Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1980 James Hillman: Toward a Poetic Psychology ROBERTS AVENS ARSTRACT: n The Dream and the Underworld James Hillman continues to deepen and to ‘refine Jung’s recovery of the spontaneous image-making of the soul. Hilliman’s contribution lies in his "imaginal reduction” —relating of images to their archetypal background in Greek mythology. Myth is seen as the maker of Uhe psyche, and, in turn, the soul-making is pocais a return to the imaginal and pootie basis of consciousness reams, understood poetically. are neither messages to bbe deciphered and used for the benclit of the rational ego (Froud) nor compensatory to the ego dung): they are complete in themselves and must be allowed to speak for themselves. Hillman also soot dreams as initiations into the underworld of death—the other side of life where our imaginal substance is unobstructed by the literal and dualistic standpoints of the dayworld, It has been observed that the basic disease from which our culture may be dying is man’s disparagement, if not vilification, of images and myths, uccom- panied by his faith in a positivistic, rationalistically ordered and dirt-free civilization, In effect, the prevalent trend in the West seems to be toward a willful, limitless control of nature and away from whatever impedes this growth in self-assertiveness, particularly from the artistic and imaginative quality of ail life. But, as in other times, so taday there exists an anti- movement, an “anti-philosophy” that unobtrusively allempts to counteract the dilapidation and flattening of the human core. Among the most prominent. in this noble cohort of philosophers, psychologists, and artists is the name of James Hillman, a Jungian who has taken seriously Jung's reported exclama- tion: “hank God 1 am Jung, and not a Jungian!” Hillman is a Jungian by being first and foremost himself—by continuing the old master's work in an independent and creative way. I should also like to imagine him—with all due reservations—as (he Heidegger of contemporary psychology, in that, like the greatest of the modern philosophers, he intends not only to “retrieve” the “unsaid” in his immediate predecessors—Freud and Jung—but to extract and to explicate what the pre-Socratic thinkers, poets, and mystagogues, above all Heraclitus, could not say explicitly. Both Hillman and Heidegger are thinkers in a “needy time”—"the time of the gods who have fled and of the God who comes.”? In this article I attempt to show, in a necessarily sketchy way, that, accord- ing to Hillman, gods who have fled from the ego-centered daylight world of consciousness have taken refuge within the realms of imagination and soul Robert Avens, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Lona College, New Rochelle, New York and the author of Imagination is Reality: Western Nirvanu in Jung, Hithnan, Barfield and Caseirer (Spring Publications, Ine.: University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, 1980) (0022-4107/80/1600-0196$00.95 186 © 1080 Institutes of Religion and HealthRoberts Avens 187 and in the “underworld” of the dream. In the course of this discussion it will also appear that. these three realms or dimensions of human existence connect us with puesis or the poetic basis of our mind; hence, “poetic psychology,” i. e., an inquiry into the poetic, mythical, and divine Jogos of the soul. The emphasis of the article is on James Hillman’s most recent work, The Dream and the Underworld, where he has developed—extrapolating Freud and Jung—a Perspective on dreams that is new and radical in the sense of retrieving the radix of these two thinkers in Greek mythology. I shall introduce Hillman’s oneiric thought by first outlining his as well as the Jungian understanding of “soul” and imagination. Soul, imagination, myth Men of all times and cultures have enjayed the privilege of citizenship in two worlds corresponding to two mares of consciousness. The Greeks called them Aypar (the waking world) and onar (the dream world), each having its own logic and its own limitations. Generally speaking, ancient peoples have ac- corded at Teast an equal significance and respect to both experiences. For example, Heraclitus is credited with the view that the soul has contact with the cosmic reason (Jogos) only when free in sleep from the interruption of the senses.* In the carliest association of dream with death, Homer tells us that dreams issue from the underworld of Ilades and refers to sleep (hypnos) and death (thanatos) as “twin brothers.’ The Western tradition, however, has exhibited a predominantly negative attitude toward the dream, relegating it to the limbo of the “imaginary,” which in turn is equated with the “unreal,” hallucinatory, “fantastic,” etc. About the only exception in this regard is the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which not unexpectedly swung to the opposite extreme of valuing the dream incompara- bly higher than waking reality. Thus a Holderlin would declare that man is “a God when he dreams, but a beggar when he reflects." Paralleling this apotheosis of the dream, the Romantics (Schelling, Fichte, von Schlegel, Schil ler, Goethe, Coleridge, Blake) were also the first to promote imagination to the rank of the primary creative agency of the human mind. For cxample, Cole- ridge described imagination not only as the source of art but as the living power and prime agent of all human perception, Creative imagination is essen tially vital, which for Coleridge meant that it is a way of discovering a deeper truth about the world.’ Dreaming and imagination have from antiquity been associated with the notion of soul. Before I set. out tu expose Hillman’s view of. dreams, it is neces- sary, therefore, to understand in broad terms the peculiar meaning given to the world soul in both Jungian psychology and Hillman’s archetypal psychol- ogy. Archelypal psychology, which avowedly represents a refining and deepen- of the live center of Jung’s thought, takes imagination and soul as the primary and in a sense ultimate realities. It is worthy of note that the Romantic appreciation of the imaginal (in188 Journal of Religion and Health contrast to the imaginary)* has been adumbrated in u famous dictum of Hera- clitus, whom Hillman regards as the first depth psychologist in the Western tradition: “You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth of its meaning (Jogos).”® Heraclitus was the first thiuker who rooted the world of phenomena not in air or water, in atoms or numbers, but in soul, He also recognized the principle of depth as the peculiar trait of the soul whose realm is not. extended in space. In Jungian psychology “soul” has an objective or collective aspect that shows itself in our capacity to conceive, behave, and be moved according tv funda- mental patterns called “archctypes.” The empirical knowledge of archetypes is derived mainly from philosophy, ethnology, the arts, religion, and mythology, because Jung believes that these fields contain the most adequate formula- tions of the objective or transpersonal psyche. Jungians, including Hillman, use the words “soul” and “psyche” most of the time interchangeably; they are not meant Lu be scientific terms or concepts but symbole. The soul, according to Hillman, is “a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols which provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought." Other words can be used to amplify the meaning of “soul”: heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, purpose, emotion, etc. A soul may be said to be “troubled,” “dis- membered,” “immortal,” “innocent,” “lost,” “spiritual,” “inspired.” Essentially, by “soul” Hillman means the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective specula- tion, drcam, image and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical." The psychologist’s aim is to delimit the nature of psychie reality per se, as distinct, from mental contents, acts of behavior, attitudes, ete. This in turn would lead to # conception of the “inner” and the “subjective” in which these words do not necessarily refer to u “something” inside the body or the head. ‘Academic psychology, in its eagerness to be as scientific ax physics, has devoted all its energies not to understand but to explain the soul from the viewpoint of natural sciences. In this way the soul has been exorcised from the only field that is traditionally dedicated to its study; it has been reduced to an epiphenomenon and finally explained away. As re-visioned by Hillman, psy- chology would be a search for the logos of the soul; a logos that has no single definition—Apollonian or Christian or whatever—but is rather, as in Hera- clitus, a flow similar to fire. Logos is “Uhe insighting power of mind to create a cosmos and give sense to il. ILis an old word for (he worse word, canscious- ness."12 ‘According to Hillman, psychology cannot be a science of either physical or spiritual things, but a perspective, a special, that is, psychic viewpoint preced- ing all other branches of knowledge. The psychological perspective is prior, because it is present in everything human beings do, fecl, and think. All human reality—economic, social, religious, physical—is derived from psychicRoberts Avens 189 images. But precisely in this capacity, i. ¢., as a perspective that sees Uhrough all our states and activities, the soul cannot itself become an object of knowl- edge, “nother visibility.” As the connecting link or the place between in- tellectual opposites (mind and matter, reason and cmotion, the Apollonian and the Dionysian), the soul is never identical with the terms it connects, Like the knight errant whose home 1s the ceaselessly blowing spirit, the soul cannot settle or conform because it is driven to reform, reformulate, and unsettle all forms."