Psychologizing or Seeing Through

Excerpt-James Hillman-Re-Visioning Psychology

Psychological Ideas

The question before us in this chapter is even more essential to the psyche than those with which we have been engaged. Now we shall be asking not only what is psychology itself, that discipline named for the soul, but what is psychologizing—the soul’s root and native activity. Our inquiry will now proceed by means of ideas rather than persons, although the archetypal connection between persons and ideas should emerge in the course of the chapter.

By emphasizing ideation, we shall be assuming the passionate importance of psychological ideas. We shall be showing that the soul requires its own ideas, in fact, that soul-making takes place as much through ideation as in personal relationships or meditation. One aim of this book is the resuscitation of ideas at a time in psychology when they have fallen into decline and are being replaced by experimental designs, social programs, therapeutic techniques.

There seems to be nothing more astounding in the field of psychology than its scarcity of interesting ideas. Whole schools are built upon one book, and one book upon one idea, and that often a simplification or a borrowing. The ideational process in psychology is far behind its methodology, instruments, and applications—and far, far behind the psyche’s indigenous richness. In this century since Freud and Jung and the wealth of ideas they introduced—from libido, projection, and repression to individuation, anima/animus, and archetype, to pick but a handful—how few have been the ideas generative of psychological reflection! Technical concepts proliferate in the jargon of a profession, but these are short-lived fruit flies feeding on the sound fruit.

Ideas decline for many reasons. They too grow old and hollow, become private and precious; or they may detach from life, no longer able to save its phenomena. Or they may become monomanic, one particular idea crediting itself with more value than all others, and in opposition to them. Today action is thought of within this polarity, which at its extreme would make action blind and ideas impotent. An old cliche, the bodiless head of academic psychology, is converting into a new cliche, the headless body of therapeutic psychology—a current demonstration of action against ideation.