Suicide as 'ultimate concern'...not as religious or ethical or spiritual evil OR medical illness

 For many, the subject of suicide is so horrendous, somewhat frightening and seemingly too complicated even for more than a passing, empathic glance.

While the numbers of suicides continue to be reported, and the idea of providing services, “mental health” services gathers public attention, much of our public and private ‘talk’ and consideration of suicide comes from the outside observer perspective. We all know people who have or have had cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, drug poisonings, and increasingly in the U.S., more and more people are becoming personally acquainted with those who have died from gun-shot.

While acknowledging that psychology, in this case, examining suicide from ‘within’, is a project fraught with uncertainty, Hillman acknowledged that he is ‘speaking out…in consciousness of folly’. And while more needs to be said about the shadowy aspects of suicide: aggression, revenge, blackmail, sadomasochism, body hatred,.. suicidal moves give us a clue about our ‘inner killer,’ who this shadow is, and what it wants. (Op. cit. prefatory note to Suicide and the  Soul, 1976)

Given that Hillman’s perspective is that of the theoretical and practicing psychologist,  he reminds us, early on, the goal of adaptation to the social order is of the right hand, of conscious counselling. But analysis includes the left as well. It reveals the inferior man where he is awkward and sinister, and where suicide is a real matter….Contrary to popular imaginings, suicide is more likely to occur in the home than in the asylum….In itself, suicide is neither syndrome nor  symptom….The consideration of suicide also brings consideration of the ultimates. Ibid, p.1-2)

Addressing the biblical command, ‘thou shalt not kill’, Hillman quotes the resolution of the American Council of Christian Churches, passed in 1961, favouring repeal of the British laws on suicide that considered suicide a sin, in which event, the Roman Catholic Church denied ecclesiastical burial.

Here is the American resolution:

Death by suicide ends all opportunity for repentance. Almighty God created life. It is His. Murder, including self-murder, is a transgression of His law.

Hillman then goes on to provide his own explication of this resolution’s foundation: The theological point of view arises from the idea of the Creation. ‘Almighty God created life. It is His.’ We are not our own makers. The sixth commandment follows from the first and second, which place God foremost. We cannot take our lives because they are not ours. They are part of God’s creation, and we are his creatures. By choosing death, one refuses God’s world, and denies creatureliness. By deciding when the time has comer to leave life behind, one exhibits the monstrosity of pride. One has set oneself up in the seat of judgement where God alone may reign over life and death. Suicide is therefore the act of rebellion and apostasy for theologians because it denies the very ground of theology itself….When you or I consider taking our lives, listening in our own ways to God, we no longer follow authority. We set ourselves up as theologians, We are studying God independently. This can well lead to religious delusions and to theological anarchy, with each man having his own God, his own sect, his own theology. Yet how else is each to find the God immanent, or experience the theological notion that the human soul is the temple of God within? Theology would have us believe that God can speak only through the events of fortune, because death may come only from without…Is it not hubris from the side of theology to put limits of God’s omnipotence that death must always come in the ways that do not threaten the theological root metaphor? For it is not God nor religion that suicide denies but the claims of theology over death and the way it must be entered. Suicide serves notice on theology by showing that one does not dread its ancient weapons: the hereafter and the last judgement. But it does not follow that suicide because it is anti-theological must be ungodly or irreligious. (Ibid, p.27-28)

From the perspective of human will, and any view that considers and attempts to embody both a relationship with and a worship of God, the psychology Hillman espouses is compelling. It is the underlying assumption within the resolution that God is evident only or even primarily in the empirical, and that worship and the relationship can be undertaken, both in prayer and reflection as well as in action, only or even primarily, by overt, conscious, willful decisions and that there is no option of a relationship or a discipleship from human to/with God from the interior, inner, non-empirical. Herein lies the nexus of the interface of psychology and faith. And, from the perspective of this scribe, the theologians and the institutional church have sabotaged their own enterprise.

Paul Tillich, respected and influential Christian theologian of the twentieth century has written:

Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern. And ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human… spirit…whatever concerns a man becomes ultimately god for him. Tillich goes on to articulate the ultimate concern; for example, it is one’s concern about the meaning of life that becomes ‘manifest in the realm of knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality.’ It is also manifest in the ‘aesthetic function of the human spirit as the infinite desire to express ultimate meaning. The ultimate concern is, claims Tillich, overwhelmingly real and valuable. It is numinous or holy, distinct from all profane and ordinary realities. (from Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy, the site of James Bishop, the bishopblog.com)

Hillman’s articulation of his position continues;

To decide whether an act is merely a theological sin or truly irreligious depends not upon dogma but upon the evidence of the soul. Dogma has already passed its judgement. Since God is not confined by the dogmas of theologies alone, but may, and does, reveal Himself through the soul as well, it is to the soul one must look for the justification of a suicide. (Ibid, p. 29)

Throughout nearly twenty years of participation in the preparation for, internship for, and actual practice of ministry in the Anglican/Episcopal church, on both sides of the 49th parallel, and from another decade of adherence to and membership in that church, I cannot recall hearing the word ‘soul’ either from the pulpit nor from the prayer desk, nor from the retreat directors, nor from the lecture podium. And while there was (is?) a determined deferral away from the instant ‘born-again’ conversions that are proclaimed in the evangelical churches, the emphasis, the focus and in the determined attentions of those providing mentorship, discipleship and guidance, the seemingly obsessive (compulsive?) interest was on the empirical, the politically correct, the publicly presentable and the profoundly negative attitude to and treatment of anything that smacked of darkness. (Think Jung's Shadow)

Whether individuals were very poor, very poorly educated, unemployed, vagrant, homeless, or imprisoned, so long as they ‘kept to their place’ they were then regarded as objects of pity, even empathy, and perhaps even agape. However, if ever any of them appeared in the formal and holy sanctuary, the derisive attitude that swept over the people in other pews was palpable. ‘How could such people be permitted to come into our holy place?’ was the verbal translation of the body language. Even the cleric who had been engaged with the Canadian prison chaplaincy service, who, after being treated for stage four cancer, and given only a brief time left to live, was depressed because, while still living he had retired from his parish ministry and was therefore of no use, in his own mind and heart and soul. His blindness to the gift to himself and to others of the apparent and surprising lifting of the terminal sentence, was not only surprising but somewhat  disappointing. Apparently, his sole manner of being a discipline of/to/for God, was to be engaged in active ministry.

And the fundamental fact/notion/concept/knowledge remains that the sufferings that we all endure are not amenable, or reducible to behavioral acts nor medical categories, but are ‘above all experiences and sufferings, problems with an ‘inside’. Experience and suffering are terms long associated with soul. The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a cosmic force in which all humans, even all things living, participate, as having been given by God and thus divine, as conscience, as a multiplicity and as a unity in diversity, as a harmony, as a fluid as fire, as dynamic energy, and so on…..the search for the soul leads always into the depths….The soul as a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols that provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought. Ibid, pps.37-8-9)

Can or will the theologians’ fraternity, and those engaged in the pursuit of God, in all faiths, including the Abrahamic faiths, read these words of Hillman, in his attempt to walk in the shoes of the analyst who faces a person fully engaged in the ‘ideation' of his/her own suicide, as worthy of serious consideration, without in any way abrogating, betraying, denying or deconstructing the religious instinct? Can the depth of identification with the inner life of the potential suicide, by the analyst, (And by extension, the rest of us) exemplify the most disciplined and the most religious and spiritual empathy of one human being to/for/with another? And can the ecclesial institutions, and their hierarchies deliberately, openly, and courageously begin a process of acknowledging the darkness in their own institution, as well as in the lives of each of their parishioners, as well as in their own lives? If consideration of the choice of ending one’s life is not to be valued as a matter of the ultimate in that person’s life, and thereby worthy of all of the intellectual, emotional, psychological, religious and spiritual attention we can muster, (not merely for prevention, but for the purpose of extending our openness and courage and strength to embrace the whole of being alive), then what can?

The illusion of hope....from a psychological perspective

 This is Easter Sunday, 2023, the day on the calendar when Christians celebrate the Risen Christ. It is the day on the liturgical calendar that, even more than the birthday of Christmas, symbolizes hope, new life, promise after a very day Good Friday and the Crucifixion.

We all speak, think and imagine hope in “light” as opposed to darkness; in melodic tunes and harmonies, rather than minor keys and dissonance; in impressionistic water pools surrounded by a surfeit of flowers, not in midnight alleys, with crawling felines and piercing sirens. In our private and personal lives, too, we attempt to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ as a sign that we are walking on the cushion of hope, that things are ‘on the up-and-up’ and that those who signal otherwise are not merely sad and depressed, but they are also to be avoided, or at least encountered minimally. “A smile is the kindest gift you can offer to another,” reads a calligraphic poster in the dentist’s office, where it has both a literal and a metaphoric appropriateness.

