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The Dream And The Underworld

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Hillman wrote this book in the mid-seventies, and it is surprising to me how little effect it seems to have had on the various schools of dream interpretation. Perhaps this is because Hillman's "underworld" is an ambiguous, sometimes frightening place, a place where each psyche is rooted into the Beyond, and where daytime morality has no dominion. According to the author, the underworld and its dreams contribute to the making of Soul, and are not to be used as helps to fix up our daytime life. To do so is an act of exploitation. This clearly is at odds with our culture's fixation on mining one's dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional players in the status quo world we inhabit during waking hours.
Hillman carefully develops his ideas through looking at the work of Freud, Jung, and other twentieth century dream workers. He winnows out the wheat from the chaff, and uses the wheat to thrust dream interpretation forward, and farther away from the safe, cozy realm the ego would so much like to stay wrapped up in. One gets the feeling reading this book that safety does not a strong soul make.

Being an inveterate "miner" of dreams myself, I was at first rather resistant to Hillman's thesis. Eventually, though, I came around to his point of view (with reservations), mainly because I realized that dreams and soulwork are very much like art. Just as art should not always be made for any practical "daytime" use, so with our souls and dream images.

However, this opens a question. For thousands of years, shamans have traveled into the underworld to bring back energy for healing individuals and their communities. They act as conduits for energies traveling up from the Otherworld so that this world can be "seeded" and keep evolving. Is this, too, an act of exploitation? I don't think so. But I do think, after reading this book, that we should be aware of, and careful about, how we use the images and teachings that come to us, unbidden, as we sleep.

Many readers may be familiar with James A. Hillman's best selling "The Soul's Code." As a best seller, that was within the genre of popular psychology. "The Dream and the Underworld," however deals with the area within psychology of "depth psychology." Our present culture is a milieu in which psychology and psychiatry deal with matters such as biopsychiatry, psychopharmacology, brief psychotherapy, quick fixes. A lot of this climate has to do with third party payments, either by an insurer or an Employee Assistance Plan. A qualified psychiatrist or clinical psychologist may often use Depth Psychology in conjunction with the prescription of medications where time and money are not an issue. Depth psychology seeks to treat the causes of a psychiatric disorder rather than just provide relief from the symptoms. Dream analysis is an art, or science, that has a long-respected history dating back to Biblical times. More recently, it has been the subject of extensive writing by 20th century psychiatrists such as Freud and Jung.

I struggled with the writings of both Freud and Jung on dreams in university courses, having found that they did not read all that well. Rather than say that I follow a particular school of psychological theory, I like the more pragmatic approach of taking what is meaningful from those that I read. Hillman's thesis for "The Dream and the Underworld" is briefly outlined in Chapter 1. It is more like the opening statement that a lawyer might make in presenting a case rather than the abstract that a psychologist might write at the beginning of a journal article. Hillman does not rely on repression or compensation, but deals with the dream in relation with the soul and the soul with death. In the context used by Hillman, the "soul" takes on a meaning that equates to the human "psyche" but with a quasi-religious quality. You should not take Hillman's concept of the soul as necessarily being the same as the soul discussed at church or Sunday school. To study the soul, we must go deep. The study of the soul (going back to the Greek origins of the word "psychology") implies a journey into the depths of the soul.

Classical Greek and Roman literature locates the dreams in the House of Hades. Hillman uses images to begin in this mythological underworld. In many ways, it is similar to his "Pan and the Nightmare." He emphasizes both observation and the insight that follows from drawing of inferences from the metaphor of the myth. This is not a "how to" book. There is an emphasis on the analysis of the dream as a modality of therapy, however, in other pieces of Hillman's writings, he posits the concept that "self therapy" is not effective. One of the essential things Hillman emphasizes is that we should be aware of our dreams. Although not actually so stated, there would be an advantage to keeping a journal where the subject logs his/her dreams. I feel that "The Dream and the Underworld" provides a road map to a greater level of self understanding.

I have written in the cover of this book:

"This is the book of Hillman's I have been waiting for. After his 'Facing the Gods", "The Myth of Analysis", "Puer Papers", "A Blue Fire" and getting little entrees from each, finally here is the main meal."

