James Hillman

My scholarly community has lost a great one, and we are in mourning. I had the good luck to meet Hillman and hear him lecture once before illness overtook him, and his charismatic brilliance was much in evidence. But his main influence on me has been through his books, many of which are best-sellers; I quote from him in almost every paper I wrote for school, and his thinking guides my approach to my dissertation.


Jim was a man with a mission: to wake Western civilization up to the vital importance of understanding and working with our own psyches and what he called the anima mundi, the soul of the world. As he put it:


"Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi." 


He challenged the medical model followed by most psychiatrists and psychologists today of "diagnose and treat" in Re-Visioning Psychology. He explained why fighting has such a grip on the male psyche in A Terrible Love of War. He told us how to recognize and honor our true calling in The Soul's Code. He taught us how to work with our own unconscious selves in The Dream and the Underworld and Healing Fiction. He showed us how to age gracefully and well in The Force of Character. This is just a partial list of his works. 


He was also a teacher and mentor who has left a rich legacy in the field of archetypal psychology, and as such, part of the lineage of gurus that I bow before. He took Carl Jung's ideas and deepened them, elaborated on them, challenged them, and made them relevant to today. Thomas Moore, author of the best-selling Care of the Soul, is one of his disciples - or "Hillmaniacs" as we call them. (It was Moore who taught me that I was not crazy to think my marriage ought to be very different from what it was, and so gave me the courage to leave it.) 


Another Hillmaniac is Rick Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Another is Patricia Berry, author of Echo’s Subtle Body: A Contribution to Archetypal Psychology. Ginette Paris, a professor at Pacifica and author of Wisdom of the Psyche, is the Hillmaniac who had the most direct influence on me  (hence, my "generation" in this lineage is the "Post-Parisians").


Rick Tarnas had this to say about Hillman: 


May I just add, in tribute to him as a friend, how deeply James has enriched us with his unending flow of insights, placing so many things in new light—and in shadow. His depth of soul and reading and culture, his trickster wit, his heretic originality, his sharp-edged individuality. He will be deeply missed, but he left us with so much that we will be integrating for a long time to come.  It was just over thirty years ago that he came to San Francisco and presented what would later become his profound and influential essay, "Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World"—a turning point in depth psychology.


Pythia Peay, who interviewed him many times, adds:


For most who knew him, Hillman will be primarily remembered for two things: his groundbreaking ideas on the psyche and culture, and the remarkable force of character with which he both lived and delivered those ideas.

From Hillman I learned the radical idea that depression is not merely an illness to be cured, but a kind of suffering that, when meaningfully borne, yields wisdom and beauty; that we are each guided by an invisible "daemon" who safeguards our calling; that we are here not to rise above life, but to "grow down" into it; and that dreams are not just symbols to be analyzed, but vivid encounters with a very real psychic realm.

This is my favorite quote from Hillman:

"The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives."

It's hard to imagine a life without him in it - but as I type that, I hear his irascible voice telling me "stop looking to me - get on with doing what you are supposed to do in this life!"

Okay, Jim. But first, just let me say "thank you." We all owe you more than can be said.

No one found it possible to say "rest in peace." That just wasn't Hillman's style. We imagine him, instead, asking questions and shaking everything up wherever he is.