James Hillman

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

James Hillman (1926-2011), born and raised in New Jersey, studied in Paris and Dublin after World War II, until he moved to Zurich in 1953 to enroll as a student at the Jung Institute and at the University of Zurich. He graduated from both in 1959, at the latter as a PhD with the dissertation Emotion: A Comprehensive Phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy. The same year, he was promoted Director of Studies at the Jung Institute, a position he kept until resigning in 1969.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

He stayed in Zurich until 1978, as the editor of the Jungian themed Spring Publications, a position he kept on his return to USA the same year.[1]

Hillman was a prolific writer on the subject of psychology and several of his books were widely read, one of them even reaching the New York Times bestseller list.[2]

As a psychologist, he was rooted in the Jungian principles but allowed himself to deviate with his own interpretations, to the point of forming a separate doctrine in the early 1970’s, calling it archetypal psychology, in which mythical themes and their functions were emphasized and applied also to the analytical situation as a whole, even to how psychological theories were formed.

In spite of the above, his writing specifically about mythology is limited. His theories about archetypes and myth mainly concern their social influence, whereas their application to mythology is mostly just implied. Still, his widened view on myth and its mechanisms in society definitely justifies his inclusion in this book. In addition, he exposes some fundamental errors in the method of analysis, impairing its ability to cure anything at all.

Inward Search

In 1967, James Hillman published Insearch: Psychology and Religion, where he discusses how analytical psychology and theology can mutually improve their cure of souls. His use of the dated or even obsolete word insearch (also spelled ensearch) in the title points to his intention with the book. It means to search for something, but in Hillman’s use of the word this search is inward, into the psyche. He argues for an inward search for the soul, in which psychotherapists and priest alike should participate for the benefit of their counseling.[3]

What he sees in society of the mid-1960s is a clergy shunning away from their role as curers of souls to adapt psychological terminology and practice, instead. The soul has been gradually replaced by the psyche. But that clinical perspective lacks the emotional incentive needed for people to recognize and experience their souls. Instead, they should remain with the religious symbols, which carry that inward connection.

Psychotherapists, too, are in dire need of these instruments and the perspective they contain, and he sees that happening within analytical psychology. While theology tends to demythologize religion, analytical psychology moves toward “re-mythologizing experiences with religious implications.”[4]

The soul, although an essential object in counseling, is elusive already in how it should be defined. Hillman states that it cannot be defined, which is why it is not a concept as much as a symbol:

The soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols.[5]

If this is deliberate, then one must ask who is responsible for the ambiguity and resistance. Hillman says nothing about it, but in Jungian psychology the answer can only be one — the unconscious, that hidden operator behind so much of the human psyche. It is by depth psychology the unconscious, and thereby the soul, can be reached and explored. Since the soul has what he calls “a religious concern,” it connects psychology and religion, making both perspectives vital in revealing it:

I hope to show as we go on how depth analysis leads to the soul and that this in turn inevitably involves analysis in religion and even in theology, while at the same time living religion, experienced religion, originates in the human psyche and is as such a psychological phenomenon.

The unconscious is not identical to the soul, but “the door through which we pass to find the soul.” Still, the existence of the unconscious and the soul cannot be confirmed by any direct proof. Instead, “We stumble upon it; we stumble upon our own unconscious psyches.”[6] That would mean it can only be traced by indications, by experiences hinting at it.

Hillman continues by discussing for several pages such indications of an unconscious in diverse psychological phenomena: forgetting and remembering, habit, slips of the tongue, the word-association experiments done by Jung,[7] multiple personality, mood, symptoms, and last but not least dreams.[8]

All of those indications can be explained by other means than the unconscious, which itself is little more than a term for things going on in our brains not solely by a conscious process. That would be fine as sort of a simplified category, but both Freudians and Jungians have claimed that the unconscious is inaccessible to the conscious mind, a separate part of the mind that influences the conscious but cannot be influenced by it. None of Hillman’s indications provide evidence of that.

That does not stop him from suggesting a third mental realm, “a sort of conscious unconscious,” which he defines by what it is not: “It is rather non-directed, non-ordered, non-object, non-subject, not quite a reality of a concrete kind.”[9] He expands on it, but again not very clarifying:

It is a realm for itself, neither object nor subject, yet both. This third reality is a psychic reality, a world of experiences, emotions, fantasies, moods, visions, dreams, dialogues, physical sensations, a large and open space, free and spontaneous, a realm mainly of "meaningness." In these states of soul we can feel connection to nature and to ourselves.