I came to this book from the wastelands of clinical depression rather than dreams but recognised immediately the realm of soul here described by Hillman. He suggests that dreams are messengers or reminders of soul and thus of our mortality, of (our) death; a healthy antidote to the 'immortality' syndrome to which we are all prone until we live through a life threatening illness or crisis.

I must admit to reading this book somewhat 'impressionistically' without necessarily trying to follow his arguments, but even then, the impression was compelling. Without a classical training I had to infer the meaning of a lot of the greek words he uses (eg. telos, phrenes, thymos, topos) from the context. I'm still not entirely clear as to their meaning even now. A glossary would have been useful for lay readers, though I don't think they were necessarily the target audience. I have yet to find a layman's glossary or dictionary of Jungian and Archetypal Psychological terms. Certainly my education has been broadened.

Why haven't we heard more of this approach in the popular books on dreams ? It is original, compelling and as cogent as any other approach to interpreting dreams. Is it so 'down to earth' that we would rather cling to the 'fantasy' of approaches that massage our egos a little more.

First and foremost, James Hillman is a "Champion of Soul," responding appropriately to the everlasting question: "What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" How is one to "retrieve his/her soul?" Obviously, we need help to do so; hence, Jung and Hillman, and others, such as Marion Woodman, not to mention Joseph Campbell, William Blake, Robert Graves. One might even gain great insight from reading M. Esther Harding's classic: WOMEN'S MYSTERIES. They all come together eventually for the serious soulseeker. To sum up, quoting Hillman, "Dreams mean well by us," in spite of their appearance to the contrary; they are designed to dissolve the interfering Ego, the Ego that would deprive you of your true Happiness.

While this book is somewhat difficult to read due to it's intensity of style, it represents a radical departure in the art of dream interpretation. If one picks up its clues, one's understanding of the world of dream will deepen far beyond the usual run of the mill dream analysis methods used in modern psychotherapy for ego development. This book deserves to be studied carefully. The author's references and allusions to the Greek and Egyptian ideas of soul are very significant.

Originally written and published for the 42nd edition of the Eranos Yearbook in 1972, controversial psychologist James Hillman's The Dream And The Underworld (1975) will appeal initially to general readers and students of psychology who have found Freud's and Jung's theories on dreams less than fully persuasive. Unfortunately, Hillman's rather unpleasant book is imprecise and often moves strictly in circles; by its conclusion, many readers may feel that the book's murky argument could have been more convincingly stated in several succinct paragraphs. Written in a style that owes much more to Jung than to Freud, Hillman bases his discussion on early philosophical commentary on Egyptian and Greek mythology, apparently forgetting that neither the writings of Heraclitus, Aristotle, or Plato nor the mythologies themselves are verities, facts, or scientific conclusions. Unlike the best of Jung's writing, readers will seldom get the impression that Hillman has committed himself the kind of practical, empirical busywork that Jung dedicated his life to performing.

Amplifying what he feels is correct in Freud and Jung, Hillman also attempts to scrupulously document the point where each of his famous predecessors went astray. However, Hillman's summaries of their dream theories are both airy and vapid, making it almost impossible to discern whether his argument, which builds on theirs, is truly a viable one. Readers may come away from The Dream And The Underworld with little ability to judge whether the book has any merit whatsoever or is simply another example of intellectual or academic harum - scarum. Clear, grounded, and rationally argued Hillman's book is not.

Hillman believes - or appears to believe - that the realm of the unconscious is a "dead" world whose contents, including dreams, have little if anything to do with conscious reality and the "daylight" world of the living. Thus, in his view, the unconscious is the grim, almost barren home of the archetypes and the more bloodless of the daimons, those pure embodiments of the psyche that are primarily concerned not with the fulfillment of the individual's destiny (as in Jung), but with the soul's exclusive preoccupation with death itself. Hillman also sees the unconscious as base, static, and subhuman rather than as transcendent: in his view, it is both pathological and sociopathic, and, for this reason among others, is incapable of actively having anything to do with the vitality of human existence or even of being understood in terms of human reality. Hillman goes so far as to suggest that human consciousness (and identity, personality) may be the naive tip of the psychic iceberg, a mere and unimportant reflection of the more fundamental if alien and ultimately unknowable pure state of the sterile, timeless inner realm. How readers are to apply the author's theory constructively to their own experiences and dream memories is one question among many the book leaves unanswered. Where the metaphorical "truth" of a particular mythology or philosophy ends and its reality as a psychic fact begins is another.