Smile as a symbol of kindness, implies, however, that ‘frown’ is a symbol of unkindness, or at least unhappiness, that ‘being down’ is a condition ameliorated at least momentarily on this bright, crisp and Spring-embodiment of a Sunday morning. We have a gallery of names and faces of men and women in our lives who have been ‘smiling’ with, at, near or among us. We have good memories of those moments, and the face and name that we associate with those moments is printed in ‘India ink’ in our memory, never to be erased.

Nevertheless, for all we know, and for all we have shown the world, there are many times when they and we ‘smiled’ when we and they felt no more like smiling that we/they felt like catapulting across the Hoover Dam, from a sling-shot ‘bungy-cord’. We knew, however, that the smile is/was/and will be the signal we were expected to project in order to attract others who might ‘like and respect’ us. Whether we were meeting a new teacher, or professor, a new doctor, dentist, neighbour or friend, ‘first impressions’ are both singular and lasting. The cliché, among human resource professionals is that ‘we have only thirty seconds to make a positive first impression” and that first impression was the indelible imprint that we leave on the new person.

Naturally, we all want to ‘fit in’ with the conventional language, attitude, behaviour and reciprocity of the social and political culture in which we live. And while it may be an early and inescapable, as well as incontrovertible, axiom that ‘smiling’ is the ‘first foot’ to put forward in all of our personal encounters. However, there is another side to this ‘smiling’ cultural meme and expectation.

Linked intimately and inimitably to the smile, is the image of strength, confidence, balance, maturity and a comfort ‘within one’s own skin’ that the culture finds both pleasing and emboldening. Anything that detracts from this ‘smile’ (and it must not be exaggerated, as if in a former ‘Pepsodent’ commercial, lest  it convey the impression of inauthenticy) is noted as at best a question-mark in the mind’s eye of many people. Being nice, pleasant, easy to be with, and uncomplicated are all social goals and aspirations in the public arena. Indeed, many would consider them the sine qua non, (without not which, therefore the absolute essentials) for personal and professional success.

While some would undoubtedly push back on a notion I read recently, for the first time, in a work by James Hillman, in Revisioning Psychology, in which he espouses this perspective:

“The ‘rage to live’ is the one-sided affection for life that one often sees in tandem with symptoms.” Never before have reflected on the notion that one (anyone, including this scribe) might have a ‘rage to live,’ I had to step back, take a deep breath, and reflect if, in all of the many ‘encounters’ with others I have had, in which I was by far the more ‘enthusiastic’ and the more ‘committed’ and the more ‘singularly minded’ and the more ‘focused’ and the more ‘determined’ to execute whatever project or purpose that was at hand, among the several others who were also engaged in the endeavour, I was embodying a ‘rage to live’ as my way of masking my determination to demonstrate, indeed to prove, my worth and value. In some instances, that ‘enthusiasm’ was deemed to be an asset and therefore merited acceptance and even encouragement, depending on the specifics of the situation for which it was being considered. In others, however, it was considered a distinct, obvious and thereby an easy path for the other to resort to dismissal of my petition. Among adolescents, for twenty-five years, it never seemed excessive, given that the students’ exploding hormones and developing intellect and bodies were dominating their consciousness. Among adults, however, the enthusiasm was interpreted sometimes as obsequiousness to the hierarchy, or as a kind of escapism, (from what no one, including this scribe, really knew) or as a demonstration of impatience. This is and was especially evident in a bureaucratic culture where change involving multiple constituents, including the seeding of information, and the ‘schmoozing’ of key leadership personnel, and the nurturing of both the comprehension of new information and the sustainability of new colleagues was not only necessary it comprised the totality of the success of the projected changes.

Excess energy, to this scribe, however, was never deemed to be ‘excess;’ what I was experiencing seemed eminently ‘natural’ as this ‘state’ of hyperactivity (as others saw it) was a ‘condition’ that had/has been both familiar and comfortable for eight decades-plus. Even at eighteen, while sitting on a beach on Sloup Island in Georgian Bay, I commented, “I never expect to live until the age of forty, given that I expect to ‘burn out’ before I reach that age!”

It seems preposterous to me now, these sixty-three years later, that I might have had such a ‘premonition’ without knowing anything more than the raw flame of the intuition. Nevertheless, neither the flame nor the accompanying energy/enthusiasm nor the consciousness of it as illusion was unavailable until recently.

When attempting to make serious decisions, I sought counsel, while, holding back on actually making those difficult decisions. Something within was asking, over and over and over, if the decision I was contemplating was both necessary and ‘doable’, not from a pragmatic and fiscal and every-day responsibility perspective, but from an ‘inner’ psychic, and almost a bodily perspective. I did not realize then, at least three-plus decades ago, that some of the bloom on the ‘flower’ of both energy and ambition was wilting. For, that energy that I was incarnating was the expression of something very deep and “siamezed” to and with ambition. A cliché such as ‘I cannot survive with only sixteen-year-olds as my human and social fabric’ return now, in memory, uttered as a rational for seeking and finding extra-curricular work, first in a men’s wear shop, and later in free-lance journalism.

Undoubtedly, while seeking counsel for large decisions, such as leaving a marriage, I brought to the room some sense of hope that I would eventually reach a decision. Hope had to be implicit in my search, otherwise I would not likely have booked those appointments. What I did not then, and only recently have more fully realized was a ‘face’ and quality of hope that remained hidden to this high-paced, impatient and highly motivated individual: illusion.

Here is Hillman:

Because hope has this core of illusion, it favors repression. By hoping for the ante status quo ante, we repress the present state of weakness and suffering and all it can bring. (The length of time during which I procrastinated on making a final decision, now seems to indicate a kind of hope for things to be more tolerable and to return to something like they were in the beginning.) Postures of strength are responsible for many major complaints today- ulcers, vascular and coronary conditions, high blood pressure, stress syndrome, alcoholism, highway and sport accidents, mental breakdown. The will to fall ill, like the suicide impulse leads patient and physician face to face with morbidity, which stubbornly returns in spite of all hope to the contrary. One might ask if medical hope itself is not partly responsible for recurrent illness; since it never fully allows for weakness and suffering the death experience is not able top produce its meaning. Experiences are cheated of their thorough effect by speedy recovery. Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 78 from Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, 79, 156-158)

Today, in homilies around the continent, in parishes of various denominations, and in likely what are millions of well-intentioned Happy Easter greetings, both virtual and floral, snail male and texting, sincere and earnest family members and friends and colleagues will be wishing happy thoughts and prayers for a “new life” and a “new hope” in celebration of the Risen Christ. And while not attempting to diminish the love and the authenticity of such time-honoured wishes, including Chag Pesach sameach for the Jewish Passover and a Ramadan Kareem for Muslims.

The religious/spiritual occasion, for all three Abrahamic religions, is expressed in the keeping of the various rituals, in worship of a diety. The pursuit and celebration of hope, including the pursuit of happiness, on the other hand, is a personal, psychological and even secular matter, from which it is very troublesome to extricate the expectations of the theology.

What our society and culture seems to have difficulty with is how, if and when to separate the expectations of faith from those of the psyche. And while they are able to be disentangled, it would seem, from the perspective of this scribe, that those engaged in the proposition of enhancing and growing and nurturing the people of their respective faith, in that faith, inevitably and almost imperceptibly, wander in the desert that lies between the secular and the religious, in sands hot enough to scorch the feet and awaken the mind and heart.

The translation, for example of ‘prosperity gospel’ as an expression of the hope of the New Testament and Easter Sunday, not only ignores the full meaning and import of the deeply religious meaning and intent of the theology. The notion of highly esteemed and ubiquitous expressions of unalloyed and unsullied self-righteousness, too, defies the meaning and intent of the Risen Christ. So, too, was my own excess of both energy and ambition in the service of career and personal goals, to justify worth, and to claim to fill the vacuum of self-respect which hollowed out the purpose of any fully authentic life or faith.

We can hope that the illusion of hope on this most important day on the Christian calendar will not sully the experience or the celebration of the meaning and intent of Easter, even in the eating of a common meal of traditional Easter food, or in the happy ‘egg hunt’ that magnetizes the day for children. Not only will the extrication of the illusion of hope offer the possibility of fewer medical complaints and the elevation of the needs of the soul to their proper awareness.

Ideas, images in service of the active imagination....

 Northrop Frye, in The Educated Imagination, writes:

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In our imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common that bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

Note, ‘there are no rights or wrongs (in the imagination)” a phrase and concept with which Hillman would concur. And for readers in this space, you will already, perhaps long ago, be aware that this entire enterprise is premised on the notion, expressed when the process began well over a decade ago, that what I need to learn is the beacon in the lighthouse that helps chart these pieces.