* In Hillman’s view, the historical importance of Jung Ties in Uhe fact Uat he resuscitated images. By inilialing 4 return to the soul and its spontaneous image-making (poesis), Jung reversed the process that in 787 at the Council of Nicaea had deprecated images and in 868 at the Council of Constantinople had reduced the soul to the rational spirit. Hillman maintains that the Nicene distinetion between adoration and veneration of images, from a psychological point of view, must be seen as a victory of the Iconoclasts. In choosing to treat images as re-presentations and illustrations (allegories) rather than presences of the divine or the numinous, the Fathers foreshadowed (he Kantian dichotomy between the noumenal and the phenomenal.*# Thus, when Jungians tuday speuk of archetypal images as unknowable and transcendent realities, they ure harking back not only to Kant and to Protestant Iconoclasts but to Nicaea; for it was then and there that a pattern was provided for rcgarding the sun-like Apollonian spirit and the masculine ego as more important than the conerete and feminine psychology of imagination. Significantly, it was the Virgin Mary who figured as the bone of contention at the Council, canvoked by the Empress Irene in the name of the imagist. parties In Jungian psychology soul is no longer based on matter or the brain nor on mind, intellect, or metaphysics, but is a “third reality” between all these “en- Lilies.” The psychic reality is essentially an esse in anima, In the psyche, idea and thing come together and are held in balance. The psychic reality (tertium quid) is the creative realm of emotions, fantasies, moods, visions, and dreams; and its language is that of images, metaphors, and symbols. According ta Ting, the autonomous activity of the psyche is a continually creative process. “The psyche creates reality every day.” "Every psychic process is an image and an imagining.” In an allempt to deepen the Jungian insight into the essential nature of the psyche, Hillman adopts what he calls an attitude of “radical relativism,” im- plying that human nature is primarily imaginal and polymorphous. Our most natural drives, he insists, are nonhuman, and the most instinctively concrete of our expericnces 1s imaginal. It is as if “human existence, even at. its hasi vital level, is a metaphor.”"* Images are even prior ly the world of symbols, which in the orthodox Jungianism have become proxies for concepts. In the beginning is poesis—the making of soul through imagination and metaphor. We can get. tu the specifically and ontologically human, the “no-thing” at the center of our being, only by moving through the poctie mode and by using poetic tools.*? Only the poet in us is attuned to our essential “no-thing-ness.” In all this, Hillman aims at nothing less than “imaginal reduction,” i. ¢., demon-190 Journal of Religion and Health strating, by evocation and description, circuitously (circumambulatio should be the word) that behind scientific empiricism, the "fuels" of science, “pure” thought and “objective” observations lies a world of separate, primordial reality—the imaginal world. Images are the basie givens of all psychic life and the privileged mode of access to the knowledge of the soul.® Radical relativism is therefore nothing more alarming than imaginal rclativism. Summarizing his position in pithy and cloquent cadences Hillman states: To live psychologically is to imagine things. ...'To be in soul is to experience the fan- tasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy. . .. In the beginning is the image; first, imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. ...Man ie primarily an image maker and our pxychie substance consists of images; our experience is imagina- tion. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on 1? Another point Uhat can hardly be overemphasized is that the Jungian at- tilude toward images (in dreams and otherwise) is radically different from that of Freudian psychoanalysis. The orthodox Freudianism assumes that the analyst can see behind the image to its “real” or latent meaning, which is disguised by the apparent meaning of the image. Images and symbols are but signs of repressed and mainly sexual content. In contrast to Freud, archetypal psychology considers images as fully meaningful in their manifest content. The first rule in psychotherapy, according to Hillman, should he: ‘stick to the rmage’ | Lopez-Pedraza] in its presentation.”2° Images are not in the psyche as ina container but wre the psyche; they are what they mean and mean what they are. ‘The difference between the Freudian and the Jungian approaches is seen by Hillman in terms of difference between allegory and metaphor. Both start off saying one thing as if it were another. But where allegorical method divides this double talk into two constituents—latent