Can the unconscious, envisioned as rich, oceanic, and primordial by Jung, really be more accurately "re - visioned" as an icy, brittle, utterly lightless abode of merciless "shades," like the land of the dead portrayed in Ursula Le Guinn's 1972 novel The Farthest Shore? If Hillman is correct, how did human feeling, much less human consciousness and raw instinct, ever arise from this dead and deathless abyss? The birth of consciousness presupposes a kind of evolutionary chain, a process Hillman's hypothesis pointedly ignores. Even when taken strictly in terms of its all - important image theory, The Dream And The Underworld is negatively distinguished by an absence of missing links.

There are enough flashes of brilliance in The Dream And The Underworld to convince its audience that Hillman, a best - selling author, is about to make an important theoretical breakthrough at any moment. But instead of keen intuitive deduction and perceptive erudition, in each case Hillman heads off on another tangent or takes up the thread of a previously addressed argument for the third or fourth time in as many chapters. Those readers who believe both Freud and Jung were only partially correct (or entirely incorrect) will very likely come away from the odd, static The Dream And The Underworld disappointed, irritated, and questioning the book's uncertain reputation as an important contribution to the field of dream psychology.

Hillman has a most peculiar style of writing, but once you get used to it, you realize that he couldn't write what he has to say, and convey the ideas he has, any other way. This book is no dream-dictionary, but will give untold insights concerning the mysterious and controversial subject of our dreams. You will want to see them like Hillman does, because it'll be evident that his vision of them, and for them, is a very pleasurable one.

In this thought-provoking book, Hillman provides another twist to the question of the soul and 'soul-making'. Pace Jung, soul has been defined as a "functional complex of the psyche that mediates between the psyche (which is mainly unconscious) and the ego". As such, the soul is our ticket to a full and satisfying life; in case that the link between the soul and ego is broken, the untethered Ego becomes synonymous with madness, destruction and despair. A soul-less Ego enters the soul's domain, the Underworld, without protection, falling at the mercy of fantasies and projections emanating from symbolic 'complexes' that define its landscape.

Hillman's Underworld cannot be comprehended,bribed or usefully navigated by the ego. The archetypal forces and energies that define its contours are non-human, brutal and non-caring. If not pacified by attention and respect they will rape, Hades-like, the conscious mind (Persephone). Underworld is where Death lives and, paradoxically, it is also the source of life.

The upper world ruled by Zeus and the lower chthonios ruled by Hades are the same - only perspectives differ. One brother sees the universe from above, the other from below. Hence, Zeus cannot be understood in the absence of the Hades perspective. In other words, experience cannot be explained through the analytical mind alone while ignoring the messiness of the Underworld. To do so, would be to actually express the death drive, the quintessential Hades (underworld) energy.

Greeks and 'primitive' peoples understood that all creativity, all life force, life power - comes from the underworld. The Ego can experience this paradox as the fight between good and evil, a metaphor that just happens to be championed by our primitive monotheistic religions. In reality, however, the Underworld harbors neither good nor evil. There is only energy, organized into more or less autonomous psychic complexes that resonate with the energy brought in by its guests. Yet we don't want to visit the Underworld. We recoil from it. This allows the archetypal material to choose its own manifestation. In a straightforward way, its embrace can be experienced as dreams; Hillman tells us it also hides as hunches, inspirations, anxieties or bouts of depression.

Hillman shows here that Freud, who created the realm of the inner space for the Western man and thereby discovered the Underworld, is not dead. The book suggests that much of conventional therapy, instead of familiarizing people with this domain, tries to conquer it through 'figuring it out'. The self insists on pathologizing itself by deciding something is wrong and needs fixing. What if, asks Hillman, there is nothing to fix? What if the sadness, fracturing of the self, hostility etc are normal manifestations of soul's growth process? You can't make yourself less sad in an organic manner (unless you take Prozac). However, you can co-opt the psychic energy of sadness which wells from the volcano that represents your/our access to the Underworld. As a result, your connection with your soul grows, you become larger and more You, and you get to know another universe where everything is possible. One is condemned to face precisely what one has wanted to avoid. No shrink can help here, there can only be tentative advice from travelers who have the battle scars to prove the journey. Tibetans know this, as do many tribal peoples.