The insights, nuances, images and their access of James Hillman’s writings in and about archetypal psychology have been, are, and continue to be so captivating, magnetic, expansive, challenging and, in a word, ‘stretching,’ that they warrant further study, reflection, exploration and assimilation by this scribe. Hence, we dig a little deeper into his thought, in a continuing endeavour to become not only more familiar with their meaning and applications, but also to experience their ‘washing’ over, and through my own imagination.

The question of what is an image, and how do we know one if and when we ‘sense’ one, seems to be lurking throughout these meanderings. And, not surprisingly, for Hillman, not only are images redolent of ripples of meaning and questions, they are also accessibile, not only in and through ‘ideas’ but also in and through the senses.

Let’s try to unpack.

For us, ideas are ways of regarding things (modi res considerandi), perspectives. Ideas give us eyes, let us see. The word idea itself points to its intimacy with the visual metaphor of knowing, for it is related both to the Latin videre (‘to see’) and the German Wissen (‘to know’). Ideas are ways of seeing and knowing, or knowing by means of insighting. Ideas allow us to envision, and by means of  vision we can know. Psychological ideas are ways of seeing and knowing soul, so that a change in psychological ideas means a change in regard to soul and regard for soul. Our word idea comes form the Greek eidos, which meant originally in early Greek thought, and as Plato used it, both that which one sees—an appearance of shape in a concrete sense—and that by means of which one sees. We see them and by means of them. Ideas are both the shape of events, their constellation in this or that archetypal pattern, and the modes that make possible our ability to see through events into their pattern. By means of an idea we can see the idea cloaked in the passing parade. The implicit connection between having ideas to see with and seeing ideas themselves suggests that the more ideas we have, the more we see, and the deeper the ideas we have, the deeper we see. It also suggests that ideas engender other ideas, breeding new perspectives for viewing ourselves and world….Therefore, the soul reveals itself in its ideas, which are not ‘just ideas’ or ‘just up in the head,’ and may not be ‘pooh-poohed’ away, since they are the very modes through which we are envisioning and enacting our lives….(But) when an insight or idea has sunk in, practice invisible changes. The idea has opened the eye of the soul. By seeing differently, we do differently…(The soul) learns by searching for itself in whatever ideas come to it: it gains ideas by looking for them, by subjectivizing all questions, including the How? To give any direct answer to ‘how’ betrays the activity of soul-making, which proceeds by psychologizing through all literal answers. As it gains ideas by looking for them, the soul loses ideas by putting them into practice in answer to how? There is in fact a direct relation between the poverty of ideas in academic and therapeutic psychology and their insistence upon the practical. To work our answers to psychological questions not only immediately impoverishes the ideational process but also means falling into the pragmatic fallacy.—the assumption that ideas are valued by their usefulness. This fallacy denies our basic premise: that ideas are inseparable from practical actions, and that theory itself is practice; there is nothing more practical than forming ideas and becoming aware of them in their psychological effects. Every theory we hold practices upon us in one way or another, so that ideas are always in practice and do not need to be put there. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps. 53-4-5, from Revisioning Psychology, 115-116, 121-123)rfhetypal p

Readers, you and I are exhorted and guided to shift from considering an idea as a concept from the perspective of both intellect/cognition and action….this would remove ideas from a purely ideological, or a theological, or a philosophical or an engineering, legal or medical or scientific perspective and use. This alternative ‘perspective,’ that of psychology, not only perceives the idea, but is enabled to see by the idea, and its import and meaning in considered from within. In a culture in which most of us have been educated, raised, mentored, role-modelled and incentivized by multiple classical conditioning ‘schemes’ to ‘do’ and to ‘implement’ and to ‘perform’ and to ‘provide value’….this process seems counterintuitive to many.

We have been rewarded if and when we brought honour to our family, we won a competition, we passed an examination or graduated from college or university. We have also been rewarded if, upon entering the workplace, we provided insights, ideas and innovations that reduced costs, enhanced sales and revenue, endeared us to the hierarchical structure, and paved the way for potential and actual promotions. We have also been ‘set back’ if and when we ‘failed’ some important test, and we ‘crossed some culturally and conventionally determined ‘line’ or boundary through which experience we ‘learned’ how to ‘succeed,’ and to ‘fit in’. Nuggets of wisdom, gleaned from a special poem or novel, our ‘tips’ for ‘success’ from an admired role-model, were epithets for many of us, that offered both guidance and inspiration. We deployed those ideas, in our ‘idea’ of our own best interests.

The shift Hillman notes, from that perspective, is more than miniscule, psychologically, and personally and professionally.

However, in a manner to evoke not compliance but serious consideration, Hillman goes on to note a profound insight to justify his contention:

…(P)sychological learning or psychologizing seems to represent the soul’s desire for light, like the moth for the flame. The psyche wants to find itself by seeing through; even more, it loves to be enlightened by seeing through itself, as if the very act of seeing through clarified and made the soul transparent—as if psychologizing with ideas were itself an archetypal therapy, enlightening, illumination. The soul seems to suffer when its inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events. This suggests that all ways of enlightening soul—mystical and meditative, Socratic and dialectic, Oriental and disciplined, psychotherapeutic, and even the Cartesian longing for clear and distinct ideas—arise from the psyche’s need for vision. (Ibid).

Try to imagine a moment, a day, a week or even a month or longer, when your life seemed to be overwhelmed by events, as if the events ‘had’ you by the throat, or had so clouded your capacity to function that you felt lost, ‘out to sea’ perhaps, or ‘falling off a cliff’…..such a moment, perhaps, is the nexus of Hillman’s argument. And, surely we are all conscious or such moments, and also of how we came out on the other side….and how those moments/events have shaped our lives. In such moments, surely ‘our inward eye is occluded, a victim of overwhelming events,’ and any pathway to enlightening that darkness, is eminently worthy of considering.

We can see how important ideas are to the process Hillman is carving through the ‘underbrush’ of clinical and academic psychology. We have previously considered the ‘active imagination’ and what its purpose is NOT. And we already, in several spaces, noted and underlined the significance of images, whether those images carry or convey an idea or not. Just to further enrich this journey into the unknown world of the soul, Hillman provides some guidance as to how, where, and through which of our capacities, we might come to ‘recognize’ a significant image.

Seeing, as through the ‘eye’ is, as we can all agree, not merely observing the external world, in a glance. Indeed, ‘seeing’ is metaphorically a far more intense and complex process in and through which metaphorical ‘insight’ emerges. Hillman suggests this ‘insight’ happens largely because I slowed my reading of the image from narrational sequence (what happened next? and the, and then?) to poetic imagistic reading. In narrational reading, the sense emerges at the end, whereas in imagistic reading there is a sense throughout…..The sense of smell alone may be a better analogy for image-sensing than both seeing and hearing together, because smell is more concrete, and less. Heraclitus…considered smell to be the mode of psychic perception…When Heraclitus further implies that the nostrils are the most distinguishing of the sense organs, and that the gods distinguish by means of aroma, he is referring to invisible perception or the perception of invisibles. Like perceives like: the invisible, intangible, inaudible psyche perceives invisible, intangible essences. Sensate intuition of intuitive sensation. Even the word essence has a double sense: both a highly volatized substance like a perfume and a primary principle seed-idea, form. Smell involves us in what is most sensate and most subtle; primitive and primordial in one and the same sense. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, pps.61-62)

He then goes on, in a response to a hypothetical ‘protester’ to list his reasons for his contention of the sense of smell as an analogy for ‘sensing’ images..These include:

· Smell is more gutsy than sight and sound

· Smell is the most parasitical sense, having hardly any language of its own…smells, like images are reflections, effluvia; smells cannot stand alone and must be linked to an particular body

· Smell refers to a particular image in which the smell inheres.

· Smelling images guards against optical illusions about seeing images…keeping them deliteralized, like archetypes: nonpresentable form.

· Smells are all there at once, like images, less likely to be read narratively

· Smell has a bad connotation, something negative, offensive is carried along with the sense, reminding us of our aversion to images. There is an intolerable aspect to every image, as image.

· The smelled image is both immediate and remembered, both animal and memorial.

· Smells cannot be summoned; we are subject to them, assailed by them, translated into their world. The egoless spontaneity of smell is similar to that of imagining.

· Spontaneity beyond control of will is not beyond limit…it is always of something, so imagining is always held within the bounds of a specific image—this image, right here, under your nose.

Having focused on ideas, and then the analogy of smell as a pathway to recognition of images, Hillman then poses one of his more significant, and perhaps difficult and diffuse notions, for the rational mind that bases its perceptions on the empirical: “Imagination, the ground of CERTAINTY”!