and manifest—the metaphorical method keeps the two voices Logether, hearing the dream as it tells itself, ambiguously evoca- tive and concretely precise al each and every instant, Metaphors are not subject to interpretative translation without breaking up their peculiar unity #1 The importance of archetypal psychology is that, by choosing the path of watchful attention to the imaginal realm, it has initiated a process whose aim is to recover the archaic, emotional, and creative core of human life—a core that lies beyond the merely subjective, humanistic, and personal. For the psyche, in a refined version of the Jungian thought, is a wider, more encom- Passing notion than “man.” In Hillman’s words: "Man exists in the midst of Psyche; it is not the other way round... and there is much of psyche that extends beyond the nature of man.”22 A fundamental tenet of archetypal psychology (and the hallmark distin- guishing it from other psychologies) is that the world of psyche is cocxtensive with the world of myth. Accordingly, the objective that this new and at the same lime perennial psychology sets for iteclf is to “re-mythologize conscious- ness,” to restore “its connection to mythical and metaphorical patterns.”!? InRoberts Avens 191 effect, Hillman’s work has partly consisted in accumulating evidence that myth, far from being part of a dead past, is superbly alive in our symptoms, fantasies, and in our conceptual constructs, For Hillman, therefore, “mythol- ogy” and “psychology” are interchangeable notions: “Mythology is a psychol- ogy of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity.”24 Tt was one of Jung's discoveries that the autonomous activity of the psyche (collective unconscious) is the souree of myths, fairy tales, and specific forms of religious belief and rituals. Myths are dramatic, personified descriptions of a nonhuman or quasi-human realm of tragical, fantastic, monstrous, or benevo- lent figures that are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind. These figures constitute the very basis, the prim materia, of psychic life, Contrary to the nineteenth-ceniury anthropologists (Tylor, Frazer, Lang) who regarded myth as u fumbling effort on the part of the so-called primitive to explain nature, Jung holds that gods, goddesses, ogres, and demons of the myth are not in vented by a primitive untutored mentality but experienced. They arc funda- mental, real structures, prior to any attempt to project them. “Instead of deriv- ing the mythical figures from our psychic conditions, we must derive our psychic conditions from these figures.”25 At bottam aur psyche is inhahited hy multitudes of mythical persons whose sracter consists onily in Uhat they are more than personal and human, In Hillman’s telling words, - we can never be certain whether we imagine them or they imagine us, All we know is that we cannot imagine without them; they are preconditions of our imagination. Tf we invent them, then we invent them according to patterns they lay down.”* In Jungian terminology these figures of the mythical substratum of the psyche are “archetypes.” In contrast to Jung, however, who stressed that ar- chetypes in themselves arc unknowable and not representable (noumenal), Hillman prefers to speak of “archetypal images,” making the adjective “ar- chetypal” stand for the polymorphous, multivalent, and unfathomable nature of any image. An archetypal image is an image with multiple and ultimately inexhaustible implications. In this sense the adjective “archetypal” must be taken as a pointer to the value of an image endowing it with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.27 In his relentless drive to refine and to radicalize the valid insights of Jung, Hillman refers to the imaginal realm of the psyche as possessing the character of “necessity” (the Greek ananke, fate) and inexorability. Images, instead uf reflecting a noumenal or hidden reality, are necessarily whal they appear to be. To maintain, therefore, with Jung that. human reality is primarily psychie and that the image is the primordial und immediate presentation of this real- ity means that . there must be something unalterably necessary abuut images so UL payehic renl- ity, which first of all consists of images, can be not after-images of sense-impressions, they are primordial, archetypal, in themselves ultimate reals, the only direct reality that the psyche experiences, As such they are shaped presences of necessity.192 Journal of Religion und Health ‘To illustrate the basic stance of archetypal or, for that matter, poetic psy- chology, Hillman quotes an Icelandic proverb: “Every dream comes true in the way it is interpreted.” This maxim expresses the very essence of "radical rela- tivism: «there are many truths sinee there are many interpretations, ... There is « God behind whatever happens... Nothing objective to hold to; no ‘true’ truth