The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling [Paperback]

James Hillman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1997

Some call it" genius". Others have named it "spirit", "daimon", and even "guardian angel". But while philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung emphasized the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping as much as it is shaped.

Now in this extraordinary bestseller, James Hillman presents a brilliant new vision of our selves not defined by family relationships or the mentality of victimization. Drawing on the biographies of such disparate people as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, James Hillman argues that character is fate and shows how the soul, if given the opportunity, can assert itself even at an early age. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices -- from the way we raise our children to our career paths to our social and personal commitments to achieving excellence in our time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

James Hillman, a former director of the Jung Institute who has written more than 20 books on behavior and psychology, delves into human development in The Soul's Code. Hillman encourages you to "grow down" into the earth, as an acorn does when it becomes a mighty oak tree. He argues that character and calling are the result of "the particularity you feel to be you" and knocks those who blame childhood difficulties for all their problems as adults. According to Hillman, "The current American identity as a victim is the flip side of the coin whose head brightly displays the opposite identity: the heroic self-made man, carving out destiny alone and with unflagging will." Hillman's theories seem disarmingly simple, but he backs them with a careful, well-practiced intellect. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Decades ago, pioneering Jungian analyst and author Hillman (Kinds of Power) challenged the assumptions of Western psychology by applying the ancient concept of "soul" to the modern psyche. Rendered in simpler terms by his protege, bestselling author Thomas Moore, Hillman's work on soul has fed the public imagination with the nourishing idea that we are vastly deeper and more permeable to the influences around us than we may think. Here, Hillman discusses character and calling, introducing an "acorn theory" that claims that "each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny." Borrowing the language of Plato's Myth of Ur, Hillman suggests that this imaginary sense of our lives or callings drives each of us like a personal daimon or force. Drawing on extraordinary lives from Judy Garland to Coco Chanel to Hitler, he describes the movements of the daimon, showing how it can use everything in our environment, from lucky accidents to bad movies, to allow the acorn to "grow down" and express itself in the real material of our lives. Without succumbing to oversimplification or wishful thinking, Hillman challenges the reductive "parental fallacy"?the contention that our early experience with our parents determines our selves and our futures. The daimon, he says, pulls us up out of mere conditioning to have a fate. In this brilliant, absorbing work, Hillman dares us to believe that we are each meant to be here; that we are needed by the world around us. Simultaneous Random AudioBook; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1ST edition (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446673714
• ISBN-13: 978-0446673716
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Theosophy

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

206 of 213 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a refreshing antidote to reductionist, mainstream psychology October 21, 1999

By Ruth Henriquez Lyon VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

108 of 112 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ideas as Art July 26, 1998

By Thomas Fulton

Format:Hardcover

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) Read more ›

89 of 98 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Leaves you wanting more -- and not in a good way June 27, 2001

By G. Collins

Format:Paperback

"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. Read more ›