If a book had the power to redeem 2020 for me, this one would be it. It’s so refreshing to read a book that manages to change your mindset or show you old things in a new and surprising way, and this one succeeds at both. At the same time, the book gave form and substance to ideas that had been floating around my mind since my disillusionment with psychology (as it is typically taught) during my undergraduate degree and beyond. It reminded me of one of my favourite quotes of Montaigne: ‘We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.’
James Hillman was a psychologist and Jungian psychotherapist who founded the movement of ‘archetypal psychology’. The approach is an invigorating blend of philosophy, religion, myth, art, history, classicism, literature, depth psychology, rhetoric, and more…
The general idea of the book – if it could be summarised easily, which it cannot – is that we humans are both myth-makers and made-by-myths. There is not one ‘I’ within us that directs and controls us, nor something so coherent as an ‘ego’ à la Freud. Hillman complains that ‘diversification of personality, and its differentiation and vivification have been suppressed. “Integration of personality” has become the moral task of psychotherapeutics.’ (2) Instead, we are better thought of as a composite of various mythical archetypes or Gods that have been carried through culture down the ages, and at times we are led by some more than others. Some situations call for certain Gods rather than others, as all are characters each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a distinct way-of-being. Before I go further, it is worth noting that none of this should be taken literally – literalism is one of the most insidious culprits that Hillman identifies as holding too much power in our era, and that is why he relies on the Ancient Greek mythical personas as the ‘archetypes’ that govern our soul. Hillman defines archetypes in a helpful way for those of us unfamiliar with Jung’s work, as ‘the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world.’ (xix).
For psychology to return to ‘the soul’, we must remain cognizant of the power each of these various Gods holds within ourselves and allow each space to exist freely, and in relation with the others. That is the benefit of both dreams and pathologies, both give voice to the characters that typically we may suppress when we aim for an integrated (but false) ‘wholeness’ under the ego or subjective ‘I’. I found this idea hugely liberating, and therapeutic in itself somehow. Thinking of our psychopathologies as means through which our internal ‘Gods’ are communicating with us to alert us to some kind of mis-alignment either within ourselves, or between ourselves and our environment, felt novel and comforting. The idea lets us both try to cure or resolve the conflict while allowing us to accept it on its own terms. His own words capturing the role our psychopathologies play are more bombastic, which makes for far more exciting reading: ‘do not forgive me the means by which the divine powers connect and become real: my complexes, which are my sacrifices to these powers … Forgiveness of the confusions in which I am submerged, the wounds that give me eyes to see with, the errant and renegade in my behaviour, blots out the Gods’ main route of access.’ (186)
Hillman’s approach in general also aligned with my feeling that psychology as a discipline had lost some of the creativity that is necessary to capture the immense complexity and richness that each of us hold within us. That was precisely why I turned to studying literature at postgraduate level after my undergraduate degree in psychology – and I was unsurprised to find that Hillman too had an academic background in literature. But literature and the arts are by no means the only disciplines that can enrich psychology, psychology can only gain by incorporating concepts and approaches from other disciplines, if only because humans (with other interests) are its subject.
There is far more in the book than I can adequately capture in one post, so I do really urge you to find a copy of this book and read it for yourselves.
Which book has been your favourite of 2020?
For Dora 