The “privileged mode of access to knowledge of soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii) is through the “raw materials and finished products of psyche” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii): fantasy images. Taken from Jung, we follow the poetic usage of the term to mean “the basic givens of psychic life, self-originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete, and organized in archetypal patterns” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvii). To have a psychology from the point of view of soul, you have to have a psychology that starts in the process of imagination. So our orientation shifts to being deeply concerned with our own processes of imagining. We have to pay close attention to the deep poetry going on in our own hearts and lives.
Like listening to the quite song playing across your spine.
To carry on a dialogue with it. A caring for our images and our relationship to them. To the fountainhead from which our images arise. We give this precedence. Not a back seat and not a sideways glance; we acknowledge it face-to-face. And we don’t dissect it. We don’t tear it apart for the sake of science. We let it breath. On it’s own. Meeting it, as it were, one being to another.
Lovers running a gentle finger down each other’s backs in the still hours of the morning.
It is the mechanism by which our world is made glorious and full of awe. That it defies the rational, concretized, literal perspective that has come to dominate our world only means that we have lost touch with the point of our existence.
That is all.
If we are not here to be filled with the grace of being here, I haven’t the faintest idea what we’ve come here for. But we deny these depths because our rational minds can’t adequately explain them. So we cut them off. And thus, alienate ourselves from the profound, unspeakable and unexplainable beauty of our existence. *1
And yet these Gods in our senses and in our Souls do not go away. They will fight to be heard with whatever is at their disposal. A thwarted archetype is a pathology. And our world is nothing if not pathological.
The great archetype of our time is that of the hero. “…feelings of independence, strength and achievement, in ideas of decisive action, coping, planning, virtue, conquest (over animality), and in psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masculinity and single-mindedness” (Hillman, 1975 p. xx). That which prefers “interpretations, analysis and conclusions” (Moore, 1982, p. 29). We have come to call this hero “ego”. All encompassing and with a brutal hand ego is a jealous God and would not have any others in its stead. It rules alone. Isolated and not a bit shack-whacky.
Re-Visioning Psychology eludes the ego and it’s needs. “So this is a psychology book without mention of conative striving, motivation or learning, free-will or choice”(Hillman, 1975, p. xx). Feelings of independence, feelings of achievement, planning, conquest, overpowering masculinity and single-mindedness…. These things we will (try to) leave at the door. Ego is a part of Soul – as everything is – but the heroic ego runs so counter to the rest of soul it is as if it were outside – and bearing down ruthlessly. To elude ego is to give the rest of soul – and within Soul the phantasmagoria of other archetypes, other perceptions and perspectives, other ways of being – a chance to come up for air. To be seen and heard.
We do this in part by moving from a monotheistic perspective to that of a polytheistic perspective. From the one – isolated and alone and driving itself crazy – to the many. Reaching back into the depths and finding the other voices. The other orientations that speak heretically of our egocentric lives and the terrors left in their wake.
1. I do not deny the horror of existence. I do, however, believe that our conception of beauty has to be broad enough to account for it.