When the mind rests on imaginal firmament, then thinking and imagining no longer divide against each other as they do when the mind is conceived is the categories of nous (intellect). Now, nous can as well by psyche; the noetic, the psychological. Knowledge comes from and feeds the soul, and epistrophe of data to its first meaning ‘gifts.’ Knowledge is received by the soul as understanding, in exchange for which the soul gives to knowledge value and faith. Knowledge can again believe in itself as a virtue. Here is knowledge not opposed to soul, different from feeling or life, academic, scholarly, sheerly intellectual or merely explanatory…but knowledge as a necessity demanded by the silvered mind by means of which the soul can understand itself…..Modern psychological methods of examining images and imagination in terms of sensations or feelings start the wrong way around. Since imagination forms us into our images, to perceive a person’s essence we must look into his imagination and see what fantasy is creating his reality. But to look into imagination we need to look with imagination, imaginatively, searching for images with images. You are given to my imagination by your image, the image of you in your heart…and this image is composed not only of wrinkles, muscles, and colors accreted through your life, thought they make their contribution to its complexity. To see you as you are is an imagination….of structure, the divine image in which your essence is shaped….To read lines on the face of the world we need an animal eye. This eye not only sees man as animal but by means of the animal, seeing each other with an animal eye. To this eye, image and type appear together….The animal eye perceives and reacts to the animal image in the other. (A Blue Fire, pps. 64-5-6-7)
It seems to this ‘animal eye’ and nous, that Frye was echoing some core insights, and Hillman, whether or not he read Frye, is extending both Frye’s thought as well as Jung’s, into a kind of perceptual vortex, merging ideas, images, senses, and myth into a rich and captivating ‘rain forest’ of potential psychic sense. The potential in the process is open to all, irrespective of academic credentials, holy orders, scientific and professional training, or an archive of mythological gods and goddesses.

Neither is the process a ‘free-for-all’ without either intellectual or ethical boundaries, while depending on the active imagination to keep digging, together with a therapist or colleague, sharing a commitment to the process’s value and integrity. Not everyone is or needs to be a published poet, a consummate artist, or a professional composer; yet, we all have an imagination and the inherent interest in mining our ‘ocluded moments’ nor for the ‘right meaning’ but for the meaning that is innately ours.

Are we up for the adventure?

More from Mars....

 In the last post in this space, Mars, and the American (and other’s?) love of war, was the focus. Referred to as a template for an introduction to archetypal psychology, this discussion, while not an attempt eliminate war from our consciousness, either individually or collectively, it was an attempt to .a deferential, open and honest acknowledgement of the ‘voice’ of the gods and goddesses, it can be and was intended as a wake-up call.

Hillman, himself, notes his intention to ‘regain the mythical perspective. My thoughts have not bee aimed at finding another literal answer to either war or nuclearism. We each know the literal answer: freeze, diffuse, dismantle disarm. Disarm the positivism but re-arm the god; return arms and their control to the mythical realities that are their ultimate governances. Above all: wake up. To wake up, we need Mars, the God of Awakenings. Allow him to instigate our consciousness so that we may ‘escape the fate of violent death’ and live the martial peace of activism…..How can we lay out the proper field of action for Mars? In what ways can martial love of killing and dying and martial fellowship serve a civilian society? How can we break apart the fusion of the martial and the nuclear? What modes of thought are there for moving the martial away from direct violence toward indirect ritual? Can we bring the questions themselves into the postmodern consciousness of imaginal psychology, deconstruction, and catastrophe theory? Can we discern the positivism and literalism—epitomized by and the fantasy of the ridiculous counting of warheads—that inform current policies before those policies literally and positively deconstruct our life, our history, and our world? Let us invoke Mars. At least once before in our century (20^th) he pointed the way. During the years he reigned -1914-1918- he destroyed the nineteenth century mind and brought forth modern consciousness. Could a turn to him now do something similar? Yet Mars wants more than reflection. The ram does not pull back to consider, and iron takes no polish in which it can see itself. Mars demands penetration toward essence, pushing forward ever further into the tangle of danger, and danger now lies in the unthought thicket of our numbed minds. Swords must be beaten into plowshares, hammered, twisted, wrought. Strangely enough, I think this deconstruction is already going on, so banally that we miss it. Is the translation of war from physical battle-field to television screen and space fiction, this translation of literal war into media, mediated war, and the fantasy language of war games, staging areas, theaters of war and theater commanders, worst-case scenarios, rehearsals and the Commander-in-Chief, an actor (Reagan)-is all this possibly pointing to a new mode of ritualizing war by imagining it?....A translation of the bomb into imagination keeps it safe from both military Martialism and civilian Christianism. The first would welcome it for an arm, the second for an Apocalypse. Imagination seems anyway to be the only safe place to keep the bomb: there is no literal positive place on earth where it can be held, as we cannot locate our MX missiles anywhere except as images on a drawing board or dump the wastes from manufacturing them anywhere safe. However-to hold the bomb as image in the mind requires an extra-ordinary extension, and extraordinary daring, in our imagining powers, a revolution of the imagination itself, enthroning it as the main, the greatest reality, because the bomb, which imagination shall contain, is the more powerful image of our age. Brighter than a thousand suns, it is our omnipotent god-term (as Wolfgang Giegerich* has expounded), our mystery that requires constant imaginative propitiation. The translation of bomb into the imagination is a transubstantiation of god to imago dei, deliteralizing the ultimate god-term from positivism to negative theology, a god that is all images. And no more than any other god-term can it be controlled by reason of taken fully literally without hideous consequences. The task of nuclear psychology is a ritual-like devotion to the bomb as image, never letting it slip from its pilar of cloud in the heaven of imagination to rain ruin on the cities of the plain. The Damocles sword of nuclear catastrophe that hangs upon our minds is already producing utterly new patterns of thought about catastrophe itself, a new theology, a new science, a new psychology not only burdening the mind with doom but forcing it into postmodern consciousness, displacing deconstructing, and trashing every fixed surety. Trashing is the symptom, and it indicates a psychic necessity of this age. To trash the end of this century (20^th) of its coagulated notions calls for the disciplined ruthlessness and courage of Mars. Deconstructing the blocked mind, opening the way in faith with our rage and fear, stimulating the anaesthetized senses: this is psychic activism of the most intense sort…..Rather than blast the material earth with a bomb, we would deconstruct our entombment in materialism with its justification and salvation by economics. We would bomb the bottom line back to the stone age to find again values that are sensate and alive. Rather than bring time to a close with a bomb, we would deconstruct the positivistic imagination of time that has separated it from eternity. In other words: explode the notions; let them go up in a spirited fire. Explode worldliness, not this world; explode final judgements; explode salvation and redemption and the comings and goings of Messiahs—is not the continual presence of here and now enough for you? Put hope back into the jar of evils and let go your addiction to hopeful fixes. Explode endings and fresh starts and the wish to be born again out of continuity. Release continuity from history: remember the animals and the archaic peoples who have continuity without history….Then timelessness could go right on being revealed without Revelation, the veils of literalism pierced by intelligence, parting and falling to the mind that imagines and so welcomes the veiling. No sudden rendering, no apocalyptic ending; timelessness as the ongoing, the extraordinarily loving, lovable, and terrifying continuity of life. (Hillman, Mythic Figures, pps. 136-7-8-9)

While this eschatological essay/lecture is not written and delivered as an effort specifically appropriate for theology, and even serves as an indictment of the fusion of materialism/literalism/apocaplyticism that includes both redemption and a fixed conception/perception of the universe and our relationship to God, it does open up many issues for the person/nation/planet to consider without relinquishing or abandoning or denying our most life-affirming, complex and essential imagination. The anima mundi, in which we all breathe, exhale, drink and eat, read and think, reflect and pray, worship and grieve, celebrate and love….is a shared “soul” and the care of that “soul” depends on our capacity, willingness and orientation to the discipline of caring for our own soul, and the souls of all other  earthlings.

We are not likely to begin to consider, espouse, embrace and dedicate ourselves to the notion of our shared and essential life-sustaining resources, unless and until we begin to adopt a different way of seeing ourselves, our place in time and our fragility and vulnerability. And while Hillman’s rhetoric itself, has both a ring of and a trumpet blast of the warrior-prophet, his profound insight and empathy and intellectual ethic reverberates throughout this passage.

Nevertheless, in any attempt to reflect critically on our own lives, without the deferral from trauma, the betrayer within, the imagined ‘hero’, the imagined ‘lover’ and partner, and the heroic ‘ego’ that has been the centrepiece of the psychological menu for many decades, our families, our schools, churches, universities and corporations as well as our institutions of the state might like to take a page from the “Mars” playbook, as Hillman has articulated it to counter  the over-weening image of monotheism, literalism, as it has been grafted onto the anima mundi, as well as the definition and conception of the ‘healthy, well-adjusted, mature, admirable, and eminently emulatable human individual. This tectonic shift in how we look at ourselves, each other, and the driving energy of our culture will not be, and cannot be envisaged as a ‘quick-fix’ in order to magically transform the “ship” of our consciousness into a new and different definition of the hero. Indeed, the reverse is not only more likely; it is to be preferred.