because there are many truths. .., The imagistic approach is not only relativistic; it is eynical and nihilist.2 One must hasten to add, however (in order not. to offend “positivistic” sen- sibilities), that this is very much the same kind of cynicism and nihilism with which an artist contemplates the su-called real life as being incomparably Poorer and paltrier than his own world of fiction. The artist's world is real because it is imaginal, as opposed to the imaginary and somnambulistic either/or world, the world of “facts,” singleness of meaning, and literalismn From the imaginal perspective, “facts” are indeed the most stubborn, delu- sional fictions, It is for this reason that archetypal psychology gravitates to- ward the field of aestheties in the broadest sense The move toward aesthetics is motivated hy Jung's discovery that psychic reality (the ease in anima) is based upon fantasy images, a term that he took from poctic usage." As I have already indicated, Jung's theory of images pointed to a poetic hasis of mind—an insight that he himself did not develop to any great extent. To stress the radicalness of the archetypal psychology’s “imaginal reduction” in the post-Jungian era, Hillman speaks about the differ- ence between the scientific and the poetic understanding of dreams. In the scien- tific approach, dream-words are regarded as concepts or symbols that acquire their significance from their objective currelatives. In contrast, a dream, under- stood poetically, far from being a message containing information about some- thing other than the dream, is "like a poem or a Painting which is not about anything, not even about the poet or the painter.” For as every artist would justifi- ably insist, painted lemons can and must be experienced without reference to “real” lemons. Art is not nature at sccondhand, and one cannot paint lemons “better” than they paint themselves. If anything, a painted lemon or a flower is more real in that it is like the Goethean {rphinomen—a conerete universal, an archetypal image. In terms of archetypal psychology and its move toward aesthetics, it is the same with the lemon in a dream. ‘The puetic: view does not posit an objective psyche to which the lemon refers and from which it is a message, Psyche is image, Jung said. We stick to the imaye hecause the psyche itself sticks there? The dream and the soul James Hillman describes his book The Dream and the Underworld as ‘an essay in epistrophe, reversion, return, the recall of phenomena to their imagi- nal background.”** His previous emphasis on the imaginal and mythicalRoberts Avens 193 psyche here is carried further, in that poetic psychology receives a more de- finitive grounding within « psychology ofdreams and of death, Tn other words, to insist first on the primacy of the image and second on the mythical character of images implies that one must begin in the mythical underworld of dreams and dcath. Hillman is aware that his approach, which derives in part from Freud and Jung, is “shocking and difficult,” “farfetched, impractical, and visionary”; and yet it has to be radical in all these senses because it “bespeaks the territory of its origin, chthon [the Underworld as distinct from ge, the realm of nature, earth, fertility), the faraway pneumatic world that isa dimension not available in itself..." What Hillman suggests is not a new theory of dreams at all, not a coherent system or metapsychology (as we have it in Freud and Jung) but a consistent perspective, a coherent attitude that lots the phenomenon itself speak. Hill- man’s is a rigorously phenomenological approach to what is actually there, a radical sticking to the dream-image in its soul-making work. For the under world of dreams and death is not a theory but rather a mythic region where the psyche is sovereign. Tf, however, we do insist on speaking of theory and meta psychology, we should be content with « metapsychology that is wholly mythic and imaginal—a “metapsychology of myth,” placing, imagining (he patient. in the dream, that is, “reducing” the patient to his own depth, soul, and death. Hillman’s method (way) is cpistrophe reverting to the phenomena in their imaginal and mythic background. A fatal misunderstanding, however, must be avoided here. ‘The myth to which Hillman’s praxis (psychotherapy) returns the dream is not something more substantial than the dream itself. In this sense there is no such thing as "grounding of dreams in mythology” Myth doesn't ground, it. opens We remain in the perspective of depth, with nothing more reliable under our feet than this depth itself We bike depth psychology literally at its word, because depth is a metaphor that has no base. ... The depth of even the simplest image is truly fathomless.