Anima Mundi

Excerpt - James Hillman - A Blue Fire

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, "the whole world is full of gods. " The idea that the world itself in all its particulars has soul was reborn in the Renaissance and now it is taken up in archetypal psychology. In the writings of James Hillman, Robert Sardello, Ginette Paris, Wolfgang Giegerich, and other archetypalists, this is not just a philosophical and mystical notion. If psychology is by definition work with the soul, and if nature and culture have soul, then psychology must concern itself with this larger sphere.

Hillman argues strongly against reducing soul to personal subjectivity, naming personalism as one of the burdens of the modern era. Psychology assumes that only humans are persons, and therefore we are given the impossible responsibility of carrying the full weight of soul. We tend to interpret everything in terms of personal relationships. Even therapy is often defined as the interaction of two persons, and the goal in therapy is the personal development or growth of the private individual.

The soul is not of itself personal, of course, the psyche presents itself in images of persons and in personal feelings, but it is more than personal. Carl Jung used the phrase objective psyche, suggesting that when we look into the soul, we are looking at something with its own terrain, its own history and purposes, and its own principles of movement and stasis. The interested, noninterfering tone Hillman usually takes when dealing with manifestations of the soul derives in large measure from this conviction that the soul has its own reasons.

To the archetypal psychologist the world, too, is a patient in need of therapeutic attention. When our fantasy of the world deprives it of personality and soul, we tend to treat this "inanimate" world badly. We place all our psychological attention on interior events and intimate relationships, withdrawing that attention from the world But if the world has subjectivity, we have to have a relationship with it. Therefore, as Hillman says, we can be in the world through the heart rather than the head We can feel our congenital ties to the things of nature and of culture, discovering our actual attachments and thereby developing new intimacies with what has been previously dismissed as dead throwaway matter.

Hillman refuses to see personality in the world of things as projection of our own fantasies. While it is true that we perceive the world's soul through a refined and strong imagination, that doesn't mean that the world is alive only through our fantasy of it. Nature, architecture, politics, economics, and even city transportation are filled with fantasy that lies beyond our projections. Archetypal psychology tries to unveil that imagery. The point is not to dissect the world's soul for the mere pleasure of analysis and understanding, but to remember the world's body so that we can become more aware of how it affects us and relate to it as person to person. We might also find in that relationship, as we would with a human patient, areas of suffering in need of special attention. Here, Hillman's point is that therapy on our own souls is ultimately ineffective without equal attention to the world soul…

Intro - Thomas Moore