There is a very ironic, and even paradoxical aspect to the thinking  of Hillman, who was raised in a Jewish home. In Jewish (Kabbalistic) thought, tsim-tsum, considered as the first step in the process by which God began the process of creation by withdrawing his own essence from the area. From the website, chabad.org, we read: Tsimtsum literally means ‘reduction.’ For a Kabbalist, a tsimtsum is a reduction of the divine energy that creates worlds-something like the transformers that reduce the voltage of the electric leaving the turbine generators, until it’s weak enough for a standard bulb to handle. So too, the divine energy needs to be stepped down so that the created  worlds can handle it.

And while positioning Mars as the wake-up call to re-visioning our dominant intellectual, cultural, religious and ethical/moral beliefs, structures, dogma and especially the images to which we seek to conform, seemingly a rejection of tsimtsum, for Hillman, it is precisely the embrace, in the imagination of all the relevant images in any situation, that can and will bring about the most real and enhanced questions, provocations, and awakenings.

There are so many ‘new’ (yet very old, if we knew and embraced their origin) images that have fallen into disrepute, that nevertheless remain ready for rediscovery, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, for all people, in all faith communities, in all ethnicities and in all periods of history, through an awakened, energized and courageous active imagination.

Hello Mars, welcome to our world!

*Wolfgang Giegerich defines psychology proper as fundamentally separate from the everyday person and the ‘human, all-too-human’ aspects of the soul. (National Library of Medicine, ed.ncbi.nlm.gov. From philpapers.org, in a piece entitled, Soul-Violence: Collected English Papers, Wolfgang Giegerich, by Routledge, (2020) we read: ‘All steps forward in the improvement of the human psyche have been paid for by blood’. Further to this statement from C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Giergerich’s third volume of Collected English Papers shows that the soul is not merely the innocent recipient or victim of violence; it also produces itself through violent deeds and expresses itself through violent acts.

Mars, the God of War, as another window into Hillman's archetypal psychology

In the last post in this space, there was a reference to Ares, (Mars) the God of War as the dominant and perhaps even prevailing archetype in the American anima mundi (world soul). While we can all agree that ‘the gods never act alone,’ it is also clear to anyone open to looking, that Molloch (God of Money) is still screaming and shouting from the tops of mountains, office towers, banks and financial institutions, as well as from the bell-towers of cathedrals, and the podiums in university and college lecture halls and their labs.

Far ahead and far more insightful than any observations this scribe might make, is the LED spotlight that Hillman pours into the perplexing and confounding, seemingly inextricable ensnarement of the United States, in the archetype of war. And consistent with his other thoughts about having to dive deeply into the heart of any matter that requires explication and detachment, he writes an extensive lecture, reprinted in Mythic Figures, ‘Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, (second edition), Series Editor, Klaus Ottman, Spring Publications, 2021, p. 121, entitled, “Wars, Arms. Rams, Mars”.

Here are some of the insights, repeated for both the reader and the writer, as any attempt to become steeped in the “tea” of Hillman’s thinking is always, and inevitably a work in progress, without a final destination, leaving both the concepts and their application and interpretation flowing in the same river in which we are all trying to stay afloat.

Hillman opens his lecture, (originally delivered to the conference entitled, “Facing Apocalypse” at Salve Regina College, Newport, Rhode Island, June 1983) with a reference to the film “Patton,” the Hollywood depiction of General Patton’s role in the drive of the Third Army across France into Germany in 1944-45. “(He, Patton) walks the field after a battle: churned earth burnt tanks, dead men. The General takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc and says: ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life’.”

Hillman then continues: This scene gives focus to my theme—the love of war, the love in war and for war that is more than ‘my’ life, a love that calls up a dos, that is helped by a god and on a battlefield, a devastated piece of earth that is made sacred by that devastation. I believe that we can never speak sensibly of peace of disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. The special state must be ritualistically entered. We must be ‘inducted,’ and war must be ‘declared’—as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt. So we shall try not to ‘go to war’ and this because it is a principle of psychological method that any phenomenon to be understood must be emphatically imagined. To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart. War is a psychological task….It is especially a psychological task because philosophy and theology have failed its overriding importance. War has been set aside as history, when it then becomes a subchapter called military history. Or war has been placed outside the mainstream of thought into think tanks. So we need to lift this general repression, attempting to bring to war an imagination that respects its primordial significance. My method of heading right in, of penetrating rather than circumambulating or reflecting, is itself martial. We shall be invoking the god of the topic by this approach to the topic. (op. cit., p 121-122)

Those proponents of both philosophy and theology, especially the latter, will

already be “up in arms” in protest of Hillman’s observation that war is a psychological task “because philosophy and theology have failed its overriding importance.” This quote from ww1.ophen.org, in an essay entitled, The Great War and Modern Philosophy, supports Hillman’s contention about philosophy:

…(T)he war motivated an historically singular mobilization of philosophers to write about the war during the years of conflict; significant works of philosophy were written during the war years and immediately thereafter…Surprisingly, while the impact of war on literature, poetry, and the arts, political thought has been a subject of intense inquiry and interpretation, the significance of war for modern philosophy remains relatively unexamined, often misunderstood of simply taken for granted.

Subjects like ‘what constitutes the just war’ or the concept of the abandonment of war altogether, while part of the writing of philosophical offerings about war, do not delve into its philosophical implications, as Hillman sees their efforts. It would be reasonable to posit that either or both of these arguments are intimately embedded in the question of the morality of war. Similarly, the Bible, as articulated in a work entitled, “War, Moral or Immoral, the Biblical Doctrine of War, by Jr. R. B. Thieme, is briefly described on the Amazon website in these words: “Whether you like it or not, the Bible teaches that justified warfare is moral- war that is necessary to protect your country and defend your freedoms!. Immoral acts may be committed in war; but the principle of war is moral when war becomes necessary-not immoral.” Aquinas, the Roman theologian argues, in Summa Theologia, (Wikipedia.org) that there are conditions to be met in order to justify war:

· It must be waged on the command of a rightful sovereign

· It must be waged for just cause or to address some wrong

· Warriors must have the ‘right intent’ to promote good and to avoid evil.

Even the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, lists four strict conditions for ‘legitimate defense by military force:

§ Damage inflicted by the aggressor on the community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain

§ All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective

§ There must be serious prospects of success

§ The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

The War and Peace section of the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church….offers criteria of distinguishing between an aggressive wa, which is unacceptable, and a justified war, attributing the highest moral and sacred value of military acts of bravery to a true believer who participates in a justified war. (Wikipedia.org)

This document also accepts the Catholic rationale for the justified war.

After reading and transcribing some of these notes, I am prompted to recall a former friend, a man who was born to a Jewish family, who, upon facing the ‘draft’ in the United States, as part of the engagement of that country in Viet Nam, came to Canada and joined the Quaker Society of Friends, a religious group that denounces war. I am also prompted to recall another class-mate who, as a Canadian, enlisted in the American military, served in Viet Nam, returned to Canada to study theology and subsequently, after declaring a family rule that no one was permitted to speak about the war, suffered a massive cardiac event.

 

After detailing the weapons, the music, the manners, the names, the spit and polish that depicts, enshrines and ennobles the military in the United States, Hillman writes poignantly these words:

Our American consciousness has extreme difficulty with Mars. Our founding documents and legends portray the inherent non-martial bias of our civilian democracy…Compared with our background in Europe, Americans are idealistic: war has no place. It should not be. War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a violent people but not a warlike people—and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself…Our so-called  double-speak about armaments as ‘peacekeepers’ reflects truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: punitive expeditions, pre-emptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact the blind god’s blindness (Mars Caecus, as the Romans called him and Mars insanus, furibundus (frenzied, maddened), omnipotens), like Grant’s and Lee’s men in the Wilderness, like the bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war…..Gun control is a further case in point. It raises profound perplexities ion a civilian society. The right to bear arms (in the U.S.) is constitutional, and our nation and its territorial history (for better or worse) have depended on a citizen-militia’s familiarity with weapons. But that was when the rifle and Bible (together with wife and dog) went alone into the wilderness. The gun was backed by a god; when it stood in the corner of the household, pointing upward like the Roman spear that was Mars, the remembrance of the god was there, and the awe and even some ceremony. With the neglect of Mars, we are left only the ego and the guns that we try to control civilian secular laws. If in the arms is the god, then arms control requires at least partly, if not ultimately, a religious approach…..We worry about nuclear accident, but what we call ‘accident’ is the autonomy of the inhuman. Arms, as instruments of death, are sacred objects that remind mortals that we are not athnetos, immortal. The fact that arms control negotiations take on more and more ritualistic postures rather than negotiating positions also indicates the transcendent power of the arms over those who would bring them under control Military expenditures, of course, ‘overrun’ and handguns ‘get out of hand.’  I do not believe arms control can come about until the essential nature of arms if first recognized. (James Hillman, Mythic Figures, p.127-8-9)

Here in this passage, lie many of the fundamental, foundational ‘stones’ of the edifice Hillman is attempting to build in his exploration of what he terms ‘archetypal psychology’. The former acknowledgement of the god of War, as a quasi-religious significant feature in the lives of Americans, yet a different and separate entity and a different purpose and relationship for humans from the religious “God” and the Bible, and the disavowing of such a mythic ‘deity’ in favour of both ego and literal “personal security” goes to the heart of his perspective. Further excavation of Mar’s blindness, as a feature of the American anima mundi, illustrates, rather than a denial of his appropriation of the Roman god of War, but a full acknowledgement, disclosure and exposure of the god’s imperfection. For many readers, it may seem both improbable and literally  impossible to have a ‘god’ even in the mythic sense, who exhibits an inherent blindness.

