Customer Reviews

Soul's Code

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I am on my second reading of this book, having read it once a couple of years ago and let the ideas percolate in the back of my mind. It is one of the most liberating books I have ever read. As an adult survivor of child abuse, I was in therapy for over 16 years and never felt that mainstream psychologists have any idea of just how powerful our soul's nature is. A system of healing which leaves out our spiritual energies-- and our ability to transform our realities into the stuff of myth--is an impotent system, at least if you are someone whose roots run very deep. I made little progress in my own healing until I began working on the spiritual and soul aspects of my life. Hillman writes that we are not as shaped by the horrors of our early upbringing as we are told by psychotherapists. What an inspiration for transcending the past! Unlike authors such as Carolyn Myss, he offers this teaching in a way that does not blame people for their anger about the past. He simply offers a way beyond the anger and other self-imposed limits, cheerfully and graciously. The detractors of this book state that it is not scientific enough. Of course it is not scientific--it's about bringing the energies of the invisible into your life. You don't have to do reductionist studies of the principles involved to have them change your way of thinking about yourself... I recommend this book to anyone who is tired of the dry, sterile approach to healing offered by professional counselors who have not themselves explored the "realms beyond" and therefore cannot teach us how to experience them for our benefit.

Like other Hillman books I have read, The Souls Code seems best read as a myth rather than a statement of metaphysical reality. The myth either resonates or not. The Soul's Code thesis that human beings are born with a daimon - an encoded destiny - is best judged as an artistic work of imagination rather than an assertion of objective truth. I found Soul's Code well worth reading for its many provocative and creative ideas but less resonant than several other Hillman works such as Re-Visioning Psychology in which Hillman sets forth his vision of the human psyche as essentially plural, and the essay Peaks and Vales, which draws a fascinating distinction between spirit and soul.

I can't quite reconcile Hillman's notion of a destiny (which seems psychologically monotheistic) with his image of the polytheistic personality, which I understand to be one of the bedrock assumptions of archetypal physchology. If the human psyche contains many persons, it would seem that the pursuit of a destiny would require repression of the many selves and inflation.

I enjoyed Hillman's challenges to psychotherapy, which I believe has a huge power shadow. I agree that the fantasy that parenting is the source of all adult misery should be rejected. I believe, however, that Hillman may have misrepresented family system therapy as promoting this view. In my experience, the goal of family system therapy is to establish an adult to adult relationship that includes the capacity to know one's parents in their complexity. Parental wounds become only one element in a much larger and more paradoxical story. I also found it interesting that Hillman seems to disagree with his friend and colleague Robert Bly by questioning the notion that the "absent father" is a fundamental source of male woundedness. One last point: I thought the section entitled Loneliness and Exile (p. 53) was particularly profound and moving.

My favorite passage from the book:

...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived." (p.259)

"The Soul's Code" starts with an interesting idea, the Acorn Theory, where an individual's talents lies as dormant and inevitable as the oak tree inside an acorn. Those essential qualities of one's talents are fed and nurtured throughout one's life, and while the final size, shape and appearance of a tree are determined by many factors, the acorn will grow into an oak as long as it is able to grow. Not a pine tree, not a rose bush, not a ficus, but an oak. And while this theory applied to humans is an interesting and somewhat far-fetched one, it does have a certain appeal, explaining why some people have an almost preternatural gift for art, music, writing, speech and so on. Basically, their acorns were allowed to grow into what they were destined to be, unfettered and unrestrained.

But maintaining this theory is a bit of a magic act, requiring some sleights-of -hand and diversions to keep the audience from picking up on those telling signs that something else is going on. Hillman tries to come up with a grand theory that can explain genius, but contradicts himself on some points along the way. The biggest one I found, or the one that bothered me the most, anyway, explained violent and destructive acts.