This is not an easy book to read. It's dense, obtuse and self-satisfied. Hillman and never stops to consider that maybe the peculiar psychic underworld described in DATU represents his psyche alone. Nonetheless, i have a lot of respect for this book. Greek myths and Egyptian religion should be required reading for every aspiring psychology/psychotherapy/psychiatry etc student; come to think of it, for every Western college graduate.

James Hillman's classic work on dreams and the origins of waking consciousness is well worth the journey through its pages. It is definitely a journey, and not for the meek, however. Hillman's mind is a treasure...and it will take you through unexpected and sometimes baffling twists and turns. This book is a must for psychology students, as well as anyone interested in the field of depth psychology.

Unlike most books on dreams, James Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld offers no theory to account for the meaning of dreams; no dictionary of dream symbols; no method for deciphering the symbolic imagery in dreams. Rather, Hillman seeks to reclaim the geography of dreams from the stale province of modern psychology, enabling us to experience our dreams freshly, with openness and wonder.

As he writes in the introduction:

I have come to believe that the entire procedure of dream interpretation aiming at more consciousness about living is radically wrong. And I mean "wrong" in all its fullness: harmful, twisted, deceptive, inadequate, mistaken, and exegetically insulting to its material, the dream (2).

From Freud onward, dreams were relegated to "the unconscious" -- which was viewed as some thing or process located inside of the person; for Hillman, dreams are an activity of the soul, and his approach -- that of depth psychology -- harkens back to Heraclitus, who wrote, "You could not find the ends of the soul though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos."
Hillman's offers a thoughtful critique of Freud's views on dreams. Though Freud gave some respect to the Romantics by acknowledging that dreams contain hidden messages from another world, he took a cue from the Rationalists by regarding the manifest content of a dream as nothing but a jumble of nonsense. The dream, therefore (according to Freud) needed to be interpreted, i.e., translated into concepts that can be used by the conscious ego during the day.

As Hillman writes:

. . . The old tabula rasa view of the mind, the view of rational empiricism, remained essentially unthreatened by the new Freudian theory of the dream. Dreams could be shown to consist of subliminally perceived images from the dayworld. There was still nothing in the mind that was not first in sense. The dream may mean something, yes, but it was basically only a rearrangement of daylife residues in accordance with the instinctual needs of sleep and sexuality. In the end, the dream becomes a "compromise," as Freud called it, between the demands of the nightworld and the dayworld. Or is it rather that Freud's view of the dream is a compromise between the positions of the romantic nightworld and the rationalist dayworld? Under final scrutiny, however, the compromise breaks apart. The rationalists win out (9).

Hillman criticizes the tendency of all the psychological schools -- including Freudian and Jungian -- to reduce the dream to an interpretation. Dreams, according to Hillman, ought to be viewed not as coded messages from our unconscious which can help us lead deeper lives, but as unfathomable mysteries of the soul whose significance lies in precisely the fact that they are not ever reducible to our day-world concepts and interpretations. But because dreams always have multiple layers of meaning and cannot be reduced to one static message is not, in itself, an argument against interpretation, nor does it suggest dreams have nothing to tell us of significance about our daily lives. Quite the contrary, dreams have much to tell us about our daily lives and to refuse to decipher the coded messages they do contain, messages from God, strikes this reviewer as perverse and unjustified.

But for Hillman,the first task, when we approach dreams, is not to figure out what the things and events in the dream symbolize. First we ought to ask ourselves what it means to dream at all. To what myth belongs the dream itself? The answer, from a Western perspective, is Hades -- the Underworld of Greek and Roman thinkers. The underworld here is not a place where we go after our life ends; it is, rather, a realm which exists at every moment we are alive. Hillman sheds some light on this dim subject, particularly as it pertains to being utterly different from the contemporary view of dreams as coming from "the unconscious" -- a term which subordinates this mystery realm to the conscious mind, instead of viewing it as equal.