Our use of, and comprehension of the word and concept “god” in and to the literal, while eliminating the metaphoric features of that word, is another of the blindnesses Hillman is attempting to unveil. The very existence of the mythic gods and goddesses, for Hillman, in and through both their acknowledgement and their embrace, as portrayals of the anima mundi, is a parallel he deploys in his explication of a psychology of the ‘abnormal’ among human individuals. And my referencing Mars, in all of ‘his’ strength and vulnerability, is one attempt to pave a pathway for a neophyte’s grasp of and significance of what Hillman is trying to share with his readers.

In another exploration of Mars, Hillman makes reference to the Roman Republic, where he was most developed as a distinct figure, (Mars) was placed in a Champs de Mars, a field, a terrain. He was so earthbound that many scholars trace the origins of the Mars cult to agriculture….Mars did not belong to the city. The focus of martial activity has usually been less the conquest of cities than or terrain and the destruction of armies occupying terrain. Even the naval war in the Pacific (19410-45) followed this classical intentions of gaining area. The martial commander must sense the lay of the land. He is a geographer. The horse (an animal of Mars) was so essential for martial peoples because horses could realize the strategy of winning terrain. Martial strategy is archetypally geopolitical. (Mythic Figures, p. 130-131)

And lest we be induced into thinking that Hillman is ‘fighting the last war’ as the cliché about the contemporary military establishment alleges, he is quick to draw from the nuclear age.

Hillman writes:

The nuclear imagination, in contrast, calculates in terms of cities, and its destructive fantasies necessarily include civilians. The city (and thus the civilization), whether taken out by ICBM’s or kept as intact prizes by the neutron weapon) is the main focus of nuclear imagination. The land between Kiev and Pittsburgh (hence Europe) is relatively irrelevant. (More about this from the perspective of 2023 below.) A second contrast between the martial and the nuclear: Mars moves in close, hand-to-hand, Mars propior and propinquus. Bellona (Ancient Roman goddess of war) is a fury, the blood-dimmed tide, the red fog of intense immediacy. No distance. Acquired skills become instantaneous as in the martial arts. The nuclear imagination, in contrast, invents at even greater distance-intercontinental, the bottom of the sea, outer space. Because of the time delay caused by distance, the computer becomes the essential nuclear weapon. The computer is the only way to regain the instantaneity given archetypally with Mars. The computer controls nuclear weapons, is their governor. Whereas the martial is contained less by fail-safe devices and rational computation than by military ritual of disciplined hierarchy, practiced skill, repetition, code, and inspection. And by the concrete obstacles of geography: commissary trains, hedgerows, bad weather impedimenta. (Hillman, op. cit. p 130-131)

Another enriching and enhancing deployment of the deep and searching active imagination arises in the evocation of Bellona, and continues the depiction of the anima mundi, as “doing psychology” from the perspective of the ‘active imagination, in and through the images of the gods and goddesses, in this instance, of war.

It is this perspective or the poetic basis of mind, expressed in and through the active imagination, courageously and diligently and relentlessly seeking for our psychic ancestors, as a way to restore psychology to what Hillman considers its rightful place in our panoply of disciplines. And this ‘poetic basis of mind’ and its agent, the active imagination, is accessible to everyone. Here is the nexus of the scribe’s interest in archetypal psychology and Hillman’s insights, intuition, including its depth and breadth of range. We are far more complex than our literal, nominal, empirical, and reductionistic vernacular and the parsing of exigent behaviour into merely moral opposites for the purpose of intervening and correcting.

Indeed, paradoxically, it is in our very dependence on the literal that we become ensnared, in a manner of self-sabotage, whether conscious or not, in our own blindnesses, denials, and paralyses. Naturally, we can assume that Hillman is not a war-monger; nor is he not deeply cognizant of all of the many historic, psychic, theatric and poetic features of our relationship with war and the military. Indeed, it is his very diligent and perceptive and imaginative and resourceful re-visiting of those voices that have planted many of the seeds of our collective and our individual psychic realities, most of which we are innocently unaware.

Not only is Hillman offering a cosmic ‘wake-up’ call, to individuals, but he is also offering a similar psychic alarm to the anima mundi.

Can and will we hear him? 

Active imagination in service of a new psychology

 Let’s recall Frye’s observation in The Education Imagination, that the language of the imagination, through the use of figurative devices like metaphor, simile, personification is a unifying of one thing with another, in a picture. And while the first ‘thing’ is not LITERALLY the thing to which it is being compared, the linkage deepens and clarifies, and enhances the “image” in both the imagination of the writer/poet/novelist/playwright and  the reader/audience. The double “linkage”, if entered fully by all participants, cannot be either denied or avoided.

Similarly, from the perspective of James Hillman, each moment, crisis, accident, illness, tragedy, if it is to be “mined” fully as if it were a poem, in an of itself, and then related imaginatively to a universal, timeless, voice of a god, goddess, myth or legend, keeping in mind that gods never act singularly, this way of seeing human psychology, provides a timeless, universal, cultural, psychological and often religious ‘linkage’ to persons and patterns, in and through those archetypes. And it is in the paradoxical relationship, based on the profound uniqueness of each individual, as discerned “backwards” (borrowing from Kierkegaarde) that surprisingly illustrates and embodies our shared human story.

Not only is Hillman pushing back against literality, nominalism, and all forms and faces of reductionism, opposing clinical diagnostics of psychiatry and psychology and the regard of the illness as the problem to be rectified through interventions of pharmaceutics, or shock therapy or ‘talk’ therapy, he is also acknowledging, without prejudice or contempt, the fact that the medical profession, by its own acknowledgement, has access to the evidence of the ‘presenting problem’ through the eyes and larynx and facial expressions of the patient. It is not surprising, then, that the whole biography lies at the core of the approach of archetypal psychology. And, as in the discernment, through the imagination of individual figurative devices in literature, there is no implicit morality in the image itself, so too, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, dwelling inside the ‘image’ of the moment, and remaining open to the evocation of the mythic/archetypal voices that “might” by inherent in and coming out of that image. Furthermore, since archetypal psychology posits a polytheism of voices, and challenges the cultural adherence to a monotheism (not merely from a Christian, Judaic or Muslim) but as a lens through which the culture tends to perceive.

Adopting or borrowing the word “soul” or “psyche” not as a thing, but as a way of seeing, (another of the linguistic challenges from Hillman), he has attempted to obstruct and then to deconstruct not only ‘what’ we ‘see’ and consider significant, but also ‘how’ we see ourselves, and our critical moments.

Hillman does, however, seek to differentiate the active imagination in his work, A Blue Fire, pps. 57-58)

v from the spiritual disciplines, because there are no prescribed or proscribed fantasies

v from artistic endeavour, and the creative production of paintings or poems,

v from silence and stillness but at story or theatre of conversation, emphasizing the importance of the word, as an instrument of feeling

v from mystical activity, for the sake of reaching select states of consciousness

v from a psychological activity in only the personal sense for the sake of curing symptoms, calming or abreacting terrors and greeds, bettering families, improving and developing personality…not as a problem solver.

v From a psychological activity in the transpersonal sense of ritual magic, the attempt to work with images by and for the human will.