This conscious unconscious seems to be Hillman’s own invention. I don’t recall any mention of it in other Freudian or Jungian writing. Nor does he pursue the concept in his book. It may be a mere hunch of his that he felt the urge to put on paper. In any case, the sensation he describes might just as well be part of the conscious. It has the flare of inspiration and a mind caught up in fantasies, which is the nourishment of art. If it is between the dreaming and the awake mind, it might simply be the state of daydreaming.

Dreams, as Always

Hillman leans heavily on the dream as outstanding proof of the unconscious. So have most psychoanalysts since Sigmund Freud published Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) in 1899. Indeed, the dream is a sweet mystery of the mind, and so is the process behind its composition. Hillman’s explanation of it is not very clarifying:

The dream itself is a symbol; that is, it joins in itself the conscious and the unconscious, bringing together incommensurables and opposites. On the one hand, nature: natural, spontaneous, unwilled, objective psychic contents and processes. On the other hand, mind: words, images, feelings, patterns and structures. It is a senseless order, or a structured disorder.[10]

Dream interpretation has been used by analysts as their major tool in working with their patients, and they have all claimed to be successful with it. That raises two questions, the first one being similar to what was discovered about quantum physics — the risk of influencing the object when it is studied up close. A therapy based on dreams is sure to influence the dreams, or at the very least how the patient remembers them. That way, they both find what they are looking for, which is no guarantee that it was there to begin with.

The second thing to question is the assumption that dreams have a message to the conscious mind. Hillman makes that assumption, too, when he speaks about befriending the dreams, since “they want to be known as a friend would.” But they may, as contemporary science suggests, be just dreams. Random combinations of recent or past impressions, like a spread of shuffled playing cards — well, Tarot cards, to approach the Jungian cosmos. The meaning of them is arbitrary, in the eyes of the beholder.

So, who is the beholder? Firstly, it is the dreamer, but in analysis it is an interaction between the dreamer and the analyst, both set on finding something making sense to them. That is always possible, especially if the interpretation is allowed improvisation using vaguely defined symbols from an innumerable supply. Then they can find whatever it is they want to find.

The role of the unconscious, though, is still an enigma — maybe nothing but a mirage. Even if we assume that there is such a thing as an unconscious creating the dreams, it is not the one presenting them to us. They reach us only when we wake up to our conscious state. Dreams are always perceived through the conscious, which means that it is the conscious interpreting and making sense of them. So, it is certainly able to reshape them as well, in accordance with what it expects or even hopes to find. Dream interpretation can be nothing more than a search for confirmation of preconceptions.

Hillman touches on this problem when he warns against giving the dream the meanings of a rational mind, which would just translate it into something known, like a sign or a label.[11] He suggests instead:

The first thing, then, in this non-interpretive approach to the dream is that we give time and patience to it, jumping to no conclusions, fixing it in no solutions. Befriending the dream begins with a plain attempt to listen to the dream, to set down on paper or in a dream diary in its own words just what it says.[12]

That still doesn’t solve the problem of the dream only being accessible through the conscious, upon waking up. Furthermore, he doesn’t stick to this agenda. He continues by stressing emotional aspects, what the dreamer felt during and after dreaming, as if dreams are mainly emotional. They often appear irrational to the conscious, but it is not the same as being emotional in nature. Of course they consist of thoughts as well as feelings, since that is how our minds always work.

He also claims that dreams are stories following the Aristotelian structure of beginning, middle, and end. But the beginning is usually hidden in the forgotten past of the dream, and the end is just the moment of waking up. For all we know, had we not woken up the dream would have continued. If we perceive that very familiar structure it is no evidence of dreams adhering to it, but a strong indication of conscious interpretation. We expect such stories, so we search them in dreams, too.

Hillman gets even more specific about what to expect in dreams and how to interpret them in a notably psychoanalytical way:

If for a few nights mainly men come into my dreams, I know that something is going on with the masculine side of myself, that these figures are all different ways to be a man, that each embodies a special set of characteristics, a complexity representing one salient feature of my own personality.

Or they could just be different men I have around me in my daily life. Dreams are certainly known to use people, settings, and events we have experienced when awake.

Hillman seems unaware that he has already broken his own rule by making analytical assumptions about dreams, expecting certain psychological patterns in them. He persists by linking them to the personal myths about ourselves he sees each of us carry:

By encouraging the dream to tell its tale, I give it a chance to present its true message, its mythical theme, and thus get closer to the myths which are operating in me, my real story, the story of my life from within, rather than my case history observed from without.[13]

Like other Jungians and Freudians, he can’t resist applying those theories to his dream interpretations. If he did not, he might discover the most persistent pattern in them — their randomness. Surely, there are elements in dreams relevant to our psyche, also reappearing themes that relate to things we process when awake. But that is no proof of a willful message from deep within.

