The Life and Ideas of James Hillman Vol II
Dick Russell - Excerpt
INTRODUCTION: AN ARCHETYPAL LIFE
“Each Life has a ‘feel’ to it, the way its life courses, which turns a case history into a soul history, a chain of events into a patterned rhythm. A biography is the exposition of feeling running through time, the feeling of a person and a period”.
-James Hillman, Jung’s Typology
This is the biography of an American sage, most have never heard of. Thomas Moore(author of the bestseller Care of the Soul and two dozen more books) unabashedly called him “the greatest thinker who ever lived: more important than Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger and Blake”. In the pantheon of Freud and Jung, Moore places Hillman at the very top. At the very least, according to the poet Robert Bly, he is, “the most lively and original psychologist we have had in America since William James”.
James Hillman who died in 2011 at the age of eighty-five didn’t provide us self-help directives to change our lives, so that we might get more of what we think we need. In his twenty-five published books and his lectures around the world, he laid out no step-by-step action plan for curing one’s neuroses. Whilst the mind set of his field focused on statistics, outcome measures, and evidenced based practices, Hillman went renegade, examining the exceptional, the abnormal, the pathologizing tendency of the psyche. Instead of priveleging the Western ego, he went about returning psychology to soul. This is not a return to Soul in the dogmatic sense, but a return of psychology to its mythic and historical roots, revivifying the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus and forgotten Renaissance philosophers like Vico and Ficino. Hillman provided no answers, but re-opened paths to mystery, while calling us to collective action in the world.
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