“The soul can become a reality again only when each of us has the courage to take it as the first reality in our own lives, to stand for it and not just ‘believe’ in it” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 497).
In 1943, while travelling in South America at the age of seventeen, James Hillman and a friend met with General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez. Martinez – then President of Salvador – had in 1932 crushed a communist uprising, made himself dictator and was responsible for the executions of 30 000 people or more. The two friends were curious as to why Martinez was so oppressive and wished to present their idea that a united South America was a solution to many of the problems plaguing the region. Not only did they gain an audience, they left the meeting unscathed, Hillman writing home of Martinez “…killed 40, 000 men in a purge. Unbelievable as he is so mild….All in all, most interesting” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 115)
Born to Julian Hillman – hotelier – and Madeleine Krauskopf – antique shop owner – and daughter of the esteemed Rabi Joseph Krauskopf, James Hillman was born, April 12, 1926 in room 101 of the pre-eminent Breakers Hotel; set against the back drop of the teeming, carnival, circus-like atmosphere of the then booming Atlantic City boardwalk.
At 16 Hillman would leave high school to attend Georgetown University and in 1944 was drafted into the Navy and – not physically fit for active duty (he came in 14 pounds under-weight at the physical) – worked in the Hospital Corps. as a pharmacist’s mate. First, attending to veterans deafened by the war, later working with the blind.
In sterile hospital wings of army bases at the end – and in the aftermath – of World War II, he was deeply moved by the people in his care. He identified with the patients to such a degree that he moved from the barracks into the hospital ward itself to be nearer to them. He was also deeply enraged by the way patients were treated as in many ways his seedling of a sensibility was inherently counter to what was happening around him. At that time there was the occupational therapy aspect of learning how to do everything disabled and the other aspect of therapy was what Hillman would later call “entertainment as therapy.” Getting the boys drunk at lavish dinners, trips out to night clubs etc. As Hillman would recall: “I felt that it was awful and I didn’t know how to handle it. I just felt the insult of it, the lack of depth in it. The treatment of diversion, cheerfulness, upbeat, all of that. I believe that set me on the road to revolution, and out of that came the recognition of how important depression is. This was a kind of key to what became a major theme of my work afterwards, that depression is fundamentally a way into soul” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 128).
After his time in the Navy (he was released three months early with the help of his Father, then in the military) he moved with the rest of his family to Europe. His family was stationed in Germany and James got a job working as a news writer for the American Forces Network. Later that same year he would begin writing a weekly column for the Occupation Chronicle called “The World Last Week.” The first of his articles opened with the line “Millions of people all over the world are discontent.” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 143)
James would then move to Paris. The GI Bill allowed for tuition and living expenses to be paid to anyone who had completed more than 90 days of military service. Hillman enrolled at the Sorbonne, in a year-long survey Cours de la Civilisation Francaise, renting a flat in the Left Bank, next to the Cafe de Flore. Hillman would pass Simone de Beauvior daily, writing at her table on the second floor of the apartment building – the book she was working on at the time being “The Second Sex.” Sartre and de Beauvoir, Jean Ginet, Edith Piaf, Picasso. Paris after the war. Despite the intense poverty and scarcity of nearly everything, there was a sense of newness, possibility and a deep questioning of everything, particularly rationalism.
In 1948 Hillman would begin at Trinity College in Dublin. Ireland’s “most venerable university” (Russell, 2013, p. 189) where he studied “Mental and Moral Science” (primarily consisting of philosophy, psychology and ethics classes).
He would only complete the first term before he was stricken with Tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps where he would spend the next few months. The mark found on his lungs then would be the same spot where cancer would be found in his eighties. He was reading Jung at the time. “Where he touched me was with the idea of individuation – that there was a process going on that one could trust. It became like a mystique of believing in my own fate” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 198).
Hillman took to Ireland naturally and found the culture and character particularly gratifying. As he would note later in Inter Views: “The psyche picks its geographies….a beautiful mixture of literary, philosophy, society, English girls, Irish poets, fantasy, drinking” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 231). In Ireland Hillman began to see the necessity of pathology. That “to be reasonable was not only dull but not fully alive”. (Russell, 2013, 207) As Hillman would phrase it, talking about his and J.P. Donleavy’s (1) coming to Europe it “opened the door to a fantasy: that what really mattered were the psychopathic underpinnings.” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 216)
Still at Trinity, James would become an editor for a new Irish literary magazine Envoy and for their second issue, Hillman would find and publish a lovely short story by a then relatively unknown Samuel Beckett. Hillman would stay with Envoy until late 1950, wearing many hats in the journal’s tumultuous run, which ceased altogether six months after Hillman took his leave.
