Table Of ContentUniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman
Series Editor: Klaus Ottmann
Volume 7: Inhuman Relations
Copyright © Margot McLean 2021
Introduction copyright © Scott Becker
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-88214-102-2 (e-book edition, v. 1.3)
Published by Spring Publications, Inc.
www.springpublications.com
First Edition
Cover illustration:
James Lee Byars, Untitled, 1960. Black ink on Japanese paper. Estate of James Lee Byars;
courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York, London, Berlin
The Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman is published in conjunction with Dallas
Institute Publications, Joanne H. Stroud, Director
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
an integral part of its publications program concerned with the imaginative, mythic, and symbolic
sources of culture.
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ABBREVIATIONS
CW = Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 20 vols. (Princeton, N.
J.: Princeton University Press, 1953–79), cited by paragraph number.
UE = Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, 11 vols. (Putnam and
Thompson, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2004–)
SE = The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1986).
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J
Introduction
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AEGIS—
IN DEFENSE OF ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY
BY SCOTT BECKER
Simmering Slowly: The Alchemy of Inhuman Relations
James Hillman first conceived of this collection of essays over a decade
ago, and he identified each of the essays that he intended to be included
in this volume of the Uniform Edition. When he contacted me in the fall
of 2008 to ask if I would contribute to this volume, he mentioned that it
contains what could be described as more “clinical” content, and he was
aware of my background in clinical psychology. Hillman chose the title,
Inhuman Relations, to emphasize the archetypal forces that shape our
human interactions—the myths behind our messes, as he says in this
volume (“How do we stay Psychological?”). Or as he sometimes quoted
Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” Hillman
made it clear that he did not want the essays to be arranged
chronologically, and he initially suggested a thematic structure that
included sections such as “Jungiania,” “Psychotherapy,” “Mothers and
Children,” “Marriage,” and others.
In order to augment this thematic format, we agreed on a novel
approach: the material could be presented in terms of its rhetorical and
psychological process, focusing on the ways in which Hillman’s writing
subtly functions as a form of alchemy, as the usual boundaries between
writer, text, and reader are dissolved in a unifying imaginal space,
engaging the reader not only through instruction and insight, but also
facilitating psychological transformation. Returning to Hillman’s chapter
headings in Re-Visioning Psychology, we opted to arrange a number of
the essays under the headings of “Personifying or Imagining Things,”
“Pathologizing or Falling Apart,” “Psychologizing or Seeing Through,”
and “Dehumanizing or Soul-making,” with essays in each section that
illustrate these operations and allow the reader not only to appreciate the
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wide-ranging content of the essays, but also to become aware of their
experiential influence.
As Hillman’s health declined, he placed this volume on a back burner
(“Our project must simmer, slowly …”), and we were unable to return to
the final editing prior to his death in the fall of 2011. Over the next
several years, volumes 4 and 8 in the Uniform Edition were published
(From Types to Images and Philosophical Intimations) as well as
Hillman’s final book, The Lament of the Dead, with Sonu Shamdasani,
and the first volume of Hillman’s biography, The Life and Ideas of James
Hillman by Dick Russell, to which Hillman had asked that I contribute
the psychological commentary. Then, in the fall of 2019, Klaus Ottmann,
the series editor for the Uniform Edition, contacted me and indicated that
we were ready to move forward with this project, with the goal of
publishing in 2020. At that point, no one could have predicted what 2020
would bring. While this project was slowly simmering, the world was
quickly being brought to a boil.
During the past year, the world has become increasingly aware of the
destructive impact of an interlocking oligarchic power structure. The
economic, social, political, and ecological injustices inherent to this
system have risen to the level of an acute crisis, including the rise of
authoritarian governments, poverty and food and water insecurity, police
violence, gender inequality and rape culture, racism and xenophobia,
climate change and the threat of a sixth global extinction, and perhaps
most dramatically, the Coronavirus outbreak. In short, life on this planet
is profoundly threatened, and it is still unclear whether the global crisis
constitutes a death or a rebirth, or perhaps both.
As a result of this overwhelming situation, this volume of the
Uniform Edition is being published in an historical moment vastly
different from the one in which it was written—and by extension from
the time in which archetypal psychology itself was conceived and
developed by Hillman and others. Given this radically different context,
the consensus at Spring Publications is that this introduction, in addition
to presenting the content of Hillman’s essays, should attempt to respond
to the seismic shift, the literal and figurative sea change that the world is
undergoing, and to illustrate the utility of an archetypal approach to
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understanding and responding to a world in chaos. In doing so, we are
acknowledging that we are all in a planet-sized crucible, and we are
reaffirming the vital relevance of Hillman’s perspective in tempering that
fire and forging a new vision for our collective future.
This introduction therefore has a dual focus: This first section aims to
draw out the alchemical method of Hillman’s writing by focusing on the
underlying unity of psychological and philosophical ideas (eidos),
fantasy images, and soul (psyche), and by applying this unity to the
imaginal experience of the reader. As we entertain Hillman’s ideas, so
we imagine, and as we imagine, so our psyche undergoes a structural
transformation. (Caveat lector, reader beware, for you may become the
subject matter of the essays, and therefore you may also be re-visioned
along with the material.)
