Customer Reviews

Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique (Eranos Lectures 4)

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Join James Hillman for an adventure in Typology that goes a good way to explaining why I always feel so empty and invisible after completing a psychological questionnaire only to told I'm some sort of X, which never seems to hit the spot.

For Hillman, it's all about how using a typology not based on image collapses our perception and blinds us to uniqueness. He explores how typologies work and Jung's own reservations about the typology he conceived (which was manhandled to become the insidious Myer Briggs index). He skips merrily through some typing thinkers like Darwin, Szondi, Gestalt's Wertheimer, and Lavarter before declaring that a type is an image and must be used as one (instead of some sort of class).

Hillman's at his rhetorical best here and I'm sure he'll inspire you to look through the types to the uniqueness that's there on the surface just waiting to be perceived.

PS: This edition is out of print, but the essay will be included in the Hillman Uniform Edition Volume 4 (due 2010 if you can wait that long).