…Hillman further articulates:

Therefore, active imagination, so close to art in procedure, is distinct from it in aim. This is not only because active imagination foregoes an end result, in A physical product, but more because its intention is Know Thyself, self-understanding, which is as well its limit—the paradoxical limit of endlessness that corresponds with the Heraclitean endlessness of psyche itself. Self-understanding is necessarily uroboric, an interminable turning in a gyre amid its scenes, its visions and voices. From the viewpoint of narrative, the visions and voices are an unfolding story without end. Active imagination is interminable because the story goes into death and death is endless-who knows where it has to stop? From the viewpoint of narrative, self-understanding is that healing fiction which individuates a life into death. From the imagistic viewpoint, however, self-understanding is interminable because it is not in time to begin with. Know Thyself is revelatory, non-linear, discontinuous; it is like a painting, a lyric poem, biography thoroughly gone into the imaginative act. We may fiction connections between the revelatory moments, but these connections are hidden like the spaces between the sparks or the dark sears around the luminous fishes’ eyes, images Jung employs to account for images. Each image is its own beginning, its own end, healed by and in itself. So, Know Thyself, terminates whenever it leaves linear time and becomes an act of imagination. A partial insight, this song now, this one image; to see partly is the whole of it…..To see the archetypal in an image is thus not a hermeneutic (branch knowledge that deals with interpretation) move. It is an imagistic move. We amplify an image by means of myth in order not to find its archetypal meaning but in order to feed it with further images that increase its volume and depth and release its fecundity. Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image. Our move, which keeps archetypal significance limited within the actually presented image, also keeps meaning always precisely embodied. No longer would there be images without meaning and meaning without images. The neurotic condition that Jung so often referred to as ‘loss of meaning’ would now be understood as ‘loss of image,’ and the condition would be met therapeutically less by recourse to philosophy, religion, and wisdom, and more by turning directly to one’s actual images in which archetypal significance resides. (A Blue Fire, pps. 59-60)

For this scribe, there is a significant stretch, away from what has become conventional vernacular, borrowing and stealing from Jung, into a new phase of ‘seeing’ images of and for their own sake…without attempting to deploy the various conventional ‘deployments’ and uses and goals of contemporary culture and therapy, and religion and philosophy. Hillman is staking out territory exclusive to psychology, in a vigorous attempt to remove surgically, epistemologically, and iconoclastically, some of what he considers the barnacles of medicine, law, literalism, nominalism and agency between and among individuals, including between client and therapist/analyst.

Charting a new voyage for psychology, through the maze that has been overgrown by both academic and professional institutions and regimes, and opening possibilities of new “births’ in how we might begin to “see” ourselves and each other. We need no longer start from a cultural perspective that holds ‘differencce and deviance and abnormality’ as primarily and unequivocally either good or bad. There is a chaotic aspect to what Hillman proposes, that opens, without closing, the process of Know Thyself….and that not merely defers from quick and glib ‘nomenclature’ but rather remains in and open to the myths/voices/legends that lie at the heart of each image.

He posits the dream, as an example of images that continually appear, without the will of the dreamer, as his best ‘process analogy’ for the enterprise. Figures in our dreams, considered as they are, without instantly comparing them to the ‘vernacular’ or the cultural notion of their meaning and identity. And as this process of Know Thyself is begun and continued, we have to face another ‘Hillman’ image, that of the uroborus snake, with its head in its tail. A professor of mine, now deceased, introduced me to the word, in the context of a person/organization/culture that merely repeats itself, grinding a trench of tradition, comfort, expectation and dependability and reliability.
(the old adage of some teachers having ten years of experience, while others have 1 year of experience ten times comes to mind) Hillman uses the word uroboric, as a descriptive, without prejudice, without moralizing, without termination, by linking all moments to our death….when who knows?

The steepness of the cognitive, epistemological, psychological, anthropomorphic  and cultural mountain Hillman is asking his readers to climb, while considerable, will differ for each, depending in part on the degree to which each shares Hillman’s own rebelliousness, his iconoclasm, his depth and range both of scholarship and of psychic experience. Some of us have resisted the kind of nomenclature of the DSM’s for decades, for a variety of reasons. For example, the definition of depression is derived from the patient interviews with primarily female patients. And moving away from the conceptual framework of a diagnosis, to the fullness of the image of the moment, irrespective of the gender, age, ethnicity, culture and language of the client, seems to this scribe as both refreshing and revivifying.

There is a profound difference between an intellectual concept, and our vernacular abounds with words that pose them as “realities” as if our sociology is our personal reality. Similarly, conceptual words have found a welcome home in the field of psychiatry and psychology, and have flooded into the practice of ministry. I have actually encountered a clergy who designed and who wrote her homilies directed to the demographic depiction of her congregation, based on their results on the Myers-Briggs typography, rationalized as an attempt to “reach” as many people as possible.

There is a ‘herd’ aspect to the linguistic, ‘intellectual’ and sociological lens that comes with each pair of prescription eye glasses (metaphorically). We have ‘bought in’ to the mass perceptions that unless we are ‘self-improving’ we are devolving downward. The self-help and the pharmaceutical/pharmacological empires, along with the insurance and the ‘war machine’ so dominate at least American culture, and to a slightly lesser extent Canadian culture, that we have lost the potential first to step away from that psychic edifice, which Hillman seems to suggest is encapsulated in the reign of Molloch (the god of Money), while this scribe might challenge that perhaps Ares, the God of War, might merit a place in the pantheon of contemporary American culture.

From godsandgoddesses.net, we read:  
(Ares) in literature he represents the violent and physical untamed aspect of war, which is in contrast to Athena who represents military strategy and generalship as the goddess of intelligence. Although Ares embodies the physical aggression necessary for success in war, the Greeks were ambivalent toward him because he was a dangerous, overwhelming force that was insatiable in war. He is well known as the love of Aphrodite, ….and though Area plays a limited role in literature, when he does appear in myths it is typically facing humiliation….He was most often characterized as a coward in spite  of his connection to war; he responded even the slightest injury with outrage…Ares was never very popular-either with men or the other immortals, As a result, his worship in Greece was not substantial or widespread….His bird was vulture.

Hillman’s overt linking of the anima mundi (world soul) with the psyche/soul of each person, and this perspective is also a direct challenge to the psychological establishment which in North America, has turned a blind eye, a deaf ear and a resistant intellect to his work, at their own, and our own peril, it says here.

Imagine, for a moment, a school in which the study of ageing, in a medical faculty under the rubric of gerontology, having both the vision and the courage to contemplate first reading, and the formally discussing and then implementing, even as an experimental project, the study by graduate students of Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology through such works as Revisioning Psychology, A Blue Fire, Suicide and the Soul, Mythic Figures, and most importantly, The Force of Character, dedicated to those of us with grey beards and/or no hair!....what a fantasy!

A personal path toward a poetic basis of mind...

This scribe “feels” like a newbie swimmer in turbulent, unpredictable, oscillating and even eddying waters with whirlpools and tree roots, rock outcroppings and the occasional creature, each of them far more innate to and comfortable in these waters. A gestalt-type of depiction for these waters is the swirling, iridescent and magnetic force of what Hillman calls “archetypal psychology. What I am learning is, first, that everything I tried to learn, even to master, as a student, teacher, free-lance journalist, athletic coach, and basic student of piano is as much a ‘trap’ from a epistemological perspective as it is a harness that held me in check while attempting to both perform and to ‘fit in’ with whatever the situation, institution and politics seemed to require. Tonsilitis led to a tonsillectomy; a separated shoulder led to aluminium pins and then physiotherapy; clouded eye lenses resulted in synthetic replacements. A pulled Achilles tendon was, according to medical sources, not amenable to formal treatment, nor were   arthritis-imbued joints.

And on the other side, that interior life that wakened one day back in the mid-eighties, to the question, ‘What the hell is driving me to sixteen-hour days, obsessive ambition to generate activity, to find new ways to write marketing and public relations copy, to drive enrolment and to function as a ‘change-agent’ in a small-to-medium sized educational bureaucracy?” Peggy Lee’s song, “Is that all there is?” kept ringing in my head. It seemed to me that I was deeply embedded in a pursuit of applause, compliments, results that were validated by others, and at the same time, I was (and still am) highly impacted by negative criticism, especially if and when it comes from people whom I consider important, relevant and intimate. There had been hints of such sensitivity, or perhaps vulnerability, before the mid eighties.

Once, in a television interview with the then local member of Parliament at the time when the people of Alberta specifically and the west generally were complaining vigorously about the “bilingual Corn Flakes boxes.” They saw no justifiable reason why they should have to read French on their boxes of cereal. Although I strongly disagreed with their bigotry, and specifically noted my disagreement on air, prior to my question, I nevertheless wanted his response.  “What can and will the federal government do about the attitudes of the people in Alberta concerning French on their Corn Flakes boxes?” Having no interest or need, apparently, to consider the question relevant, appropriate or worthy of a response (hence not to dignify it), he uttered words that suggested, ‘the question is ridiculous’ to my ears. As the moment occurred barely half-way through a twenty-minute interview being conducted by both the station’s New Director and myself, I literally and metaphorically ‘froze’, psychically extricated myself from the interview, while remaining ‘on camera’ and bolted from the studio, to retreat to a recording booth at the radio station two doors down the strip mall. Shaking from both embarrassment and frustration, a little anger and disappointment, not because  asked the question, but because it elicited such a response. I was fully aware that the local member was a strong supporter of the French language and the French fact in Canada, and was adamant that bilingualism was necessary to move Canada forward, a position with which I fully concurred. What I was not even remotely conscious of, however, was the intensity and the abruptness, and the apparent arrogance of his ridicule, not of me, but of the question. It was barely five minutes after seeking refuge in that booth, when the door opened, and the MP entered, with a full-throated apology for his behaviour in the interview. Since that moment, I have read, watched and listened as the national debate unfolded, and in some ways continues today, if differently, as the nation attempts to bridge issues of language and culture with those of economics, politics and nation-building.