* With this statement [Tillman remains firmly “grounded!” in the groundless (the Ungrund of Jacob Boehme?), that is to say, within the limits of “imaginal reduction” and radical or imaginal relativism, which we discussed earlier, and which, in my opinion, is the outstanding feature of the Hillmanian approach in contrast to Freud and Jung who, in their (often unconscious) drive to provide metaphysical underpinnings to their praxs, remained prisoners of a dualistic and Cartesian mode of thinking. Hillman’s thought, in its consistently nondual stance, is comparable only to the late Heidegger and Zen or, better still, to ‘Yantric Buddhism. His psychologizing is truly contemporaneous in the precise sense that it appropriates the origins of Western spirituality in order to make them serve the needs of modern man, Like Heidegger, Hillman steps outside the mainstream of Western tradition and returns to the Pre-Socratics—a time und a place where rigorous thinking was possible not in a vacuum we today call “intellect” but in the closest proximity to myth and poetry. We must explore now some of the intricacies of the Hillmanian epistrophe. First, I should like to delineate Hillman’s position aver against. Freudian194 Journal of Religion and Health reduction of dreams to the waking state on the one hand and the Jungian concept of the dream as a compensation on the other.® Hillman credits Freud with the romantic idea that the dream contains a hidden and important sonal message from another world. Unfortunately, this idea, which was nearest to Freud, disappeared among the post Freudians, Freud himself, how- ever, made a major concession to the prevailing rational empiricism of his day by viewing the residues of the day (Yagesreste) as the raw material of the dream. In this way he stays with the Lockean fabula rasa concept of the mind, holding that there is nothing in the mind that. was not first in the senses. In the end, therefore, Freud returns the dream to the dayworld by translating or interpreting the realm of sleep into the jJanguage of waking life. Psychoanalysis becomes an instrument enabling the ego to rescue or “reclaim” the dream from its underworld madness and immersion in the pleasure Principle—a progressive conquest of the id (das Es) by the principle of Apollonian rationality and mono-vision. ‘The over-all construct that Jung applies to dream is compensation. Jungians read dreams for their information regarding the process of individuation, whose supposed aim is the ercation of a more whole midway station embracing both the dream and the ego, the inner and the outer. The assumption here is that a dream is not complete in itself it is always partial, one-sided, unhal- anced. To understand it and to make it useful, the analyst must help the Patient reestablish the “original harmony” between the opposites. Jung refers this principle to Heraclitus’ doctrine of enantiodromia, expressing the “regu- lative function of opposites.” He adapts the Heraclitean saying, “The way up and the way dawn are one and the same,” to mean les extremes se touchent.* From a purely philosophical standpoint, this ancient doctrine, opposed as it is to the either/or thinking of the Aristotelian tradition, is certainly important. and probably even “true.” But, says Hillman, in the consulting room of the unalyst things turn out rather differently. For the question now is: who is going to reestablish the lost. harmony? The only “person” on the scene to do the work is, of course, the old protagonist, the ego. In practice he compensation approach appeals tu the dayworld perspective of ego and is guided by egocen- ine ideology, not by the dream. The principle of compensation, according to Hillman, is rooted in Western allopathic medicine, where healing means re~ versing the direction of a disease Process by attacking it or by supplying the missing element. What has been overlooked in this procedure is that every dream (like every image) already contains its own opposite, that “every Psychic event is an identity of at least two positions and is thus symbolic, metaphorical, and never one-sided.” The Heraclitean -coineidence of opposilex means that nothing has to be intruduced by anyone from anywhere, because the opposite: is already present. ... Every dream has its own fulerum and balance, compensates itself, is eamplete as it is.27 In sum, both Freud and ‘Jung maintain that the dream must. be translated into waking language. The difference between the two is that whereas Freud uses the dream in order to broaden the rational ego, Jung wants to extract fromRoberts Avens 195 the dream what is absent in the daylight consciousness in order to achieve wholeness of personality (the Sclf). In sharp contrast to both of these positions, Hillman refuses to bring the dream into the dayworld “in any other form than its own”; “the dream may not be envisioned cither as a message to be de- ciphered for the dayworld (Freud) or as a compensation to it (Jung)."3 ‘Hillman, then, will follow the dream into a province where thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences; the dream will be met on its own ground, which is that of unfathomable depth and polyvalence—in the under- world." Just as images of the psyche are what they mean, just as the figures of myth and artistic creation possess their own consistency and message, so the dream imagery must be treated according to the Taoist principle of “letting be” and noninterference (wu-wei). For it 1s precisely then that the images of the dream will begin to speak for themselves and eventually alter our ways of living. The underworld of the dream is a cusmos in its own right, distinet from but not entirely unrelated to the dayworld. In Greek mythology this is indicated by the fact that Hades is the brother of Zeus. Their brotherhood means, according to Hillman, that the lower world is “contiguous with life, touching it in all parts... its shadow brother, giving to life its depth and its psyche." The underworld is the realm of the psyche in the literal sense of the word, a purely psychic world, a psychological cosmos whose mythological figures are metaphorical statements ahunt. the soul’s comportment beyond life. There is a useful analogy in Plato's Sophist (266c) where dream images are compared with shadowe—“dark patches” interrupting the light and leading us to see a kind of “reflection,” “the reverse of the ordinary direct view.” In Iillman’s interpretation, dreams are like dark spots, like absences of the dayworld. Nonetheless, these images are visible, though “only to what is invisible in us The invisible is perceived by means of the mvisible, that is, psyche."*! The shadow world in the depths replicates our daily consciousness, but it can be perceived only imaginatively; it. is this world perceived and experienced as a metaphor, i. e,, in a state of interpenetration among all things, events, and persons, From the perspective of the underworld only shadow has substantial reality, “only what is in the shadow matters truly, eternally.” The shadow is not only repressed or cvil reflection, which constantly accompanies us and which must be integrated into a “better” whole, but the very essence of the soul. Or, if you will, sub specie mortis, it is we, the “real people,” who are the shadows of our souls. In the words of Heraclitus, “when we arc alive our souls are deud and buried in us, but when we die, our souls come to life again and live."#? Hillman interprets the Heraclitean fragment as follows: ‘To'sloop’ places us in touch with the ‘dew, the widola, essences, images: to be ‘awake’ 15 to be in touch with the sleeper, the ego-conscious personality. In the Romantic sense: during sleep we are awake and alive: in life asleep. Hillman also distinguishes between the ego of daily life—the Herculean and controlling ego—and the ego of our dreams, the imaginal ego which is “at home in the dark, moving among images as one of thern.”** Since the dream does not196 Journal of Religion and Health belong to “me” but rather to the psyche (which, as we saw, is “x wider notion than man”), the dream eyo merely plays one of the roles in the theatre. In fact, all persons we encounter in dreams, including myself, though they often pre- sent themselves in the guise of human beings with whom we are personally acquainted, belong neither to the external world nor to my psychic constitu- Lion, hut to the shadowy “between” of the underworld—to the liminal, clusive, and ambiyuous twilight zone in which alone is the home of the soul. In Hill- man’s words, “they are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hallow of which is a numen.” For example, in the Egyptian cult of the dead, the shadow souls arc at the same time images of gods. Our human person and all the other persons of the dream are "shadowed by an archetypal image in the likeness of a God, and the God appears as the shade of a human person.” Thus, says Hillman, we are made not only in the divine image but are constantly made and remade “hy the divine images in the soul."# ‘Accordingly, Hillman’s dream therapy, based as it is in the underworld perspective (sticking with the dream), consists not in translating the dream into ego-language but rather in translating the ego into dream-language. Te wants to do the Freudian “dream work” on the ego, aiming at a transformation, ‘a metanoia of the modern heroic ego Uhat. is caught in a whirlwind of activity for its own sake, into an imaginal ego, representing a more discontinuous, ireular pattern, an “uroboric course, which is u circulation of the light and darkness."47 When we take the dream as a corrective to the “day-residues” (Freud) or as an instruction for Lamarrow (Jung), we are using it for purposes that. are alien to the dream-ego, i. e., fur strengthening our heroic stance. Since, however, dream is not primarily a comment upon the world of our literalistic and ra- tional consciousness but rather a digestive and assimilative process, we must imagine the dream work as converting bits and pieces of the day, indeed all life events, “into psychic substance by means of imaginative modes symbolization, condensation, archaization. This work tukes matters out of life and makes them into soul.” Dream-work is essentially soul-making. We work on dreams not to strengthen the ogo but to sake psychic reality, matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the make life iagination.