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Re-Visioning Psychology

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Hillman boasts in his foreword that this book is packed with ideas. He was being humble. It will take several rereads to fully savor all the things he has said and all the things he has intentionally left for our imagination to grasp and intuit. This is one of the few 20th century books I have come across that does indeed deal with psyche-ology--understanding the soul. The closest contender I have seen is Rollo May's "Love and Will." After reading Hillman other works read like elementary textbooks.

Many may be repelled by Hillman's seeming anachronistic and animistic return to gods, daimons, and personifications; as if taking the field of psychology on a regress. Hillman may even seem to some as living in a fantasy world concocted out of what he's read between Plato and the Renaissance period. But this is not mere atavism on his part, to revive a nostalgic time and worldview. As Hillman states in his latest book "The Soul's Code" we need only fall madly in love to admit of a daimonic possession. Gods--archetypes--animate us. Some gods may be dead but many others certainly are up to the task of roiling us.

Hillman is a master writer. He is effusive as any scribe of the soul should be. He is poetic and mythic; he provokes the reader and evokes a litany of images and connections. Helmsmen Intuition and Imagination are continually steering Hillman's hand. If there are contradictions in this work then they are most welcome, and even sought. How else can it be? Simple sciences breed simplistic answers. Something as complex as the soul and as great as the imagination cannot but procreate that which to Logic appears as contradictions. And so his style and objective as he admits is to confuse and confound rather than reduce and ground (in the empirical and, therefore, to a halt). There can be no pat and final answers or theologies of the soul and the gods, and Hillman makes certain of that.

For those of you not put off by James Hillman's obviously ornate writing style, this book is an excellent place to turn if a deeper understanding of archetypal psychology is your desire. Hillman is as hard to read here as he is elsewhere, but he's hard to read with a purpose: since part of his thesis is that metaphoric and mythic language is more alive than "conceptual" language, he spends much of his time writing mythically and metaphorically. If you have no patience with poetry, avoid Re-visioning Psychology. However, if you are willing to indulge Hillman and allow yourself to experience his ideas in your heart (and soul) and not exclusively in your head, then give this book a try.

I think Jung would have appreciated the irony: in a way this book both completes and thoroughly undermines the Jungian project. At least that's how it worked for me.

Hillman is a genuinely wise man (I do hope he never reads this, or if he does, that he forgives me for saying so! :-). Yes, he is certainly a poet, a mythologist, a psychotherapist, a thinker, an iconoclast, a scholar etc, etc... But above all, he is a wise man -- a shaman, a guide. In this book he turns his gift for "seeing through" to the subject of psychotherapy itself. I can only describe the result as an astonishing, erudite, profoundly beautiful and ultimately liberating dance, in which Hillman, on our behalf, engages (and disengages!) himself with the psychological stuff of psychotherapy. This is healing of the highest order, and I never expected to encounter it in such an accessible form.

Having read this book, I can no longer think of Psyche in terms other than those of polytheistic "seeing through". And I can no longer read any books on psychotherapy, except through Hillman's playful, re-visioning eyes -- no, not even Jung, nor Hillman himself. The circle is complete. The thesis and anti-thesis have combined into synthesis, and in the four-step magical dialectics, got transmuted into a new totality. Where do we go from here? I have no idea, but it will be somewhere else.

This is Hillman at his best, presenting psychology in a new light. The book gave me many new perspectives; combining Hillman's creativity and intuition with a modecum of "enfant terrable". Although not always easy to read, it is well worth the effort. I have given this book to a rather square psychoanalyst in the hope that it would turn his head around a bit.

Excellent read - Hillman's dialectic compells us to consider that integration does not necessarily need to mean sythensis - in fact, we will continue to be alienated if we pursue this heroic task blindly.

On the initial episode of the award winning HBO series, The Sopranos, a depressed gangster named Tony Soprano tells his wife Carmela that he is seeing a psychiatrist, and is now taking Prozac. Carmela is thrilled and replies, "Tony! That's wonderful! Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else." This bit of writing by David Chase is incredibly insightful; modern psychology addresses behavior, statistical norms and bio-chemical brain activity, but not The Soul. James Hillman addresses Soul, or re-addresses Soul as he re-visions and points to the Idea of Soul in Psychology.

I have been a student of religion and psychology for over thirty years. I have read thousands of books. This book, without exaggeration, is the most profound and revolutionary book I have ever read. The perspective of soul-making is refreshing, and is potentially a new unifying numinous center in a world where culturally-bound religions must fade away. Hillman draws on the soul of history, philosophy, literature, mythology, theology and other fields with Psyche as the hub of the interdisciplinary spokes in the wheel.

The notions of soul-making through personifying, pathologizing, psychologing and dehumanizing are fascinating ways of using and being used by Psyche. Notice that each of the four word ends in 'ing,' implying that these are activities of soul, not states or qualities. Psyche is alive, active and eternal. Psyche is the unfathomable Imaginal Realm in and from which we swim, dream, fantasize and develop.