In Chapter 10, "The Bad Seed, " he uses as examples both Adolf Hitler and a woman named Mary Bell, who, at 10 years of age, strangled to death two boys, aged four and three, in two separate incidents. In both of these people, says Hillman, a lifetime of indicators showed that these were evil acorns leading to evil oaks. Hmm, interesting, except that in every other example and anecdote he related in the preceding chapters, people would become violent when their true talents were not allowed to take shape. In the very first chapter he uses the example of Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1981, and his confrontation at age five with his slightly older cousin, who was learning to read and write. When she teases him and refuses to let him see her notebooks, holding them above her head and out of his reach: "All at once, I left her there and walked the long way around the house to the kitchen yard, to get the Armenian's ax and kill her with it...I raised the ax high and...marched back over the long path into the courtyard with a murderous chant on my lips, repeating incessantly: ...'Now I'm going to kill Laurica! Now I'm going to kill Laurica!'" How cute! Hillman's response? "They seem to have no other choice. Canetti had to have letters and words; how else could he ever be a writer?" That's all?

One is left with the old conundrum: What if Hitler had been a better painter? It seems flippant and facetious, but with everything Hillman has written to this point, it seems a valid question. What if Hitler, Mary Bell, and any other evil individual in history were encouraged to develop their talents, to tend to their acorns? Hillman dismisses such thoughts. Hitler was inherently evil, and he goes to great lengths to try and prove this. Only a person who was born evil and had talents only for evil deeds could do what he did and what Mary Bell did. While Elias Canetti may run around, swinging an ax at his cousin to get her notebooks -- a disproportionate response to the situation if ever there was one -- that's just the passion of his latent talent exercising a kind of survival instinct. Hitler's "cold stare" as a child, however, proved that he would grow up to be a genocidal maniac. Huh?

The book's reach exceeds its grasp, though, and the whole thing starts crumbling from that point on. It had taken an effort from the beginning to make the whole theory hold together in my mind, but once the doubt seeped in, it was difficult to resist finding an example of my own for every one he used, easily poking holes in his reasoning. While "The Soul's Code" makes for an interesting launching point for a bull session, it doesn't work as a grand psychological theory.

This is a tightly packed book that was challenging to read. I read with reasonable care, but probably absorbed only 30-40% of what Hillman was saying. So much for 8 years of higher education. (Though I have to say, having seen some of the tendentious, slash-and-burn reviews below, I'm happy that period in my life is finished.)

Hillman's thesis is that we are unique after all, that we have callings in life, and that our caretaker soul guides us, in fits and starts, but nonetheless inexorably, towards the achievement of that destiny. It is a wonderful thesis for people, like myself, who have felt that the path they are treading neither fulfills their childhood expectations nor conventional ideas of success, and who are not sure exactly it is they are supposed to be.

The acorn theory urges us to continue on toward our destiny, even if it remains invisible through much of our lives.

This is a book for anyone who has ever been stuck in the quicksand of the intellect or has made the emotional descent into the pit of angst. In my opinion, it is no mere hyperbole to say that, if you have ever questioned the meaning of your life's purpose or struggled with the concept of destiny, "The Soul's Code," might be the Rosetta Stone with which to illuminate and give meaning to your life. James Hillman is a psychologist and Jungian analyst with a thoroughly modern view of the human psyche that I can only describe as truly empowering for the reader. The subtitle of the book--"In Search of Character and Calling"--not only illustrates the investigative intent, it delivers a discovery that is nothing short of miraculous. In "The Soul's Code," Hillman uses the metaphor of an acorn to serve as the image of the soul and its "calling" in life. Just as the acorn contains all the information that is needed to grow a complete oak tree; so does the soul contain the entire history of a life, from the moment of birth to the end of a life. Using biographical examples of diverse personalities such as Judy Garland, Adolf Hitler, Josephine Baker, Manuel Manolete, Ella Fitzgerald and others, Hillman makes a credible case to support his theories. The idea of the book, in a nutshell, is that the soul of every individual is given a unique "daimon" which has selected a pattern that we live on earth. Another word for daimon--which comes from the Greeks--is "genius" (which is the word that the Romans used). In Hillman's own words, from Chapter One: "This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny." In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the 'acorn theory,' which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who has wondered and pondered and searched for meaning in their life beyond the the mundane and habitual patterns they may have settled into.

After reading Moore's "Care of the Soul," I decided to move on to his teacher, James Hillman. And I am glad I did.

