proposes that our calling in life is inborn and that it’s our mission in life to realize its imperatives. He calls it the “acorn theory,” the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak’s destiny is contained in the tiny acorn.
Hillman doesn’t like to give interviews and is a notoriously prickly conversationalist. He tells me he harbors a deep mistrust of journalists and interviewers. “People have a terrible desire to talk about themselves,” he says. They call it ‘sharing,’ but it’s really chewing out someone else’s ear. Well, I don’t have that desire.”
So why consent to an interview with me? “Because I’m a nice guy,” he says with a mischievous grin. Ideas are like children, he adds, “and you should try to get your children into the world if possible, to defend them and help them along. I don’t think it’s enough just to write and throw it out into the world. I think it’s useful to have to put yourself out there a little bit for what you believe.”
Hillman and I met at the library of the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California, where his papers and archives — along with those of Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas — are collected. We could hardly have found a more evocative setting for our conversation than this book-lined study, filled as it is with the personal books and belongings of three of the 20th century’s great minds.
Scott London: You’ve been writing and lecturing about the need to overhaul psychotherapy for more than three decades. Now all of a sudden the public seems receptive to your ideas: you’re on the bestseller lists and TV talk shows. Why do you think your work has suddenly struck a chord?
James Hillman: I think there is a paradigm shift going on in the culture. The old psychology just doesn’t work anymore. Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn’t do anything — or that it doesn’t do enough.
London: You’re not a very popular figure with the therapy establishment.
Hillman: I’m not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that’s not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I’m trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it’s also in the system, the society.
London: You can’t fix the person without fixing the society.
I don’t think so. But I don’t think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, “What’s wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?” We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.
London: You’ve said that you usually write out of “hatred, dislike, and destruction.”
Hillman: I’ve found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that’s behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I’m an accident — a result — and therefore a victim.
London: A victim?
Hillman: Well, if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. Or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result.
London: What about the idea that we are self-made, that since life is an accident we have the freedom to make ourselves into anything we want?
Hillman: Yes, we worship the idea of the “self-made man” — otherwise we’d go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he’s a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It’s unbelievable, yet it’s part of that worship of individuality.
But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual.
London: In The Soul’s Code, you talk about something called the “acorn theory.” What is that?
Hillman: Well, it’s more of a myth than a theory. It’s Plato’s myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.
The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormon’s have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn’t have it.
London: In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of “vocation” or “career.”
Hillman: Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In his book on ethics, three or four chapters are on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it’s hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it’s not a vocation.
London: Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are still expected to have a vocation above and beyond being a mother.
Hillman: Right, it’s not enough just to be a mother. It’s not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It’s a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood — the sense that motherhood isn’t itself a calling — also arises from economic pressure.
London: What implications do your ideas have for parents?
Hillman: I think what I’m saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying, “This is my child,” they must ask, “Who is this child who happens to be mine?” Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid’s destiny might show itself — like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on there that the parents didn’t see before.
London: Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.
Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my book that illustrate this.
London: How much resistance do you encounter to your idea that we chose our parents?
Hillman: Well, it annoys a lot of people who hate their parents, or whose parents were cruel and deserted them or abused them. But it’s amazing how, when you ponder that idea for a little bit, it can free you of a lot of blame and resentment and fixation on your parents.
London: I got into a lengthy discussion about your book with a friend of mine who is the mother of a six-year-old. While she subscribes to your idea that her daughter has a unique potential, perhaps even a “code,” she is wary of what that means in practice. She fears that it might saddle the child with a lot of expectations.
Hillman: That’s a very intelligent mother. I think the worst atmosphere for a six-year-old is one in which there are no expectations whatsoever. That is, it’s worse for the child to grow up in a vacuum where “whatever you do is alright, I’m sure you’ll succeed.” That is a statement of disinterest. It says, “I really have no fantasies for you at all.”
A mother should have some fantasy about her child’s future. It will increase her interest in the child, for one thing. To turn the fantasy into a program to make the child fly an airplane across the country, for example, isn’t the point. That’s the fulfillment of the parent’s own dreams. That’s different. Having a fantasy — which the child will either seek to fulfill or rebel against furiously — at least gives a child some expectation to meet or reject.
London: What about the idea of giving children tests to find out their aptitudes?
Hillman: Aptitude can show calling, but it isn’t the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough. Or there can be a very slow formation of character.
London: What is the first step toward understanding one’s calling?
Hillman: It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.
London: You’ve written that “the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached.” What do you mean by that?
Hillman: It is a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don’t talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no theology in it. But it’s the only way we human beings can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.
London: God?
Hillman: Yes, but it doesn’t have to be that lofty.
London: Our calling?
Hillman: I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.
London: In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers of The Soul’s Code have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?
Hillman: Well, some reviewers has a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.
My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as “new age.” If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn’t go far enough — it’s too rational.
London: I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.
Hillman: I’ve been wrestling with these questions for thirty- five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can’t go back over that again. I can’t put that into a two-word answer. I can’t. Wherever I go, people say, “Can I ask you a quick question?” It’s always, “a quick question.” Well, my answers are slow. [Laughs]
London: You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we’re dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul’s code.
Hillman: I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.
Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one’s well-being on earth.
London: It’s hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.
Hillman: Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:
You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy
What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You’re really happy. Just stop for a minute and you’ll realize you’re happy just being. I think it’s the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it’s right here.