Dreams are composed of our conscious experiences, memories from the past as well as things presently on our minds. That is the material they have at their disposal. It also means the messages are not from the dreams, but to them. They are the recipients of a content from the conscious mind, which they shuffle and spread. Sometimes the result is coherent, but mostly it is just a jumble.

The problem of dream interpretation is precisely that it presupposes a certain meaning and message, before even trying the possibility of those things being absent.

Morality

After speculating about the above elusive phenomena, James Hillman turns his attention to morality. That is quite a shift, and a surprising one coming from an analytical psychologist. Morality is a maze. It is not something becoming a therapist, who should stay away from judging the clients, contrary to how priests see the moral guidance of their parishioners as a major task.

Hillman touches on this dilemma, but with a tone of dismissing it:

In the popular mind, those in the pulpit are supposed to be identified with morality, while those in the analytical chair are supposed to be on the side of the id, of unbridled desire, and against morality.[14]

Unbridled desire, against morality? That is a devious way of putting it. Any therapist would know the difference between observing the patient’s character traits, as opposed to praising or condemning them. Those who do not are agitators in disguise. The analyst should not seek to “correct” the patients, but to assist them in self-discovery.

What Hillman suggests is something of an alliance between psychology and theology, as if they have the same goal. That would risk ending with people who don’t conform to the ideals of the church being declared mentally ill, in need of drastic treatment. It has been known to happen.

He speaks of it as “analytical ethics,” comparing it to legal and medical ethics.[15] But those are quite different — they point to the responsibility of the lawyer and doctor towards the right and protection of the clients, not the moral judgment of them.

Hillman’s wish to merge psychology and religion has the major flaw of replacing research with dogma. Then, it is no longer about how things are, but how they should be. Not only does that lead to prejudiced science, but also to intolerant religion. This, too, has been known to happen.

Still, he insists that analysis is a moral procedure.[16] His language gets religious when he states, “Remembrance of sin, remorse, and repentance become the living language of an analysis.”[17] That would turn analysis into confession.

Male Femininity

In the last chapter of his book, Hillman treats the Jungian principle of anima, the female archetype in the unconscious of men. Jung also spoke of animus, the corresponding male archetype in women, but that is something Hillman disregards, as if only the male psyche counts in his psychology.

He is far from alone with this prejudice among Freudians and Jungians, especially the early ones. His book, though, is from as late as 1967, when such an attitude had become quite outdated in Western society. Not that full gender equality was reached — at that time or since — but the exclusion of half the population when dealing with human conditions was certainly not the norm.

Hillman’s prejudice is evident also in how he describes the characteristics of anima. They are blatant examples of gender stereotypes. He goes through a number of different roles anima plays in a man’s psyche, especially his dreams, like the older woman, who is “school-teacherish, perfectionist, critical”; the positive mother; the one in love with him, “which means nothing other than that he is in love with himself”; the cool, pale blonde; a whore; the old whore, who reflects “a certain impersonality in human affairs, having been through it all and seen so much that nothing perverse astonishes”; and the young and seductive girl, “sometimes tawny-skinned, sometimes nude, often dancing or swimming.”[18]

The same kind of stereotypes appear when he discusses what moods, or affects, the inner femininity expresses:

Some affects are particularly feminine in nature — for example, self-pity, sensitivity, sentimentality, the sense of weakness and despondency, depression.[19]

But he continues with an important clarification: “It is not that these affects particularly pertain to women.” It is just that those sentiments feel feminine to men, when they experience them. So, it seems that he points out the prejudice of the male mentality, which is also a form of prejudice though not without reason. But when expanding on what these feminine feelings cause, he falls right back into the stereotypes:

They do not have "go-ahead" in them. They lessen a man’s ability to achieve, just as arguing and fighting often lessen a woman’s ability to connect.

