“Personifying has always been fundamental to the religious and poetic imagination, and it is today fundamental to the experience – and to thinking about the experience – of archetypal psychology” (Hillman, 1975, p. 1).

In our normative, sane world we are only allowed to bestow subjectivity on ourselves. What is human is allowed that particular interiority. Certianly not animals, or trees, or the wind. If we find persons there, we are presumed to have put them there ourselves. Our interiority, our personhood transferred to them as “a defensive mode of perception, a projection, a “pathetic fallacy,” a regression to delusional, hallucinatory or illusory modes of adaption” (Hillman, 1975, p.2).

But we treat things differently that we allow personal interiority. We give precedence to soul. Slaves were said to not have soul. Women were said to not have soul. It would appear that what we want to control, or what we want to treat like shit, we de-personify. If something is objective dead matter we can treat it however we want.

But objective dead matter also lacks a certain, deep-seated beauty. Because ultimately what we see when we see beauty is that particular inner spark, that numinosity. But you can’t see it – and you can’t interact with it – if you don’t think it exists in the first place.

“But on this expedition we shall penetrate the interior realm of animism. For we are in search of anima, or soul. From the outset we are assuming that the close connection between the personified world of animism and anima – soul – is more than verbal, and that personifying is a way of soul-making. That is, we are assuming that soul-making depends upon the ability to personify, which in turn depends upon anima” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).

To personify then is to be open to a broader, deeper reality. To extend the borders of the possible down and in until they drift off the edge of the earth itself. To extend them until they hit the boundary of what we call imagination and then, with a little rhetorical coaxing, to go through that boundary, into the unknown space where these differences are trifling details.

What color were the sheets? Who cares. The sex was amazing.

Feeding our lives through a perspective that has the capacity to personify anything – and by personifying we do not mean making shit up. We are not putting our personality on the world. Nor are we sailing our ships to new lands for cotton and sugar. We are not looking to meet new persons in order to colonize them. To bend them to our will. These are beings unto themselves. With their own logic, their own pathos, their own love, their own surrenders. That has nothing to do with us. We can – should we find ourselves lucky enough – notice them. We can – should we work at it – take inspiration from those who have come before. We can take our cues from them and perhaps, add a few nuances of our own. But most importantly, we can listen to the persons we find in this former dead matter. We can strain our senses through the gauze of our illusions and fears to find the voices that are everywhere.

“The modern vision of ourselves and the world has stultified our imaginations. It has fixed our view of personality (psychology), of   insanity (psychopathology), of matter and objects (science), of the cosmos (metaphysics), and of the nature of the divine (theology). Moreover it has fixed the methods in all of these fields so that they present a unified front against soul. Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning. A fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).

 

The world is alive and beyond our rational capacity to comprehend it. Since the Enlightenment, we have shrunk the world to match an increasing incapacity to manage the myriad of phenomena that occur in and around and through us. At some point, we decided it was more important to explain then experience. But an animal doesn’t question the phenomena it sees or feels. If it did it would be neurotic. It doesn’t need to explain, to question its senses; it needs only to react. To interact.

It accepts.

But we have not just denied the breadth of the potential for our capacity to experience, we have moralized against it, shamed it, made it stupid and naïve and crazy. As Hillman states “Such thinking we say is legitimate only for animistic primitive people, or children, or the insane” (Hillman, 1976, p. 2). So to re-imagine the world as alive is to be primitive (to be primitive from our side of things, in a colonial, commodified world means to be open to the simplest forms of manipulation and exploitation), simple (children are needy and dumb to the way the world really works) and worse yet insane (locked away, alone, incapable and out of the only place we have been told we can truly call home: our minds).

Not surprising then that we actually don’t see the breadth of our experience. Work horses with the blinders securely in place. We can carry our Western loads with no distraction. And should the phenomenal break through our glossy-sheened protective capsule; should something penetrate into our iWorld, we are quick to explain it away and should our attempts at explaining fail; we blame the phenomena and not our capacity to experience it.

But as is the way with our bourgeois, condescending and fearful world-view, the thing that we fear the most is the thing we most invite. A sure sign that our senses are compromised – we run into the burning house we are supposed to be running away from.

There is a wall of cotton around our senses. TV and consumerism, banal sex and pain killers, uppers of all kinds that dupe our body into running itself ragged and pain-stricken leave us open to the simplest forms of manipulation.

And do we understand how the world works really? When the stock-market crashed, who really had a solid understanding of what was going on? Of what had been done?

