In Search of a Psychology of Soul
When I was younger, full of myself, and wanting to impress my colleagues with my budding interest in archetypal psychology, I suggested to attendees at a strategic planning session for our media company that the chairman’s wife should assume the role of corporate gypsy, fortune teller or budding alchemist, thus capturing the true zeitgeist of the place that was not reflected in balance sheets, cash flow antics and strategic action plans.
The other attendees, apparently understanding the fine art of corporate survival much better than I did, largely remained quiet, allowing me to remains afloat in my archetypal stew, without offering a lifeline or a way out. I don’t know if my tongue-in-cheek advice every made to the wife’s ears and did not remain in the company long enough to ask follow-up questions. This became the fate of an acolyte who, to mix metaphors, was too far out over his skis.
I picked up the fortune teller idea from psychologist James Hillman who had tilted at a few windmills in his time. This was a time of upheaval in my life with the deaths of my mother, sister and a divorce in quick succession. I was also experiencing dreams by what seemed like a hundred weights and reading around in psychology. I was immediately drawn to “Revisioning Psychology” by Hillman, a post-Freudian, post-Jungian archetypal psychologist who attempted to “free psychology from personalistic confines and to revert its vision to poetic principles and polymorphic Gods. Call it a program of animism, of ensouling the nonhuman, a program that would relieve the human of its self-importance.”
That appealed to the poet and writer in me. Still does.
Hillman wrote that his agenda was clear enough: “To restore the mythical perspective to depth psychology by recognizing the soul’s intrinsic affinity with, nay, love for, the Gods. Or, as the Greeks may have said, to reaffirm the tragic connection between the mortal and the immortal, that natural plight of the soul that lies at the base of any psychology claiming to speak of psyche.”
My son gave me a copy of “Revisioning Psychology” for Christmas in 1993 and I must have read it a dozen times since. I wrote Hillman a number of times before his death in 2011, thanking him for the book and sharing poetry that was prompted by his book. He was careful in the book and apparently in his life about making too much of the self, the ego and the inflation associated with these terms. This is what he is getting at when he writes about depersonalizing psychology, the literalism of the self and absolute belief. Hillman referred to the latter belief as either fundamentalism, delusion or literalism — or all of the Above.
“Revisioning Psychology” is a book about soul-making. It is an attempt at a psychology of soul. Hillman acknowledges the idea of soul-making comes from the Romantic poets, particular John Keats and William Blake. But the psychologist has to be a little more precise than the poet. For Hillman, soul is a perspective rather than a substance. In turn this perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and what’s around us. Soul-making is between the doer and the deed. It is a reflective moment that differentiates the middle ground.
For Hillman soul exists when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. And soul is independent of events in which we are immersed. The word soul “refers to that unknown component that makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.
Hillman adds that soul refers to the deepening of event into experience. Soul also refers to the “Imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic and metaphorical.” Hillman’s psychology of soul is psychology of image. This psychology doesn’t start in the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor in the analysis of behavior, but in the process of imagination.
Hillman points to his sources and influences from the arc of history. Heraclitus, one of the first thinkers “to take psyche as his ancestral first principle, to imagine soul in terms of flux and to speak of its depth without measure.” Plotinus, Plato, Ficino, Coleridge and others have contributed to the conversation about soul-making over the centuries.
In these thinkers, philosophers and writers Hillman found an archetypal sensibility with the archetype representing the deepest level of psychic functioning, ‘the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are axiomatic images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever returns.” They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models and paradigms we find in other fields, such as “God,” “energy,” “life,” “and “matter,” which are fundamental metaphors, perhaps even archetypes that hold worlds together and can never be fully grasped or circumscribed.
Archetypal psychology can be considered polytheistic, less out of any religious sense than out of psychological necessity. This position takes into consideration the many-sidedness of human nature and the variety of viewpoints within an individual. The idea of unity, for example, is one of many archetypal perspectives. In that spirit the book moves from a “monotheistic bias that has ruled our habitual psychological thinking; we are in search of further structures and wider myths. Our internal confusions are a latent richness. They require a differentiated background if they are to be appreciated adequately. Often we condemn images and experiences as wrong, weak, sick, or mad simply because we have not discovered their archetypal sense. Because our minds have been “monotheistically” prejudiced we forget to see things through other colors of the pluralistic spectrum.”
In his effort to revision psychology, Hillman writes that he has not gone East, primitive, animal, off into the future or on his own private inner voyage. “This book has the geographical, historical, and religious limits of our Western tradition,” the root of the amazing soul questions of the day.
Hillman might frown at this remark but I don’t think I have found any book I’ve read in the last thirty years that I have found as interesting, helpful, constructive, and baffling as “Revisioning Psychology.” In my personal, religious and psychological life, it’s been a blessing. It also opened up a wonderful new world of dream interpretation. Hillman’s treatment of religion, including the reminder that “there is always a God in what we are doing,” proved an indispensable insight when I was writing “Chanting the Feminine Down,” a psychological and religious novel that is also about soul-making. (I came close to dedicating the novel to Hillman, so much was his influence. In the end Boccaccio’s “Famous Women” won out.).
Freud acknowledged that he was an artist by nature. In “Revisioning Psychology” Hillman reveals that there is a novelist in him, a writer of healing fictions.
“Revisioning Psychology” is well worth the read.