Hillman sees traces of this inner femininity in religion and mythology, too. For example, he speaks of shamanic initiations involving “a ritual and symbolic change of sex, including transvestism and homosexuality, living as a wife to another man.” There are other explanations to this phenomenon, nearer at hand than the initiation of a shaman. Hercules after his feats, Hillman points out, became the servant of a woman and then went mad — as if that was an unavoidable consequence. But that woman was a queen, and there have been countless men serving under queens in myths as well as history, without going mad.[20]

And this is how he argues for the Buddha having feminine features:

The Buddha’s feminine characteristics are obvious: the heavy, silent, full-bellied, soft-breasted receptivity; the huge ears, open and taking in; the tree under which he sits and the lotus posture; compassion.[21]

He goes on to call the Jewish Sabbath a feminine tradition, and Jesus feminine in his weakness as revealed by his weeping. Feminine is also the image of the Holy Ghost as a dove, since it once belonged to the love goddess Aphrodite, though the dove bringing an olive leaf to Noah would be a much more familiar and important symbol in Christianity.

He even claims that the religious experience is necessarily feminine:

Because the religious moment requires a passive mood to God’s intentions, a receptive state to Divine Will, a wounding experience which opens us, it is feminine in nature.[22]

At the end of his book, Hillman repeats even more firmly that anima is the key to the religious experience:

I do not know how better or how else we can prepare for the religious moment than by cultivating, giving inner culture to, our own unconscious femininity.[23]

Since woman’s unconscious is instead equipped with the male archetype animus, that would mean the religious experience is only accessible to men. Obviously, that is not the case.

This utterly binary view on humans has never been confirmed by evidence, either by Hillman or any other depth psychologist insisting on it. The odd thing is that they have still insisted on it, to the point of being blind to other paths of exploring and understanding those issues. Freud and Jung are at least partly excused because of the culture and conventions in which they formed their ideas, but Hillman, being born half a century later than Jung, would have other perspectives accessible to him, had he been perceptive to them.

It is interesting in this context that his book was published in 1967, the year of the summer of love, as they call it, when old ideals were not only questioned, but revolted against. It cannot have passed him unnoticed, especially considering that his profession was one of exploring human mentality.

Archetypal Psychology

James Hillman introduced the concept of archetypal psychology in 1970, when he became the editor of the annual Jungian journal Spring and changed its subtitle from Contributions to Jungian Thoughts to An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought. He explained this change in an editorial postscript, “Why ‘Archetypal Psychology’?”[24]

Hillman is well aware that he enters a minefield by daring to present an alternative to the established Jungian terminology. He speaks of the hostility of Jungians towards the “non-Jungians” who promote other psychological theories, but also “the aggression and destruction released by Jungians against Jungians in the name of Jungian psychology,” which is hardly resolved by shifting terms.[25]

Jung mainly used the concept analytical psychology for his contribution to the discipline, but also complex psychology, with a slightly different meaning. Hillman sees both as somewhat insufficient, which is why he feels the need to introduce his own concept, regarding it as a more adequate representation of the originality of Jung’s psychology, since “the archetype is the most ontologically fundamental of all Jung’s psychological concepts.”[26]

It also has the advantage of widening the perspective from the strictly analytical approach:

Analysis may be an instrument for realizing the archetypes but it cannot embrace them. Placing archetypal prior to analytical gives the psyche a chance to move out of the consulting room. It gives an archetypal perspective to the consulting room itself. After all, analysis too is an enactment of an archetypal fantasy.

To Hillman, and certainly to Jung as well, the individual psyche is not the only place where the archetypes manifest. They can be found just about everywhere in human culture, and therefore:

Insights for this approach call for an archetypal eye that is difficult to acquire through focus upon persons and cases. This eye needs training through profound appreciation of history and biography, of the arts, of ideas and culture.[27]

This leads him to an understanding of the archetypes as expressions of polytheism, which is a deviation from the familiar monotheistic deity he had in mind in the previously discussed book Insearch. He states, “The plurality of archetypal forms reflects the pagan level of things and what might be called a polytheistic psychology.”[28] He ends the article by saying that this archetypal perspective is the spirit in which he hopes Spring will proceed.

Indeed, it is with the archetypes Jung made his most noticeable contribution, not only to psychology but to other fields of cultural pursuits, where the arts were far from the least prominent and popular applications.

In 1988, while Hillman was still editor, the journal’s name was changed to Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, this time without any explanation of it in the journal. It should not be interpreted as abandoning archetypal psychology, but as an enhancement of the wider application of the archetypes he had already promoted. Hillman left as its editor in 1997, and the journal was discontinued after 2015.