And lastly, I would argue that we have isolated ourselves in such a way that we are very much alone. We are locked away. And when juxtaposed against a raw animal functioning – a way of life we insist we have evolved passed – we are insane. We are guttural beings. We should be able to trust that first and foremost. Our nervous systems are ideally the only thing we need pay attention to.

I think one thing that happens is that anytime we get a sense of the grandeur of the world we really live in – an ocean and not a fish bowl – the experience is completely overwhelming. We lack the internal resources to navigate. We have become internally frail. And the external resources we depended on for millennia have failed us – through corruption and an incapacity to adequately explain its own teachings in light of modern day rationalism. Were we to acknowledge the breadth of experience that is actually available to us, the world as it is currently constituted looks utterly mad. Like any animal brought back to its senses we would want to flee, immediately. And that is untenable.

And we participate willingly. Happily. Because to feel the presence of unnamed or unnamable mythic sources of divine energy is to simultaneously feel the pain of a God bound. Our livers are eaten out of us every day while we hang on the rock. The eagle of capitalism all too happy to take it’s succor at our hearts and lives day after day. To fight back is to first have to acknowledge our predicament and who has the energy or the time or the courage for that?

But these are all just thoughts. And this is not about thoughts. This is about experience. So do me a favor. Step outside. For just a second strip off all of the expectations we have of this world. All of the demands that we place upon this frail titan we call reality. Stop assuming a difference between the real and the imaginal. The Emperor has no clothes. Strip it all off. Like sticky cotton beside a cool lake. Take a deep breath and look at the world. For a moment, see as an animal sees.

Do you feel that? That density of magic?  It’s not that hard to grasp how in past times we sensed Gods all around us. Isn’t it everywhere? What would life look like if this is how we experienced our lives always?

 

 

-Jung had a dream that led him to his theory of the collective unconscious. He was in a house with many levels.  Beginning with the Salon, in the style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers, descending through the medieval ground floor, the Roman cellar and ending in a prehistoric cave. “The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself – a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness”. (Jung, 19671, p. 160).

-Jung had begun noticing the difference between himself and Freud at this point and had been wrestling with a variety of questions on the matter: “On what premises is Freudian psychology founded? To what category of human thought does it belong? What is the relationship of its almost exclusive personalism to general historical assumptions?” (Jung, 1961, p. 161).

-This dream, seemingly spoke directly to those questions and others. “It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history – a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. It “clicked” as the English have it – and the dream became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect. It was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This I first took to be the traces of earlier modes of functioning. Later, with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable knowledge, I recognized them as forms of instinct, that is, as archetypes” (Jung, 1961, p. 161).

-This dream also inspired Jung to pick up his old interest in archeology. He began by reading about Babylonian excavations and dove headlong into books on myth, then onto Gnostism. One book in particular struck him: Friedrich Creuzer’s “Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker”. “It was as if I were beginning to treat and analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods, and goddesses in Creuzer’s book as though they were my patients. While thus occupied I could not help but discover the close relationship between ancient mythology and the psychology of primitives..” (Jumg, 1961, p. 162).

-While he was furiously studying mythologies he came upon a paper by a friend, Theodore Flournoy in the “Archives de Psychologie”. In it he describes one Miss Miller, an American. “I was immediately struck with the mythological character of the fantasies. They operated like a catalyst upon the stored-up and still disorderly ideas within me” (Jung, 1961, p.163).

-“The realization came to him that the imagery that his patients were finding welling up from their own psyches was precisely that with which the world of comparative mythologists and their history of religion studies were already familiar. The imagery of his patients’ fantasizing showed precise parallels to mythological themes. Jung then noticed that the parallels held true not only with psychotics but with neurotics and with relatively well-balanced people as well.

-This discovery impressed him tremendously and motivated him to immerse himself in the study of mythology” (Campbell, 2004, p. 86).

-“Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence” (Campbell, 2004, p.86).

-“Beneath the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life” (Jung, 1961, p.178).

– “The concept of the archetype…is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairytales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today….They impress, influence and fascinate us. They have their origin in the archetype, which in itself is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest spontaneously anywhere, at any time” (Jung, 1971, p.392).

-“My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents” (Jung, 1971, p.60).

-“There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception or action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis” (Jung, 1971, p.66).

