Paying homage to James Hillman's gift, "Revisioning Psychology" (Harper, 1976)
Reading James Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology, one
comes away both enlightened and puzzled; enlightened because each page offers a
laser-like insight into contemporary culture, and puzzled because the
complexity of our enmeshment in our own blind sabotage offers scant light at
the end of the dark tunnel.
Broadening and deepening the potential of psychology,
from therapeutic interventions into a psychology of “soul” and “soul making,”
Hillman posits that soul is a “perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint
toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates
events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens.
Between us and events, between the does and the deed, there is a reflective
moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.” (p.xvi)
Discerning the profound difference between the
contemporary place of today’s words: (“Of course we live in a world of slogan,
jargon, and press releases, approximating the ‘Newspeak’ of Orwell’s 1984,” and
“Words like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us” (p.9),
Hillman actually names words as “angels” and as “persons” “transcend(ing) their
nominalistic* definitions and contexts and evoke(s) in our souls a universal
resonance….Words like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us.
They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies…histories
and vogues: and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating and annihilating effects.
For words are persons.” (ibid)
Stretching for a new perspective on a dominant “Christian”
cultural image, for example, based on the Easter story of Good Friday and Easter
Sunday, Hillman shines a LED on the notion of depression. He writes:
Because Christ resurrects, moments of despair and
desertion cannot be valid in themselves. Our one model insists on light at the
end of the tunnel, one program that moves from Thursday evening to Sunday and
the rising of a whole new day better by far than before. Not only will therapy
more or less consciously imitate this program (in ways ranging from hopeful positive
counselling to electroshock), but the individual’s consciousness is already allegorized
by the Christian myth and so he knows that depression is and experiences it
according to form. It must be necessary (for it appears in the crucifixion),
and it must be suffering; but staying
depressed must be negative, since in the Christian
allegory Friday is never valid per se, for Sunday—as an integral part of the
myth—is pre-existent in Friday from the start. The counterpart of every crucifixion
fantasy is a resurrection fantasy. Our stance toward depression is a priori a
manic defense against it.
Even our notion of consciousness itself serves
as an antidepressant: to be conscious is to be awake alive, attentive,
in a state of activated cortical functioning. Drawn to extremes, consciousness
and depression have come to exclude each other, and psychological depression
has replaced theological hell….
Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy
is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from and denials of it than
goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: Psychopathic
criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught is cycles
of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions
in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying
down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.
Yet through depression we enter depths and in depths
find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the
dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity,
weight and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution
begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither
jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering
it through gill it turns, nor theologizing it—but discovering the consciousness
and depths it wants. So begins the revolution in behalf of soul. P 98-99)
Neither a denigration of Christian theology, nor an
anthem for traditional psychology, this vision of the intimate, integral and
unavoidable relationship between cultural myths/archetypes and the human psyche
needs some unpacking.
Consciousness of the implications of this
Easter/Death/Resurrection dynamic on our visceral, unconscious and often
ignored/denied/avoided psychological entrapment can potentially offer both a
new and freeing psychological vision, and even a more profound appreciation for
the penetration of each of the multiple myths/archetypes/fantasies/ with which
we walk, eat, breathe, sleep and dream.
First, we need not remain trapped in our limited
vision of depression as sin. Also, we need not jump to distracting activities
in order to curtail the depression that comes often without warning, without
preparation, without constraint and without easily accessible support.
Depression, seen as “angel” or as “person” or as having a voice to which it begs
us to attend, will, if we accept Hillman’s perspective, offer gifts from its depths
that will only enrich our sense of our self, our capacity to see and experience
both our self and our world in new and authentic ways.
Seeing our psychic life in more imaginative scenes,
replete with fantasy, angels, visions, dreams and n an esternal archetypes can
enable us to open to “self-talk” that integrates our conscious “voice” into
conversations with these figures, these angels, these characters silently
waiting for us to invite them into our “world.” Similarly, our swimming in the waters
of the cultural archetypes that swim in those same bays, eddies, inlets, rivers,
isthmuses and whirlpools and permitting their “presence” to become part of our
consciousness not only enriches our psychic breast-stroke, back-stroke, crawl
and even our treading water, not merely increasing the strength of those
skills, but selecting to the most appropriate ‘stroke’ given the fullness of
the psychic environment and our appreciation of its complexities, really our
own complexities.
In the Christian tradition, the “dark night of the
soul” has captured the attention of mystic spiritual seekers and has provided
narratives that inspire others, while also perhaps terrifying some.
Eckhart Tolle writes about the dark night of the soul:
It is a term used to describe what cone could calla a
collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life or a deep
sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what
is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no
purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some
disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could
trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you
had built up your life, and given it meaning, --and the meaning that you had given
your life, your activities, your achievement, where you are going, what is
considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses. (Eckhart Tolle website)
Our tendency to pathologize this “darkness” (this deep
depression) as either or both a sin or an illness, based on the traditional religious
and/or medical model respectively, sabotages our attempt to deal with our own
reality, our own truth. In order to appear “well” or “not evil”….or also to
avoid being ostracized, alienated, or declared “unfit” for acceptance in employment,
social association, neighbourhood, or even amateur athletic teams, too many of
us rush into a public “face” of “being OK”….and thereby cover our depression,
both to ourselves and to others we “don’t want to worry”.
We cannot afford to avoid, deny, disdain or trash
Hillman’s cultural revisioning of our conventional perceptions of our psychic realities.
And, obviously, it will take each of us, including all of our thought leaders,
our shamans, our pedagogues and our clergy (especially) to “unbind” the
constrictions of many of the reductions of conventional psychology and society
if we are to enter into an enriched culture of poetic imagination.
As Red Green reminds us, “We’re all in this together, and
we’re pulling for you!”
*nominalism: the doctrine that universals or general
ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality, and that only particular
objects exist; properties, numbers, and sets are thought of as merely features
of the way of considering the things that exist (Dictionary)
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