Senex and Puer
Excerpt - Glen Slater
Introduction
James Hillman undoes. You enter his writing and a conversation or an argument will occur, either with him, with yourself, or with some well-worn belief system. Favorite theories will either be turned on their head or you’ll be guarding them all the closer. Passive readers beware: this work engages. Though his approach is not systematic—he doesn’t build models of the mind—his reflections are pointed and precise, sharply illuminating whatever terrain he traverses—pathology to politics, nature to nurture, antiquity to Armageddon. Yet his concern is always more vertical than horizontal. Hillman lifts rocks and reveals the strange creatures beneath. He locates fissures of narrow-mindedness and drops into their blind spaces. Unraveling conventional wisdom and codified understanding, he makes room for new ways to be psychological. The undoing always becomes an opening. The result is a different perspective, one that deepens before it explains. The consistent goal: To put psyche (soul) back into psychology.
Today psychology rarely inspires. Materialism and numbers have eclipsed interiority. Cognitive-behaviorism and neuroscience dominate the landscape—flatlands where subjects are quantified, therapies are determined determined economically, and pills are given before anyone asks, “what’s wrong?” Functionality reigns. There is no room for the dream, less for meaning and little for the imagination. Most theorists have abandoned the depth perspectives of Freud and Jung, thinkers whose works constantly ignite discourse in the humanities and remain mainstays of popular soul-searching. Psychology has placed itself inside a Skinner box—a place with an empty interior where psychologists map the brain and observe activity. [1] It is this boxed-in psychology that is grist for Hillman’s mill.
When efficiency and functionality become psychology’s primary goal, the programmable machine becomes its primary metaphor. Medicine already convinces us that psychopathology is a “chemical imbalance.” These trends force complex, multi-faceted soul-realities outside the field. To find “psyche” one must get into Buddhism, read pop psychology books and take New-Age workshops. Whereas these alternate paths may sustain for a time, they are notoriously evasive of the soul’s disturbances and they often lack a nose for cultural shadows; they may have psyche, but little critical logos. Between scientism and self-help, psychology proper, the logos of psyche, finds itself homeless.
Hillman’s work reverses this kind of alienation of the psyche. His writings recover an authenticity and vitality within the field. Staying close to emotion, fantasy and metaphor, to the more poetic and imaginative basis of mind, his ideas stir the heart while waking the intellect. Religion and myth are predominant themes, providing expressions that have always been the psyche’s mirror. Courting rather than denying mystery, Hillman follows psychological life through its innate forms. He lingers in dark places and rarely settles on easy, unambiguous understandings. The driving concern is for apt perspective—insight that satisfies through its very way of seeing, so that the process of being psychological, referred to by him as soul-making, [2] becomes the focus. Curiosities, confusions and deformities are given their due. They too are part of psychological understanding. As the title of his previous key work suggests, Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a psychology re-visioned. [3]
You can download the Jung and the World Podcast with Glen Slater here:
Jung and Hillman with Glen Slater
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