Analysis as Myth

James Hillman’s 1972 book The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology consists of three lectures from 1966 to 1969, which he revised and expanded in the book, for the purpose of explaining his ideas behind the concept of archetypal psychology and how his viewpoint differs from analytical psychology.[29]

That must have been a daring venture within the discipline of depth psychology, as several predecessors — including Carl G. Jung — experienced when deviating from the dogma of Sigmund Freud, which was fiercely protected by him as well as his major disciples. Jung also had devoted followers, forming what Richard Noll in his book about that movement called a cult.[30] Jung’s intellectual leadership was unquestionable, and there was certainly intrigue going on among them, but not to the extremes of the Freudians.

Maybe due to his own experience, or his confidence, Jung did not behave as paranoid as Freud, nor did his followers rush to battle in defense of his ideas. Also, his psychology was more of a maze than a formula, which made deviations from it less provocative. His theories left plenty of room for variations, compared to Freud’s firm obsession with the Oedipus complex. Furthermore, and maybe most importantly, when Hillman presented his archetypal psychology, Jung had already been dead för almost two decades.

Hillman felt at liberty to question the very fundament of analytical psychology, and he did.

He declares in the introduction that he sets out to free psychic phenomena from “the curse of the analytical mind,” which has a predilection for psychopathology, thereby “distorting the psyche into a belief that there is something ‘wrong’ with it.” Psychotherapists and other helping professionals have a direct interest in this perspective: “They must see sickness in the soul so that they can get in there and do their job.”[31]

Hillman sees it quite differently:

But suppose the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are archetypal in their sickness and thus natural. Suppose they are authentic, belonging to the nature of man; suppose even that their odd irrationalities are required for life, else we wither into rigid stalks of reason. Then what is there to analyze?

He questions the model of the unconscious and its psychodynamics, pointing out that it can hardly be the only possible psychological model: “Perhaps the ‘unconscious’ and ‘psychodynamics’ are fantasies that could be replaced with better ones.” He suggests that there are some archetypal patterns, as good as those in use for understanding the psyche. Modesty stops him from saying that they are superior, but that is certainly implied.

So, in a few sentences Hillman discards the very fundaments of both Freudian and Jungian depth psychology, as well as any other psychological treatment. They have misunderstood what is and what is not an ailment of the psyche.

The damage it may do to their patients is that they try to suppress what is in their personality in order to fit some clinical norm, as if people are supposed to be the same and never feel bad or uncertain about where their life is heading.

That is absurd, of course. Life is full of experiences, some pleasant and some not, and the only way to avoid the latter is sedation. That is the opposite of a cure. The most it can do is to postpone.

Hillman is quite rare among depth psychologists by not only having his own additions to it, which is rather common among Jungians, but to reevaluate its very basics and coming to his own conclusions. He says it again, with slightly different words:

The psyche can carry its imagination and live from it without professional aid, providing it assumes more confidence in itself. For this, it will first have to dispossess the "inner analyst," who has an armchair in our mind.[32]

The problem is not necessarily the agony of the patient, but the prejudice inherent in the therapy.

To Hillman, we are all mythical by nature, in so much as we all regard ourselves and what we do in the light of myth: “We are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties.”[33] The mythic is in our language and observations, also in the theories of science. That includes the “fantasy” of analysis.

He suggests that its three pillars — transference, the unconscious, and neurosis — should be replaced with the erotic, the imaginal, and the Dionysian, in accordance with the mythical perspective.[34] He is also a strong proponent of using the concept of the soul, which he made clear also in the previously treated book. The question is, though, if a change of terminology really changes the dilemma he finds in analytical psychology. The structure remains the same.

Still, he is far from wrong about the mythic nature of the human mind as well as its products. Certainly, analysis is built much more on myth than on empirical science. On the other hand, if the human mind is mythical, maybe a mythical psychology is just what it takes to understand it.

The problem might not be the mythical, but whether those myths are comparable and can be combined to further our understanding. Are the personal and analytical myths analogous enough to be applied to one another? If not, merging them in some kind of therapy would be unfruitful or even detrimental. But if they do correspond, somehow, their meeting could lead to benefits for the patient and analyst alike — although the result might evade clinical scrutiny.

What Hillman neglects is that this already takes place in analysis, especially of the Jungian kind. It is based on mythical perspectives and assumptions, as Hillman has also pointed out, so he doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. The only difference in his approach, and it is not a small one, is that he objects to regarding the patients as in need of a cure. Instead, the patients should be encouraged along their mythical path. But that, too, is included in the method of analytical psychology, albeit not that outspokenly.

Jung’s central idea of individuation shows it. Patients are to discover and come to peace with their true self, by indulging in the archetypal messages from their unconscious. It is by the very acceptance of those signals from the unconscious that they succeed. This is indeed a mythical method applied to a mythical understanding of the self.

