So I shall leave you with these more positive thoughts on Hillman's critique as I head off on holiday on Thursday. I shall try and post from holiday if the internet works!
Best wishes
Peter
James
Hillman and Soul-Making
Hillman has had a
huge influence on contemporary psychological culture and some of his views have
been accepted uncritically by others. However, if the current recurrence of
‘soul-language’ in psychological literature is primarily because of Hillman if
we want to understand that language there is no better place to begin than with
Hillman, in all his contradictions and ‘twists and turns’. Yet, in addition to
this somewhat negative reason for reading Hillman I would like to suggest
before reaching our conclusions in this chapter, that we might find more
positive aspects to Hillman’s approach:
1.
‘The Third Path’
As well as his
critique of the ‘over-spiritualization’ of the psyche, Hillman, let us not
forget, is equally a trenchant critic of the over-scientism and reductionism
within contemporary approaches to the psyche. The past few decades, since
Hillman started his writing, have seen a marked reduction in the significance
of the spiritual and religious control of the psychological therapies. The same
cannot be said for the empirical and pseudo-scientific approach. Indeed, in
many respects, with the rise of quasi-neurological ‘explanations’ and
‘interpretations’ of the mind it seems as though this approach may have reached
its zenith in recent years. Along with Wittgenstein (whose objections we shall
return to in the following chapter), Hillman had a justifiable and deep-seated
suspicion of the over-idolisation of psychology as a ‘science of the mind’ and
was every bit as trenchant as Wittgenstein in challenging the unquestioning
acceptance of this position. His own approach was to advocate a ‘third path’
between reductionism and idealism, theology and science, which gave him, he
believed, the right to challenge scientific and medical models of psychology,
especially psycho-pathology:
As
connecting link, or traditionally third position, between all opposites (mind and
matter, spirit and nature, intellect and emotion), the soul differs from the
terms which it connects. (RP, p.174)
For:
The
science fantasy with its reliance upon objectivity, technology, verification,
measurement, and progress – in short, its necessary literalism – is less a
means for examining the psyche than for examining science.
Our
interest lies not in applying the methods of science to psychology (to put it
on a ‘sound scientific footing’), but rather in applying the archetypal method
of psychologising to science so as to discover its root metaphors and
operational myths. ( RP p.169)
Distrusting too the contemporary
language of psychopathology - ‘the descriptions of the alienations, sufferings
and bizarre life of the soul’ MA121 – Hillman felt that such a language ‘insults
the soul’. Only psychotherapy as imagination (and very much out of the academic
context) can ‘unleash the soul’ MA 122. Whether we accept Hillman’s critique or
not (and many academic psychologists will of course simply dismiss it), as with
his critique of organised religion, there is much here to challenge some of the
basic, unthinking assumptions upon which contemporary psychology (especially
academic psychology) is built, and to which it should answerable. As we have
seen in these last two chapters, Hillman and others can both best be described
as ‘psychological heretics’ and it may ultimately be to our advantage to heed
their criticisms (or at least take them seriously as I have done here) rather
than rushing them immediately to the Stake.
In
conclusion, Hillman challenges all professionals, no less professional
psychologists as well as ministers of religion, to look again at unexamined
concepts of self and the psychological life. As he puts it in Insearch p. 46
‘let the clergy follow the imitatio Christi rather than imitate psychotherapy’
2.
The symbolic/mythic self
With Rank we saw that
creativity must play a decisive role in any future ‘soul-psychology’. Likewise,
with Hillman we see the importance he attached, as a post-Jungian, to the role
of imagination and the symbolic. As he puts it in Revisioning Psychology:
Psychological
faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of
persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections and imaginations... (the ego’s)
trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly
presented, immediately felt. p.50 RVP
For analysis goes on
in the soul’s imagination and not just in the clinic:
Essential
to soul-making is psychology-making, shaping concepts and images that express
the needs of the soul as they emerge in each of us p. Xviii RP:
We let imagination
speak for itself without interpretation. As we saw in last chapter from the
Wittgensteinian perspective, psychology as a peculiar art, takes the Weltbild
to view the ‘foundation of possible Weltanschauungen’:
‘Insight
would no longer mean translation, no longer mean the reformulation of imaginal
speech into psychological language, mainly through understanding our fantasies,
interpreting our dreams. We would let the insight contained with the fantasy
appear of itself, in its own ‘intrinsically intelligible’ speech’ MA p.201 .
Or
as my training analyst, Hymie Wyse, used to put it, in analysis the analyst
must pray: ‘Lead us not into interpretation!’ The soul/psyche for Hillman is at
root imaginal and myth is in the natural discourse of the soul. In an earlier
work (Teresa of Avila) I stressed the links between the postmodern Jungian view
of the symbolic with the premodern medieval understanding of the symbol. As a
great medievaelist/renaissance man, Hillman, like his mentor Jung, recognises
the symbolic nature of the psyche and how the psyche really lives in the realm
of the symbolic and mythic, for ‘the imaginal does not explain, myths are not
explanations’. As such the symbolic utterings of the soul ‘are bound to ritual
happenings; they are stories, as our fantasies are, which project us into
participation with the phenonemena they tell about so that the need for
explanation falls away. ‘ p. 202 MA
For
Hillman, ‘the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogues, in images, that’s its
primary language’ (lament of the dead p.81). The psyche, for Hillman, is in its heart essentially symbolic
– it is ‘its natural language’. For
By
soul I mean the imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing
through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy – that mode which
recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical RVP xvi
3.
The Importance of Relationship
Hillman wants to use
his soul-language to place relationship once again at the heart of psychology –
rather than pathology or intellectualisation. Against psychopathologies and all
terminology of pathology, Hillman rather calls for psychology to be a ‘speech
that lead to participation, in the Platonic sense, in and with the thing spoken
of, a speech of stories and new insights, the way one poem and one tune ignite
another verse and another song’ (MA p.206). For:
Psychological
work begins with the human meeting. What we know and have read, our gifts of
intelligence and character – all we have gained through training and experience
leads to this moment. (insearch p.16)
It is, as he
repeatedly stresses, a work of love, and the jargon and styles of psychology
can often get in the way of the love-relationship that must lie at the heart of
all true psychology.
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