An Excursion on the Return to Greece

Excerpt - Hillman - Re-visioning Psychology

Enough has been written to justify the “return to Greece” from aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural points of view. We have all tended to look to Greece for past glory, for perfection, grace, and clarity of mind, and also when in search of “origins”, for Greece is where our culture began. But our aim here is to look to Greece for psychological insight. We are trying to understand both what is this “Greece” that so draws the psyche and what the psyche finds there.

When the dominant vision that holds a period of culture together cracks, consciousness regresses into earlier containers, seeking sources for survival which also offer sources of revival. Critics are right when they see the “return to Greece” as a regressive death wish, an escape from contemporary conflicts into mythologies and speculations of a fantasy world. But looking backward makes it possible to move forward, for looking backward revives the fantasy of the child archetype, fons et origo, who is both the moment of helpless weakness and the future unfolding. “Renaissance” (rebirth) would be a senseless word without the implied dissolution, the very death out of which that rebirth comes. Critics miss the validity and necessity of regression. Critics also miss the necessity of a regression that is particularly “Greek.”