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James Hillman
Psychoanalyst and Philosopher
USA
James Hillman, psychologist and philosopher, scholar of ancient religions and expert on Mediterranean art and culture, was born in Atlantic City, USA in 1926. He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin and then did his Ph. D. at the University of Zurich under Jung. He did his psychoanalytical training at the C. G. Jung Institute, where he went on to work for several years as Director of Studies. In 1969, he underwent a profound crisis, which led him to completely reconsider the way he understood analysis, and left Switzerland. The next year, in London, he published his first non-fiction best seller, Emotions: a comprehensive phenomenology of Theories and Their Meanings for Therapy. He started a new Jungian school on the basis of his insights, with the objective of enhancing the imagination and the sensitivity of the individual. Archetypal psychology, the movement founded by Hillman, immediately met with great success and strongly renewed the Jungian tradition for all practical purposes. Re-Visioning Psychology, published in 1975, confirmed and emphasized Hillman's interest in the study of the soul, conducted through the analysis of the lives of great people of the past (Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico in this case) which he analysed as though they were clinical cases. Hillman used this style once more in The soul's code (1996), a book that is considered his masterpiece in Italy and the United States. Hillman retuned to the United States in 1978, first to Dallas, then to Thompson, in Connecticut.
His published works include Pan and the Nightmare (1972, Italian edition 1977), Anima (1985, Italian edition1989), Facing the Gods (1980, Italian Edition 1991), The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling (1996, Italian edition 1997), Puer papers (1979, Italian edition 1999), The Force of Character (1999, Italian edition 2000), The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992 Italian edition 2002) whose Italian editions are published by Adelphi; Il piacere di pensare (The pleasure of thinking,1991), L'anima del mondo. Conversazione con Silvia Ronchey (The soul of the world, conversations with Silvia Ronchey 2000) e Kinds of Power (1995, Italian edition 2002) published in Italy by Rizzoli.
James Hillman brings to the WWS his own original and personal interpretation of fear, and more generally of mental disorders, namely that it is a manifestation of the soul's autonomy in creating suffering, through which life is experienced. Keeping fear under control is therefore possible only if one is able to listen to one's soul.
In this sense, the concept of the soul occupies a central place in Hillman's theories. He does not identify the soul with the spirit of man (a religious interpretation) or with the body (a psychosomatic interpretation) because, as he explains in The Soul's Code: On Character and Calling, the soul does not belong to man, rather man forms part of the world's soul. The task of Archetypal Psychology, a branch based on his theoretical reflections, is accordingly that of listening to the anima mundi, paying attention to each element and to each place of the world, because it is the soul that permeates them.
The error committed by psychoanalysis is, rather, that of dragging man back into his past instead of helping the individual to problematise the world in which he lives, the causes of his malaise being in the present day, and more generally of stressing the need for postmodern man to recognise the mental and psychological connections tying him to his ancient (or even archaic) cultural roots, not only as a single carrier of the soul's turmoil and pathologies but as a member of a society that is no less disturbed and pathological than he. This is because the soul's disorders in actual fact manifest the problems of adaptation of the individual psyche to the demands and pressures of the social and historical milieu in which its bearer is called upon to act, as well as the conflicts between the "character", "calling" and "fate" of the individual and those of the community in which he lives.
It is with his "acorn theory" that Hillman explains what he means when he refers to the "character", the "calling" and the "fate" of the individual, which are the key to understanding the encoded language making up the "soul's code". In particular, referring to the philosophy of Plato, he states that "before birth, the soul of each one of us chooses a pattern that we shall then live on earth, and we are allotted a companion to guide us from above, a daimon, who is unique and typically ours. Nevertheless, on coming into the world, we forget all about this and believe we have come here empty handed. It is the daimon that remembers the content of our image, the elements of the predetermined pattern, therefore he is the bearer of our fate". As if to say there is a reason why each person, who is unique and unrepeatable, is in the world, and there are things to which one must devote oneself beyond the daily chores, and which give relevance to one's daily life.
The acorn theory (incorporating the "calling", the motivation to try and become that unique and splendid oak tree) refers to the sensation, which is often evaded, omitted or unheard, of being responsible for something that presents blurred edges, but that is calling us in some directions rather than others. Every person, therefore, possesses a uniqueness, a "character" that asks to be lived, a calling to be that unique, unrepeatable individual, to be the tall, leafy oak, or the low, solid oak that the acorn and one's daimon have chosen, a "time" outside time. More precisely, we are what we are by virtue of a daimon looking down from above, which is no other than what we call "fate", causing us to be born at a given time, in a given family and under given conditions.
Thus Hillman takes us by the hand and allows us to rediscover and retrieve "truths" that are not demonstrable but are undoubtedly perceived and experienced by every man. In philosophical terms it is natural in this theoretical position to refuse to think of a man's life as a story decided exclusively by inherited genes and environmental influences which, right from the start, write the script he will be forced to act out without the possibility of any digressions. Hillman's theory, on the other hand, releases us from a mechanistic fate based on cause and effect, in that it restores to us the belief, or simply the sensation, that we are not in this world by chance, that there are things that make us feel alive and full of meaning, and other things that are empty and purposeless.
Man's journey "within himself" re-discovering the uniqueness of his being, is necessarily one filled with apprehension and fear. And as Hillman writes in Pan and the nightmare, "fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous, the uncontrollable, by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd".
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