From there James would take to Africa with his future wife Kate. They would eventually wind their way to Bombay where they set up house in Kashmir with Hillman hoping to use the space to write a novel he had been meaning to get going on for some time.
It was in May 1952 that James, Kate and a good friend of theirs would visit with Kashmiri Brahmin Gopi Krishna. In his mid-twenties, after years of intense meditation, Gopi Krishna had a particularly intense Kundalini awakening. He was a revered figure, known to speak 15 languages of which (prior to the awakening) he could speak but a few. Gopi Krishna had a profound effect on Hillman as his thoughts on spirit would rattle Hillman’s rather taken-for-granted and solidly western approach while also synching up – years later – with the neo-Platonism found in Marcillio Ficino. He also suggested to Hillman that he go high up into the mountains “where the spirit speaks” (Krishna as cited in Russell, 2013, p. 341) and Hillman did, one year later. On the last night at 12000 feet, Hillman had a brief, horrifying dream that sent him back down the mountain permanently and would be a pivotal moment in his life and work.
Having had something of a breakdown just prior to his wedding in Sweden to Kate, James was at a crossroads. The newlyweds would travel to Switzerland for a three week stay with friends they had there. James was immersed in Jung and other depth psychologists at the time and his friend happened to have a brochure for the Jung Institute in Zurich. After perusing the program he and Kate decided to pay the Institute a visit “and perhaps “attend for a week or so” (Hillman, cited in Russell, 2013, p. 355)
In late February 1953 James and Kate would arrive at the Jung Institute in Zurich. After attending an initial lecture, Hillman knew the Institute was not for him and he and Kate were set to head back to India. But, stopping in Frankfurt to visit his father – still stationed with the military there – it occurred to James, while “sitting on a park bench in a little square, and making up my mind to postpone India, stay on in Zurich, and go into analysis.” He couldn’t explain the decision, beyond the lone surety that he was “a mess” (cited in Russell, 2013, p. 369).
While studying at the Institute James simultaneously pursued a doctorate at the University of Zurich despite – as he would relate years later – not learning a thing. His main study was psychology, with minors in philosophy and history of religions.
And so it began. Hillman would do exceedingly well at the Institute, becoming Director of Studies – a position he would hold for a number of years while weathering many storms, both within the institute and himself. He would publish (including Suicide and the Soul 1964) and be invited to be a part of Eranos: a meeting of world renown scholars that takes place once a year in Switzerland, where for eight days participants live together while giving a two hour lecture each on a given theme, thus inspiring convivial, open and deep discussion.
At another crossroads, Hillman would make a fateful trip to the Warburg Institute in London in May 1969. The private library of Aby Warburg, a German scholar who focused on the art of the Renaissance. The vast collection -occupying a five story building – was sent to London when Hitler came to power. There Hillman came upon “a giant vault of psychic archeology.” (Russell, 2013, p. 631)
“There were texts associated with the images, obscure authors from the Renaissance era whom he’d never heard of before. One of these was Marsilio Ficino – “a loveless, humpbacked, melancholy teacher and translator who lived in Florence,” Hillman would later write; translator and reformulater of Plato, Plotinus, and the Corpus Hermeticum. Ficino’s reading of ancient philosophy provided “an incentive to plumb the depths of one’s own soul so that the whole world may become clearer in the inner light” – a way of seeing that had deeply influenced Michelangelo, among others. Ficino’s ideas had spread through Renaissance Europe, then gone underground with the advent of the Rationalists and the Enlightenment , and now they reverberated in Hillman across the centuries as though he’d found an ancestral brother. He had the overwhelming feeling that “something was beginning and something was over” (Russell, 2013, p. 631).
Reflecting on the Warburg years later, Hillman would note “much of what I had been floundering around with in this lecture or that seminar were pieces that the Warburg pulled together into a single tradition – and that is what I was searching for: a tradition prior to Jung and Freud which could found the work and which was a tradition in which soul was the central trope” (Russell, 2013, p. 632). He had found his opus. In a letter to Kate he wrote “Mythology and Psychology and my own ‘psychopathy’ all go together” (Hillman as cited in Russell, 2013, p. 632).
This would be the beginning of Archetypal Psychology.
1. J.P. Donleavy’s first novel, “The Ginger Man”, after being banned in Ireland and the United States for obscenity, would go on to be considered a seminal work of 20th century literature.