Sensibilities, both to the larger situation, as well as to my own personal ‘feeling’ component, have been linked from a very early age. When, in grade thirteen, I asked a question in history class about the way the United Nations had/was/and would likely address a particular situation, the teacher’s response, to my lasting chagrin went something like this: “We do not have time for such questions; we have to prepare for final examinations!” Barely, seven years later, while teaching in that same history department under that same ‘head,’ I begged the principal to be relieved of the ‘curriculum’ which landed in my mail box each Monday morning, with a foolscap sheet listing the chapter and paragraph headings from the prescribed text, for the coming week, based on a text on modern European History. When asked what I would like to ‘do’ in place of that lock-step, memory-based, fossil-grounded pedagogy, I replied, “I would recommend a new approach in and through a study of the United Nations itself, based on a text of papers and essays that, in a scholarly manner, dig into the importance of the United Nations.” His immediate response, “Do it!” For this I am forever grateful.

Somewhere along the way, from this perspective, there seemed to be an inevitable, predictable and insurmountable tension between the immediate ‘task’ and the perceptions of that task by those in charge, with a longer, wider, more expansive vision of what might be possible, if a full range of options were to be considered. Attempting to see both simultaneously, from the perspective of at least a thought process, first, before considering the feasible possibilities, and before even accessing the emotional implications of all options, has its “up-side” as well as its ‘down-side”. The “up-side” is that there are always ideas available; the ‘down-side’ is that ‘tradition’ and what others expect from their experience, learning and vision, does not seem to be valued.

These two energies, the one based in the interior search for ‘what am I doing that seems to be so ‘obsessive, demanding, and potentially damaging?’ and the energy around the force-field that persists in seeking, expressing, advocating for and even arguing about a ‘different view’ from the conventional norm, finally collided with what can now be seen, and even then could have been predicted, as a ‘train-wreck.’

While generating marketing materials, newsletters, Smoke-less strategies, and multi-year planning documents, (really, only collating the contributions of others), I had the delightful opportunity to have lunch, in my office, with a retired kindergarten teacher from Great Britain, now a practicing Anglican clergy. She, at least two decades my senior, listened to my babbling, about whatever topics and issues seemed to be relevant during our shared time, interjected her unique and inimitable wit, and, slyly, almost inconspicuously, the notion of ‘theology’ as a potential route for next steps in my journey. She was unaware that, a mere decade-plus earlier, I had paid a visit to two schools of theology, Knox and Emmanuel, at the University of Toronto School of Theology, with the expressed intent of enrolling. When I informed my then spouse of my intention, I received this immediate, unequivocal, non-negotiable retort: If you go into theology, I will divorce you on the spot!” The subject was not mentioned, to my memory, for the next fifteen years.

The conversation with ‘Muriel’ took place in the midst of an interior jumble of both thought and feeling which sought answers for a self-sabotaging pattern as well as what I perceived to be a crumbling marriage. I had already entered therapy as one approach to sorting out my own inner life, and then proposed that both my spouse and I enter joint therapy to discern both what might be ‘askew’ in the marriage, and what we might do about it. The latter attempt at therapy terminated prematurely; the former continued until I finally resolved to leave the marriage and enrol in theology.

Never remotely considered at that time as a process of ‘saving the world’ by entering the study of theology, I was merely seeking guidance through reading, retreat, prayer, community of others interested in a similar journey, and new awareness of ‘what God might want’….as an inarticulate, and cliché and still applicable question of my place in the universe. And, in the midst of that inner voice, I now see that my words and concepts, perceptions and the identifying of those perceptions were, in a word, literal, empirical, nominal, and as far as I could rationally determine, rational and logical.

Although I had spent considerable time teaching English to high school students, including a segment focussed specifically on Greek mythology, I had barely scratched the surface of that genre. Historic literary periods, schools and the various stages of literary criticism had occupied much of both the pedagogy and the perspective of the world garnered from those readings. British culture, seen in and through the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Shelly, Coleridge and Eliot, etc. as well as the occasional piece of American literature like Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the memorable, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pearl, as well as the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, were included in the curriculum. Short stories and essays, too, offered models both for reading and interpretation as well as for student writing assignments. Subsequently, Canadian authors began to figure in the mix, including Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, W.O. Mitchell, Mordecai Richler, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Earle Birney, Raymond Souster, F.R. Scott and many others. These writers offered both to the instructor, and hopefully to at  least a few students, windows on both their world view and their choice of language as an integral component of their respective art.

Occasionally, too, there would be opportunity to dip into the contemporary writing of editorial writers, arts reviewers, political junkies and cultural owls like Richard Newman in the Globe and Mail. Language, specific words, seen through such critical pieces as Northrop Frye’s Massey Lectures, entitled, The Educated Imagination. This piece specifically articulated the difference between the language of practical sense that sought to divide and compare, and the language of the imagination, specifically expressed in metaphor, simile, personification that sought to unite…by connecting one thing with something else…a cat with a burgler, for example, denoting the stealth of both.

Along the way, the writing of Freud (Ego, Id, and Superego) crossed the eyes of most English instructors, as did, later the glimpses of Jung’s unconscious, anima and animus, and the process of individuation. Questions about the overlap of the psychological models with the literature, were one of the windows that seemed like ‘low-hanging fruit’ for exploration, along with the critical insights of people like Aristotle whose definition of tragedy was inevitably brought out of the closet for use in Shakespearean tragedy discussion and exegesis.

Earlier in my youth, I had attended an extremely virulent evangelistic and fundamental Christian church, where I had openly, and vehemently withdrawn from attendance following a blatantly bigoted homily against Roman Catholics. (Written about in other pages in this space.) I had also be invited to participate in a public forum on the ‘relevance of the Christian faith as part of a Lenten study session, in which I advocated for more deliberate discussion, in seminar format to foster engagement with the stories, including the language and meaning, their various interpretations and applications to individual and family life, as compared -with the top-down, unilateral and ego-driven homilies dedicated to building both dollars and bottoms in pews, as a measure of the success of the religious enterprise.

From my perspective, church was not similar to, analogous to or comparable to a business operating on the Main Street, although many of its primary leaders were deeply imbued with this approach. One of my teachers in grade twelve French, Miss Jean Craig, whose scholarship, demeanour, humility, reflection and quiet presence, seemed to epitomize the life of a Christian pilgrim. A middle-aged spinster, nuanced, specific, observant, patient, disciplined and expecting high standards, and eminently steeped in her languages, both French and Latin, Miss Craig, I later learned, was a sister to an Anglican clergy, and may also have been a daughter of an Anglican clergy. Nevertheless, irrespective of her genealogical background, she embodied, incarnated and exemplified both the discipline and  boundless ‘light’ of faith, hope and charity.

From language, to theology, to scholarship and to a personal crisis of meaning, purpose and a psychic cross-road, I finally entered seminary. And from there, with more exposure to Jung, Myers-Briggs, the psychological differences between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ aspects of personal life, along with three different sessions in clinical pastoral education, one in chaplaincy, and two in pastoral counselling, I attempted to serve in active ministry.

And here, I found, a dearth of both imagination, theological exploration and discussion, a fixation on both sexuality and finance, as if these were the two most detestable sins. The turning point, from my perspective, was a ‘charge’ to the diocese in 1998, by the then bishop, reduced to what I considered little more than a recipe for a corporate annual general meeting agenda: 10% more people and 15% more money. What I publicly declared was nothing more than “General Motors religion” was not taken lightly in the bishop’s office. Nothing about how to accompany parishioners in their spiritual struggles, how to address parish tensions and conflicts, and nothing about the nature of the culture in the parish and diocese that might be impacting the life of the church. Growth, measured in numbers, people and dollars, irrespective of how that might be addressed and collaborated on, even studied with reference to both scripture and church teachings, was a starvation diet, laced, of course, with more antipathy and hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.

For the past twenty-plus years, fortunately, James Hillman’s work has been not an obsessive, but a constant reminder of how psychology has failed itself, and its failure has also seriously and negatively impacted the church, both in its hierarchy, as well as in its laity and clergy.