In the second section, we will apply this method to the current state
of the world, addressing the global crisis in which we find ourselves by
using Hillman’s mythopoetic, alchemical approach, finding imaginal
depth and archetypal coherence in the seemingly disparate symptoms of
our time: misogyny, racism, oligarchy, and environmental destruction.
These goals are not considered to be two separate processes: the first
subjective and internal, and the second objective and external. Rather,
Hillman’s nondualistic approach allows both domains to be part of a
unified imaginal process, drawing on a Neoplatonic, alchemical, and
astrological understanding that the distinction between inner and outer,
subject and object, self and other, mind and world, is false and
unnecessary. As the astrological maxim goes, “as above, so below; as
within, so without.” Our understanding of the world deepens as we enter
its images, as the form of the world and the form of our minds begin to
cohere. As Plotinus said, “No eye ever saw the sun without first
becoming sun-like; nor can a soul see beauty without becoming
beautiful.” Hillman’s work actively facilitates this process, by
simultaneously revealing the image and using that image as the lens
through which we see. Outer object and inner subject, or what we see
and how we see, meet, and form a single, unified whole in the image.
Understood this way, working on ourselves is working on the world, and
vice versa, not because of a naive heroic fantasy, but because we are in
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the metaxy, the middle realm that underlies the mental and the material,
the quantum entanglement of the soul.
Given that both our mental and material worlds are currently in
turmoil, our inner world panicked and the outer world a swirling chaos,
finding the right image may prove difficult. As Margaret Atwood put it,
When you’re in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion;
a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood;
like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over
the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it
becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to
someone else. [1]
Nevertheless, finding our collective story is the task of the second
section of this introduction. This search may require some courage on
our part—a willingness to lose our bearings and to face the terrifying
ugliness of the world we have created. To paraphrase Paracelsus, no eye
ever saw chaos without first becoming chaotic. But if we look behind
and beneath the facts for a series of images, we may find a myth within
the chaos. We may be able to find the eye of the storm, to see through
that eye, and to discover its source.
Here we are also highlighting a relatively neglected aspect of
Hillman’s work: his intent to see through the problems of the world, not
primarily to build an integrated theory, but to actively and critically
respond to crucial issues that require a deeper understanding or re-
visioning. Hillman was not orderly so much as opportunistic, responsive,
timely, and goal-oriented:
There is not a systematic metatheory behind my thought. I come from New
Jersey where we have sea gulls who fly right down and get what they want
from the oceanside. I am like them, dropping down into the depths of our
culture and seizing what I need to understand things and make a point! [2]
To expand on this idea, we can say that Hillman was not only trying
to make a point, he was trying to be useful. Because of Hillman’s
frequently martial style and his plutonic deconstruction of his subject
matter, some critics have understandably tended to overlook the fact that
he was, by training and temperament, a psychotherapist, and that his
therapeutic intent continued long after he left the world of
psychoanalysis proper. His passion was in the service of compassion.
That he accomplished this by holding up a mirror to our follies does not
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detract from his therapeutic intent. Quite the contrary, our
disillusionment and discomfort were the required first steps to letting go
of our destructive ideas, a necessary nigredo phase as we descended, fell
apart, went bugs. We had to lose our minds to find them. [3]
And so, in the second section of this introduction we will be
following Hillman’s lead by attempting to offer something useful to the
reader and to the world. We write as a concerned clinician, attempting to
identify the world’s symptoms, to reach an accurate diagnosis, and to
formulate a treatment plan. In the process, we need to consider Antonio
Gramsci’s apocalyptic vision, written in 1930 from his prison cell in
Mussolini’s Italy: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is
dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid
phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.” [4] Notably, Gramsci
is often mistranslated as: “The old world is dying and the new world
struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” In the second section
of this introduction, we may discover that our tendency to see monsters,
to see our problems as enemies to be slain, is one of our “morbid
symptoms.”
Our approach will also follow Hillman’s method and style by using
images and language that are mimetic to our subject. This is another
underappreciated aspect of his work, as he used his literary and rhetorical
skill to evoke his subject matter in both form and content, style and
substance. In his book Inter Views, Hillman offers this vivid description
of his fantasies while writing several of his well-known essays:
When I was trying to finish [Re-Visioning Psychology], I was drawing battle
maps. I played the game of trying to fortify and seal whatever pages were still
weak. [5]
Then later in the same section, he writes,
I remember writing “Abandoning the Child” in 1971 for an Eranos lecture. My
image of it was a collection of very simple water colors. And I just wanted to
do a little one here, one there, a little one on the “dead child,” a little one on the
“tree and child” … like you go through a gallery, and it didn’t matter which
picture came first. [6]
A third description follows:
When I worked on Dionysus and Hysteria [Myth of Analysis, part 3 (1969)], I
remember saying I feel like I’m inside one of those great big sculptures, a
Henry Moore, or one of those huge things of steel girders, and I’m doing all I
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