Theories of dreams there are aplenty. Any well-stocked analytical community . . . can display wares of all sorts: Freudian, orthodox Freudian, neo-Freudian, modified psychodynamic Freudian, Jungian in various contours and pastels, Gestalt-dramatical, transcendental-mystical, scientific-empirical, ego-behavioral, primal-parapsychological, as well as existential and phenomenological approaches that reach back to the Romantics and earlier. Yet, none I know asks the mythic question; none tries to suggest a theory, and a praxis with it, derived from an archetypal approach to the whole business of dreams. Others have seen myths in dreams and have used myths for amplifying the dream motifs. It is, however, another vision altogether to look at dreams as phenomena that emerge from a specific archetypal "place" and that correspond with a distinct mythic geography and then, further, to reflect this underworld in psychological theory. By connecting psychological theory with mythological theoria ("viewing," "speculation"), we are essaying a psychology of dreams, that tries to keep a sense of the underworld always present in our work with them (3).

Hillman critiques the perspectives of both Freud and Jung on dreams, while borrowing ideas from each. Rejecting Freud's idea that the dream requires translation into waking-language in order to extend waking consciousness, he nevertheless accepts Freud's hypothesis that the dream has nothing to do with the waking world but is the psyche speaking to itself in its own language. From Jung, he takes the idea that the ego requires adjustment to the nightworld. He departs from both Freud and Jung by not bringing the dream into the dayworld in any other form than its own, "implying that the dream may not be envisaged either as a message to be deciphered for the dayworld (Freud) or as a compensation to it (Jung).

It is this dayworld style of thinking -- literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps -- that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there -- translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn (13).

Hillman's departure from Freud is much greater than from Jung. Indeed, his viewpoint seems not inconsistent with Jung's own, despite his self-conscious attempt to distance himself from Jung. Jung also eschewed ready-made projections of theories onto dreams, or any overly formulaic approach to their understanding. Nonetheless, he did view dreams as compensatory to the ego's inherently one-sided attitude. But one can maintain this idea without making a dogma of it.

The conflict now stands our clearly. On the one hand, the dream belongs wholly to sleep; on the other hand, the interpretation of dreams is to bring them over into the dayworld, shall we say rescuing or "reclaiming" (Freud's own metaphor) the dream from its underworld madness and immersion in the pleasure principle. Freud would wake up Psyche from its embrace in the nightworld of erotic pleasure, its narcissistic delight in its own imagery.

The final chapter of the book, "Praxis," contains some of Hillman's most interesting ideas. It is here that he lays out some general ideas on certain common features in dreams, for example, the color black, Sickness, Animals, Bodies of Water, etc. In this final section are some of the books most interesting insights.

The forgotten dream is the dream resisting to be remembered, perhaps because memory has been put into the yoke of the dayworld and the forgotten dream refuses this service. It will not deliver its contents to the ego's strengthening. . . That forgetting and dreaming have so close a relationship implies that dreaming itself, as we said earlier, is a process of forgetting, of removing elements out of life so that they no longer hold such interest, of letting slip, washed downstream, a movement out of ego into psyche (155).

It is this latter section of the book where Hillman returns to what differentiates his approach from Freud, Jung, and the whole psychodynamic tradition they started. This is not one of my favorite dream books, nor is it recommended for someone new to dreams and dreamworking. I do not find convincing Hillman's contention that dreams should not be interpreted, nor do I believe there is anything "aggressive" about interpreting dreams. Jung was essentially correct that dreams present us with images, feelings and symbols which tend to compensate for the one-sided modes of the ego. Dreams are best used in the service of psycho-spiritual awakening, and that involves not only paying attention to dreams but interpreting them. Ultimately, the spiritual process transcends "dayworld" and "nightworld," so Hillman's presumption that interpreting dreams subjects nightworld to the tyranny of dayworld is not necessarily true. Hillman's presumption only holds true if one assumes that one's dreamworking is carried out entirely by the ego, unaided by the Atman or God. But one should not assume that.