Femininity Revisited

The last part of The Myth of Analysis returns to the psychology of femininity, which Hillman also treated in Insearch, but here it is with firm opposition to misogyny and prejudice. He examines what he calls “the fantasies of female inferiority” through history and their misleading influences on psychology in particular. Therefore, he uses psychology to find out what went wrong: “So we are attempting here to bring psychological, or archetypal, understanding to these errors.”[35]

Doing so, he mainly uses two mythological sources: Adam and Eve in Genesis, and the Greek god Apollo. As for the former, the simple fact that God created Adam first, and then Eve out of Adam, made it clear who was the closest to him: “Whatever is divine in Eve comes to her secondhand through the substance of Adam.”[36]

Regarding Apollo, Hillman uses a quote from the play Eumenides by Aeschylus, where the god states: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.” Apollo even claims, “There can be a father without any mother.”[37] Hillman points out that the words of Apollo are of Aeschylus’ invention and not necessarily part of the deity’s mythology, but he uses it to symbolize this archetypal attitude towards the genders:

It is a statement of an archetypal position representing a world-view which can be attributed to Apollo and may be called Apollonic.[38]

Fair enough. In the play, what Apollo takes as proof of male reproduction is Athene, who is also present in the scene and was born out of her father Zeus. The idea of woman being but a vessel for the seed of man predates even the ancient Greeks, and made some sense before the advances of biology could dismiss it. Misogyny was not necessarily involved.

On the other hand, the belief that the first woman was created out of the first man is more likely a depreciation of Eve’s gender compared to that of Adam. It was she who convinced Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit, and therefore God condemned her to give birth in pain and to be ruled by her husband.[39] Surely, too, the biblical myth has had a much greater impact on posterity than the tragedy by Aeschylus.

Greek mythology is not particularly misogynic. Male and female deities were equally immoral, and although Zeus was the ruler of Olympus his might was frequently challenged by female deities, who often got the best of him. The Greek pantheon consisted of both male and female deities, and their level of power was not decided by their gender.

In the Bible, though, the power is definitely male, from God himself to Jesus and just about everybody in between. The only woman of divine significance is Mary, the mother of Jesus, but she was indeed just a vessel of God’s offspring, immaculately impregnated by his Holy Spirit.

Hillman goes on to claim that “psychoanalysis found the feminine faulty” and the “urge toward science is governed by the same archetypal background as the tradition of misogyny.”[40] That would make science as such male, which is questionable, to say the least.

No doubt, a vast majority of scientists through the centuries have been male, but it doesn’t automatically mean that science as such is misogynic. An explanation closer at hand is that the male governed society excluded women from any significant positions, including those of scientific endeavor. Once this started to change, around the turn to the 20th century, women began to participate and make their marks. Not that inequality is completely eradicated, but it is a problem of society as a whole and not just science. Religion is not doing any better on this issue.

Hillman then goes on to the Dionysian aspect, which he regards as opposed to that which Apollo represents, but still they are combined in psychotherapy: “Thus therapeutic psychology has an inherent contradiction: its method is Apollonic, its substance Dionysian.”[41]

He explains:

It attempts to analyze the collectivity, the downwardness, the moisture of libidinal fantasies, the child, the theatricality, the vegetative and animal levels — the "madness," in short — of the Dionysian by means of the distance, cognition, and objective clarity of the other structure.

That would be like applying strictly scientific tools to examine and understand art. Something about the latter might be overlooked, and that is the very essence of it. Therapy strives to diminish the madness in order to make it rationally accessible to the conscious mind, i.e., “transform the unconscious (Dionysian) into consciousness (Apollonic).”

When Hillman speaks of the conjunction of the feminine and masculine, which is what the Dionysian represents to him, he gets rather confusing because he insists on the term bisexuality for it. True, Dionysus had amorous adventures with both men and women, but so did Apollo — and most of the other Greek deities, including their ruler Zeus. Neither Greek mythology nor their culture had any problem with that.