This is not an easy read. It is a tough nut to crack; but once you reach the myriad kernels inside, the value is immense! I am reading, I should say contemplating the Ideas in this book for the fifth time. This book doesn't give you principles or solutions, but rather a way of seeing, and seeing through. If you have never read Hillman, you may want to read The Soul's Code first; it is a sort of Primer for his opus, Re-Visioning Psychology.

Michael Bogar, MDiv, ThM
www.michaelbogar.com

This book contains the write up of the four lectures on psychology James Hillman gave at the Yale University in 1972. Topics covered in the lectures are (in Hillmans own words p. xxi and p. 129): mythology (the reflection from the imaginative psyche: phantasia of the archetypes), psychiatry (reflection from the affective psyche: pathos of the archetypes), philosophy (reflection from the intellectual psyche: logos of the archetypes) and the humanities. All four lectures cover psychology and religion. For example the second lecture (psychiatry) dwells extensively on affliction and pathologizing, the importance of the symptom and its relation to the soul itself.

James Hillman is a student of Jung. Anybody somewhat familiar with Jung's views can easily and fruitfully follow these lectures. The style is not theoretical but more like psycho-fiction, psycho-poetry, psycho-mythology, evocating meaning and content rather than describing it. So the prospective reader should take the word `visioning' in the title literally. One of the key features of Hillmans is his holistic style. It does not matter, if you read two or twenty or two hundred pages: you always get the complete picture. Reading more is well worthwhile: it enriches and sharpens the picture. For you as a prospective reader it pays well to read a couple of pages at amazon online.

This is my first true Hillman book (not edited congenially by Thomas Moore) and I am delighted. It is as easy to understand as "A Blue Fire". But the rhythm allows more distance to this book. My own images, thoughts and associations have more room in Re-Visioning. Both books improved the quality of my dreams. I highly recommend Re-Visioning Psychology".

This is one of the great classics born out of the crossing between psychology and mythology. Indeed, one might even say this was the LAST such classic, for there have been very, very few great books on mythology produced since this came out in the mid 1970s.

Hillman is a Jungian, but a refreshingly nihilistic one who does away with the theory of Individuation, mandalas, the ego - Self axis and other such baggage. What interests Hillman is strictly the archetypes because for him, the archetypes essentially are the gods -- the Greek gods -- hiding in the modern world. Hillman's interest in mythology, it should also be said, is exclusive to Greek and Roman myth: you will not hear him making references to Hindu or Chinese deities. Ever. For Hillman, mythology means Greek myth and that is both one of his failings and his strengths.

The key idea of "Re-Visioning Psychology" is Hillman's notion of what he calls "psychologizing," in which he says, quite simply, that "there are gods in our ideas." Hillman has a knack for cracking open concepts -- scientific or otherwise -- and coaxing the runny yellow gold of the gods to come forth. Ideas in the mind, he says, often conceal mythological archetypes as their indwelling inspiration. Darwin's theory of evolution, for instance, involves the archetype of the Great Mother and her dying and reviving consort; Locke's theory of the mind as a tabula rasa, or empty slate which requires experience to fill it up, is really a disguised version of the myth of Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her prince to wake her up; Freud's theory of the ego and the Id is really a version of the hero myth, in which the solar warrior hero descends into the underworld in order to conquer it. Where Id was, there shall ego be.

"Psychologizing" is thus one of the most useful ideas in the history of mythology / psychology since it can be applied to a broad spectrum of ideas. Ideas often do conceal myths inside them, as do, according to Hillman, things like illnesses and depression. Masturbation involves the god Pan, for instance; depression is the archetype of Saturn; and the great myth of analysis, for Hillman, is the story of Cupid and Psyche.

Hillman is interested in the psychology of the soul and not -- like Ken Wilber, for instance -- the realm of the spirit, with its intolerance of ambiguities, suffering and chaos. The realm of the soul has to do with suffering, depression, anxiety and suicide. These are the dark areas of the human psyche which to Hillman become revelations of the soul's need for attention in the form of fantasies of death. The soul craves the death / rebirth experience, not in a literal sense, but in an imaginal sense.

According to Hillman, the fantasies which the soul spins forth are images -- in our dreams, in our fantasies -- which, over the course of a life, are creating our own private ship of death, our own imaginal vessel which will carry us on to the afterlife.

Hillman, these days, seems to have fallen a bit out of fashion, and that's too bad, because he really does have good ideas to contribute to the field of psychology and mythology. If you ever decide to read any of his books at all, read this one. It's his best.

SEE ALSO MY LECTURE ON HILLMAN ON YOU TUBE

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion."

I can only thank the four previous reviewers for saying so well what I feel; not only about the book, but the author. These ideas are thrilling, challenging, radical, and hard. All of which makes them more than simply worthwhile. Mr. Hillman moves the ideas forward with an imagination filled with integrity.

this was one of the most difficult books to get through that i've ever come across - hillman expresses so much in such a (relatively) small amount of space that it not only took a few re-reads to get certain concepts, but it took breaks between pages just to let some of these wonderfully big ideas sink in.
if there's one fault i found with this, it's that it's intimidatingly academic and the amount of references it relies on is simply astounding.

having said that, i've read a lot of books pertaining to the relevant fields and i've never come across anything so beautifully correct and thorough as this. well worth the effort!