Peaks and Vales

Excerpt-James Hillman-A Blue Fire

I have called this talk “Peaks and Vales,” and I have been aiming to draw apart these images in order to contrast them as vividly as I can. Part of separating and drawing apart is the emotion of hatred. So I shall be speaking with hatred and urging strife, or ens, or polemos, which Heraclitus, the first ancestor of psychology, has said is the father of all.

The contemporary meaning of peak was developed by Abraham Maslow, who in turn was resonating an archetypal image, for peaks have belonged to the spirit ever since Mount Sinai and Mount Olympus, Mount Patmos and the Mount of Olives, and Mount Moriah of the first patriarchal Abraham. And you will easily name a dozen other mountains of the spirit. It does not require much explication to realize that the peak experience is a way of describing pneumatic experience, and that the clamber up the peaks is in search of spirit or is the drive of the spirit in search of itself. The language Maslow uses about the peak experience—“self-validating, self-justifying and carries its own intrinsic value with it,” the godlikeness and God-nearness, the absolutism and intensity—is a traditional way of describing spiritual experiences. Maslow deserves our gratitude for having reintroduced pneuma into psychology, even if his move has been compounded by the old confusion of pneuma with psyche. But what about the psyche of psychology?

Vales do indeed need more exposition, just as everything to do with soul needs to be carefully imagined as accurately as we can. Vale comes from the Romantics: Keats uses the term in a letter, and I have taken this passage from Keats as a psychological motto: “Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making. Then you will find out the use of the world.”