Hillman’s use of the term, though, points not to sexual preference but to androgyny or hermaphroditism, where both genders are conjunct in either the body or the mentality, or both. He claims support for his terminology in Carl G. Jung:

In Jung’s language, psychotherapy achieves its ultimate goal in the wholeness of the conjunction, in the bisexuality of consciousness, which means, as well, conscious bisexuality, that incarnation of durable weakness and unheroic strength that we find in the image of Dionysus.[42]

So, he speaks primarily about a mentality, someone with both male and female character traits. He sees bisexuality in this sense as the primary human condition to which we should return. Earlier in the text, he states the same, using the more adequate term, “androgynous consciousness, where male and female are primordially united.”[43]

In therapy, it is primarily femininity that needs to be raised as equal in importance and value to masculinity, since it is the suppressed one. Therein lies the remedy:

We are cured when we are no longer only masculine in psyche, no matter whether we are male or female in biology. Analysis cannot constellate this cure until it, too, is no longer masculine in psychology.[44]

Hillman adds, in italics for emphasis: “The end of analysis coincides with the acceptance of femininity.” That may seem drastic, but there is no denying the necessity of accepting femininity in whatever body it appears. The question is what that femininity is, exactly. Hillman’s description is much more respectful and nuanced here than in his previous book, but it still leans on conventional gender roles that need to be questioned and examined.

After all, the difference is not so great between praising one role and praising two in union. They are still roles, upholding dated conceptions about what we humans are like and how we differ from each other.

Binaries

Hillman’s reasoning leads to approaches that easily become absurd. For example, should we all strive for balance between the male and the female inside of us, and are persons without that balance therefore in need of therapy? What signifies persons in such balance, are they both strong and weak, dominant and submissive, rational and emotional, and so on?

People are not purely binary in any sense, not even mixes of different binaries. It is much more complicated. So, a method based on binary concepts will hardly liberate the human soul, whatever that is, but imprison it.

The emphasis on gender is sadly missing one basic fact about us. We are all the same species, and quite a remarkable one at that — for better or worse — and we share so tremendously much more than what separates us, regardless of gender, sexual preferences, habitat, cultural inheritance, and whatnots. Even in the most misogynic of societies, and there are still plenty of those, a psychology concentrating on gender is ignoring or at least underestimating the very most of what goes on in our psyche. The diagnosis cannot be accurate.

When people are sorted into groups of whatever kind, prejudice is just around the corner. It may be due to the sad fact that so often, the incentive to make that division originates in prejudice, and the dividing is just a method to justify it. That has happened a lot in history and is not over yet.

Hillman is doing a noble effort at getting rid of prejudiced generalizations about the feminine, but fundamentally he is replacing them with other generalizations, and they are not even that different. When a man is emotional or a woman stern, they are not expressing the element of the other gender hiding in their unconscious. It is simply so that he is emotional and she is stern. It happens all the time. So does the reverse. No fundamental truth about the soul is to be found there. It is not even a significant part of their being.

If psychology is to untangle the human mind, it has to start by getting rid of all generalizations and strict categories. It is particularly urgent to dismiss assumptions about the human nature, which are based on social conditioning. That was what led to the prejudice about women, and so much else, to begin with. It can’t be annulled by other prejudice.

A grave flaw in both Freudian and Jungian psychology is that they are largely based on phenomena that have their origin in social conditioning, but mistake them for being fixed properties of the human mind. Anthropological accounts from other cultures have shown that they are not. It is also confirmed by the variations within a certain society.

Most of what the gender roles contain are examples of this. Masculinity and femininity are in the eyes of the beholder, also when the beholder is the one beheld. We are compelled to play our roles, but that does not mean we identify with them. This is a very important distinction.

Carl G. Jung talked about it as the persona, the behavioral mask we wear to direct how others will perceive us. We know that we are playing a role. We may take delight in playing that role or we might despise it, in any case we are very much aware of it. And each of us plays it differently.

Hillman’s Dionysus lives alongside Apollo in us all, but so does the whole pantheon of Greek deities in a collective so big and disorderly that there is no meaning in using those archetypes to find a distinct structure. Well, not in an empirically scientific sense. If there is a claim of scientific evidence, failure is certain. But that is not the only way to do research.

What Hillman and other Jungians have used for the pursuit of understanding the human mind is a symbolic perspective, which can bring its own rewards. Their mistake was the claim that what they found were objective facts. They should have given that claim up. Their speculations just show one perspective, one way of looking at it. But as such, it can still further our understanding — indirectly.

The fact that our minds find it so easy to relate to symbols and apply them in our thinking tells us something about our cognition. They display our age-old need for simple patterns by which to make life comprehensible. The binary division into opposites is a clear example of this. In reality, though, it is rarely that simple.

Day and night do not instantly switch. Their borders are blurred by periods of dawn and dusk, and clouds influence the brightness of the day and darkness of the night. Man and woman are no absolute opposites, considering how very much they have in common, as well as how much their bodies shift from childhood all the way to old age. By symbols, the complexities are turned into simplified patterns, and life appears a little less overwhelming.

