When we move the soul insights of the dream into life for problem-solving and people-relating, we rob the dream and impoverish the soul. The more we get out of a dream for human affairs the more we prevent its psychological work, what it is doing or building night after night, interiorly, away from life in a nonhuman world. This lifelong activity of nightly imaging is distinct from what we do in the day with these images, applying all the humanistic fallacies—egoistic, naturalistic, moralistic, pragmatic. Dream activity might better be conceived as soul-making, or in D. H. Lawrence's words, building the Ship of Death. (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology)
Underworld images are nonetheless visible, but only to what is invisible in us. The invisible is perceived by means of the invisible, that is, psyche. (James Hillman, The Dream And the Underworld)
Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the patient part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passion to extinguish certainty. (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology)
With slow suspicion or sudden insight we move through the apparent to the less apparent. We use metaphors of light—a little flicker, a slow dawning, a lightning flash—as things become clarified. When the clarity itself has become obvious and transparent, there seems to grow within it a new darkness, a new question or doubt, requiring a new act of insight penetrating again toward the less apparent. The movement becomes an infinite regress which does not stop at coherent or elegant answers. The process of psychologizing cannot be brought to a halt at any of the resting places of science or philosophy; that is, psychologizing is not satisfied when necessary and sufficient conditions have been met or when testability has been established. It is satisfied only by its own movement of seeing through.
(James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology)
This passage proved revelatory for me:
This first entry into myth needs an important correction. It commits the ego fallacy by taking each archetypal theme into the ego. We fall into an identity with one of the figures of the tale: I become Zeus deceiving my wife, or Saturn devouring my children, or Hermes thieving from my brother. But this neglects that the whole myth is pertinent and all its mythical figures relevant: by deceiving I am also deceived, and being devoured, and stolen from, as well as the other complications in each of these tales. It is egoistic to recognize oneself in only one portion of a tale, cast in only one role.
(James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology)
I could go on like this forever. In some of Hillman's books I have underlined almost every sentence.
Nemo
|