This book gave me pause to conduct my own personal "archetypal autobiography," an exercise that has utterly transformed my life. Hillman's insights into the forces that move and motivate us have helped me as a man, as a father, and as a scholar.

I had my own copy bound in leather and I refer to it periodically -- when trends and events in my my life require archetypal realignment, when my soul needs grooming, and when I need the kind of perspective that shows me how I can gracefully my past into my present, and thence to the future.

It is a subtle and sophisticated set of arguments, not for the feint of mind.

Flip to his presentation of Plato's myth of Er (pp. 7-9 and 44-47) to capture a sense of Hillman's expansive wisdom.

No matter what critics said here, when I found this book in a shop in Helsinki (of all places!) I was very unhappy - when I started reading, somehow I found strenght to cope with life.It gives me back the glow on the face, my self-confidence and hope - soon after I started reading this book, I know I should listen my inner voice: I quitt the job that made me very unhappy and moved to another country where I feel much better.It seems that I finally have life in my hands, but then,Mr.Hillman would probably said that everything HAS to be that way anyway.I cant find words to describe how strongly this book influenced me, this is the first time in my life that I am reading very slow because I simply dont want to finish.I like Mr.hilman ideas and his writting style which is very comforting, and I will look for everything that he wrotte.

Many of the reviews I've read have focused on what they fell Hillman is trying to push, speaking as though he is on a mission to convert us to some ancient religion. He makes no such attempt. His desire is that we indulge ourselves in a walk through the mythical. It is his hope that by viewing human personality through an ancient prism, we might better come to apply the pscyhological disciplines which humanity has built over the past few centuries. Parent as determinant of personality is indeed largely a myth, as is genetic theory of personality. Neither has been reasonably proven within the guidelines of scientific method. Science is currently failing to help us understand personality because it can't take a step back from its current path to re-examine its approach. Hillman's criticism of the psychological establishment is thus well deserved. If they were being raised in the West today, I have reason to believe that many of the greatest leaders, artists, and thinkers of all time would have had their genius drugged out of them during childhood by 'scientists' who claim dominion over the still almost completely mysterious nature of human mind and personality.

One does not have to agree with everything James Hillman covers in this study of character as vocation. I found the chapter on "The Bad Seed" particularly iffy; it seems as if imaginal psychology has not yet found a way to explain creatures like Hitler, to whom the epithet "human" hardly applies, or the fatal attraction they exert on others (read Elias Cannetti's "Crowds and Power" for that). However, I have always found his books challenging in that they shake one's most profound beliefs and prejudices about the nature of the psyche. And, given the current prevalence of "victim theory," it is absolutely necessary to have someone remind us that we have a free will, that the soul is sovereign, and that we cannot go around blaming fate, God, the devil or society for the negative aspects of our lives. I found that message in the Seth books by Jane Roberts many years ago. All in all, an important book for those who have left Freudian and Lacanian systems of thought, and have accepted imagination as the soul's predominant mode of knowledge.

Mercurial Jungian analyst James Hillman, with all due respect, has written numerous very substantial, sophisticated and penetrating--if not sometimes overly self-indulgent-- books over the years. But this simply is not one of them. Hillman endeavors here to reintroduce readers to the ancient yet very timely Greek notion of the "daimon," and deserves credit for doing so. But his description and definition of the daimonic is, in my view, superficial, stilted, unsophisticated and one-sidedly deterministic. He likens one's congenital daimon to an acorn, which indelibly determines what one becomes. But people are not oak trees. I disagree that the daimon is fully developed at birth, believing rather that it is continuously formed (or deformed) as the result of various life experiences. Nor is one's destiny or character wholly determined at birth by the daimon, or, for that matter, by five years of age as Freud suggested. Hillman here gives short shrift to the crucial role of personal freedom, responsibility, and the myriad ways in which one's conscious and unconscious responses decide how (or even whether) our sacred daimon will be expressed: positively or negatively, destructively or constructively, as evil or creativity. For readers wanting a more in-depth, extensive and existential elucidation of the theory of the daimonic, I highly recommend Rollo May's rich discussion in LOVE AND WILL, which presaged this simplistic presentation by almost thirty years.