-“…the images arising from the a priori inherited foundations of the unconscious. These archetypes… the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types. In these archetypes, therefore, all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the more clearly focused they became in the archetype. The archetype would thus be, to borrow from Kant, the noumenon of the image which intuition perceives and, in perceiving, creates” (Jung, 1971, p.260).
-“That this is so is immediately understandable when we consider that the unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to its remotest beginnings. Not, indeed, a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways – all the more effective because invisible. It is not just a gigantic historical prejudice, so to speak, an a priori historical condition; it is also the source of the instincts, for the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume” (Jung, 1971, p.44).

 

One of the things the psyche most needs is psychology. It needs good ideas from which it can “deepen and intensify experience”.  (Hillman, 1975, p. xviii) Ideas are vessels in which we work. In which the opus can take shape. Through which our raw experience can pass. And a fundamental re-visioning of psychology requires first and foremost a re-visioning of its vessels.

However, the psychological ideas of Jung’s and Freud’s and Hillman’s have not spoken for us. They have spoken only for themselves. Hillman’s ideas are Hillman’s vessels. Not mine. Not yours. We may glean many things from them, but they can’t do the work for us. “Freud and Jung are masters, not so that we may follow them in becoming Freudian and Jungian, but that we may follow them in becoming psychological.” (Hillman, 1975, p. xviii) Hillman also believed deeply in negative learning: the idea that you learned more by disagreeing then by casual assent.

So before us we have inspiration.

Vessels to honor and vessels to smash.

It is our job to work out our own salvation (up to – and including – dropping the idea of salvation itself). To pick our own way through the dense and shrouded vale.

Because we are each one of us in therapy always as it relates to making soul and we are each therapists of our own souls as well. Our pilgrimage through the valley is a sacred rite given each of us in their turn. “…it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements that we give ourselves.” (Hillman, 1975, p. viii) We each exemplify the wounded healer.

Patient and therapist, lying on the same sweat-soaked sheets.

 

“…the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul. Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv).

And this changes everything. If the purpose of our life is to make soul of it; not a career, nor legacy, nor reputation, nor any of the myriad of tasks we set ourselves to – all of the dangling carrots – but to make soul.

Soul.

How different would our orientation be?

It is an adventure. A wandering. Not a mission from one end of the vale to the other. Not a five day hike for the sake of team building. We can no longer match our whereabouts with “how well we are doing”. There is no more conative striving. No more proscriptive procedure. Yet passion; Eros, is central. Getting lost is part of the adventure. Through the vale of the world. We are not ascending to new heights. We are investigating the murky depths. We are getting mud on our hands. And we do this for love.

“and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it” (Hillman, 1975, p. xv). To make soul. Like an alchemical procedure, we feed our life through a perspective that turns our raw experiences, our prima materia into soul. We make something of it. Not a thing that happens to us but a thing we participate in the co-creation of. Not in an egocentric way. In an erotic way.

A fundamentally artistic, perceptive-love-making.

Greeting the world as you would a lover.

Get naked and sweaty and loud.

Re-Visioning Psychology is a “book about soul-making” (Hillman, 1975, xv). A re-visioning of psychology away from medical, moral or biological models towards a psychology from the point of view of soul. It’s needs and wants. So often radically different from what the ego aims at. From the egoic perspective it is almost a psychology from the point of view of the contradistinction. Our aim is not to dissect or cure; to be hygienic, to shame, punish, judge or to explain ourselves.

The challenge of this cannot be overestimated. It is essentially asking you to all but abandon every common-place idea that we have to be replaced with ideas that – from our swollen egocentric and hyper-rational perspective – seem utterly absurd and probably more to the point – exceedingly dangerous.

To, in a sense, forget yourself to the chaos. To let the wild and unblemished through.

So why do this?

Because what we are currently doing does not work. We are destroying ourselves and the capacity of the earth to support us. We insist on our rationality and on our capacity to be moral and yet we kill the very thing that sustains our lives. The very thing you are reading this on has undoubtedly caused many people untold hardship not much different in scope or barbarism then to enjoying some sugar in your tea in the 18th century. Our entire western existence is based on the exploitation of everything, including ourselves.

So let’s cut the bullshit. We’re not rational. Or if we are, we’re rational the way a sociopath is rational. And we are not moral. Were we moral our lives would not be able to exist the way they currently do. We are anethnatized consumers who plod along ignoring the actual rape and murder that happen on our behalf so that we can have conveniences that slowly erode our well-being or outright kill us.

And we’re fucking miserable doing it.

We exist in a dream world of untended consequences and moral amnesia. We live in a fiction already. We should at the very least make it a more interesting one.

A policy initiative is not going to do the trick. A diet or a one hour commitment once a year to respect the fucking planet is not going to do it.

What we need is a radical shift in the very way we perceive the world.