Analysts have made the mistake of regarding the symbols as factual components in us, forming our behavior, instead of analyzing our tendency to create those symbols in the first place. The significance lies not in the symbols, but in our need to invent and utilize them. In other words, they are not our masters, but our tools.

The Soul’s Archetypes

The idea of symbols as imaginary inventions to grasp the complexities of reality, discussed earlier, was also in a way promoted by James Hillman. There are several indications of it in his writing, even in the books previously examined. He did so again in Re-Visioning Psychology from 1975, where he explains how his archetypal psychology differs from and also to some extent agrees with Jungian analytical psychology.

It is when he presents his ideas of the soul that he ventures into its capacity to create an imaginary version of its experiences. He starts with this definition:

By soul I mean, first of all, 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.[45]

The soul, then, is a reflective entity, adding meaning to experience. He adds three qualities, whereof the third in particular approaches the concept of symbols invented in the mind to make sense of it all:

First, "soul" refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by "soul" I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.

So, the symbolizing stems from imagination, the mind’s fantasy at work, and it is a continuous process, involving all experience: “Every single feeling or observation occurs as a psychic event by first forming a fantasy-image.”[46]

That would be the archetypes, except for the fact that in Jungian psychology they are not created by the imagination but stored in the unconscious and inherited from generation to generation, without change. So, Hillman must have a perception of them, or he speaks about different phenomena. It is unclear.

He regards the archetypes as metaphors rather than things, easier to describe in images than literally. That would fit them as fantasy objects. So might his idea that they are the “deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world.”[47] But less so what he says next:

They are the axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return.

Now, we are back at the Jungian archetypes, not invented by individual minds but planted in them long ago. Hillman calls them axiomatic first principles, models, or paradigms, again taking them far away from the process of imagination. On the contrary, by his definitions they are fixed objects locked in our minds, impossible for us to erase or even alter. He even compares the archetypes to gods, which certainly confirms their unchangeable nature:

By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God.

It seems, therefore, that the forming of fantasy-images he speaks of is limited to our inherent catalogue of archetypes, as if they are all the cards our imagination is dealt, and the only thing we can do is shuffle them. That leaves little room for the tremendous cornucopia of human fantasy.

[1] Kirsch 2000, pp. 20, 22f.

[2] James Hillman,The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, New York 1996.

[3] James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, Dallas 1984 (first published in 1967), pp. 6f.

[4] Ibid., p. 5.

[5] Ibid., p. 42.

[6] Ibid., p. 50.

[7] Jung found that with certain words the response took significantly longer than normal, and deduced that their meaning was not fully accessible to the conscious mind.

[8] Ibid., pp. 51-57.

[9] Ibid., p. 66.

[10] Ibid., p. 57.

[11] Ibid., p. 59.

[12] Ibid., p. 60.

[13] Ibid., p. 61.

[14] Ibid., p. 69.

[15] Ibid., p. 68.

[16] Ibid., p. 71.

[17] Ibid., p. 73.

[18] Ibid., pp. 96-100

[19] Ibid., p. 102.

[20] Ibid., p. 105.

[21] Ibid., p. 107.

[22] Ibid., p. 108.

[23] Ibid., p. 126.

[24] James Hillman, "Why ‘Archetypal Psychology’ ?" Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought , New York 1970, pp. 212-219.

[25] Ibid., p. 213.

[26] Ibid., p. 216.

[27] Ibid., p. 217.

[28] Ibid., p. 218.

[29] James Hillman,The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, Evanston 1972, pp. ix and 3.

[30] Richard Noll,The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton 1994.

[31] Hillman 1972, pp. 3f.

[32] Ibid., p. 5.

[33] Ibid., pp. 5f.

[34] Ibid., p. 8.

[35] Ibid., p. 246 and 248.

[36] Ibid., p. 217.

[37] Ibid., p. 224. Quoted from Aeschylus, "Eumenides," Oresteia, transl. Richmond Lattimore, Chicago 1953, p. 158.

[38] Ibid., p. 225.

[39] Genesis 3:16.

[40] Hillman 1972, p. 288.

[41] Ibid., p. 290.

[42] Ibid., p. 293.

[43] Ibid., pp. 282 and 259.

[44] Ibid., p. 292.

[45] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York 1975, p. x.

[46] Ibid., p. xi.

[47] Ibid., p. xiii.

Jungians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in January, 2023.

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