** In contradistinction to Freudian analysis, psychotherapy, or the Jungian pro- cess of individuation, Hillman would call his way “soul-making” or “initia- tion.” Our nightly descent. inin dreaming is not a compensation but a mode of initiation which, instead of completing (wholing) ego-consciousness, voids it of attachments to and identification with Lhe surface of things. In this sense Hillman’s emphasis is on "psychology of craft” rather than on a “psychology of growth.”*" Note, however, that the notions of growth, individuation, integra- tion, ete., are rejected only to the extent that they are used to angment the hubris of the imperial ego. Soul-making encompasses organic growth and em- ploys its images in the creation of psychic reality.Roberts Avens 17 Soul-making is a “malcing” in the original sense of poesis, The dream work, ns | previously pointed out, eansists in a shift of perspective from the heroic basis of consciousness to the poetic basis of consciousness, im plying that “every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche."® Asa work of poesis (making of images in words) the dream work is made up not only of its material (content) but also of a form; dreams shape the given matter (Tages. reste) into a work of fantasy and imagination—a process during which the events of life and the life itself are transformed into a work of art. This, of course, is as much as saying that under ideal circumstances what we call “life” imitates dreams or that, on the level of depth, “nature” (the Creek ge) is mimetic to art. From the poetic perspective dreams and imagination are more real than what we mindlessly call “real life” and the "hard facts” of life In this context Hillman refers to the work of Gaston Bachelard, who also emphasizes the necessarily polyvalent and ambiguous nature of imagination,” Just as a dream ean never have only one interpretation, one meaning, in the realm of imagination, according to Bachelard, there is no value without polyvalence and duplicity. It is as Heraclitus observed: “The Lord whose is the oracle in Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.”®° Hillman follows Heraclitus in imagining the dream work to be an activity of a bricoleur (scrap dealer) rather than that of a censor. The task uf « bricoleur is to take the leftovers from the day and to shapc them into new figures within a new setting. The dream serves two principles, love and death. The bricoleur, who is in the service of (he death instinct, "scavenges and forages for day residues, removing more und more empirical trash. out of life"; the love instinct. (uses and shapes the junk into a material for soul-making. “Imagination works by de- forming and forming at one and the same moment,”** Bachelard, too, speaks of the deformative activities of the imagination. Something in the psyche scems to want to be and yet. to resist being twisted into unnatural monstrous shapes: is it the “polymorphous perversity” of the child in us? Hillman suggests that alchemy has resulved this dilemma by conceiving psyche’s deformative urges ("pathologizing") as an opus contra maluram, a work aguinst nature and yet for nature in its animated or ensouled form. For the psyche and her poetic urge the merely natural states arn circumstances are inadequate and “unnatural.” Therefore, the alchemical work had in deform nature in order tv serve nature, It had to hurt il, sever, skin, dessicate, pulrefy, suffocate, drown, ete.) nalural nature in onder ta free animated nature.%» ‘The dream, like artistic imagination, is intent on saving nature—a far ory from subjecting it to man’s control by means of tec nological machincry. Technology, in its present state, seems to be bent. mainly on distorting and maiming nature. There is a war of cosmic proportions going on. To sum it up, Hillman’s epistrophe is an effort on the part of the waking exo (an effort of “fearful cold intelligence”) to lead us into the underworld of night, dreams, and ghosts; to follow the transformative and deformative course of198. ournal of Religion and Health dreams “in” to the soul and “out” of life. For “each dream . .. is a preparation of the psyche for death.” Death and life ‘The closeness nf soul to death is one of the most important themes in ar- chetypal psychology. | should like to introduce this theme by first quoting R. M. Rilke, since few people have piven such an accomplished expression to that strangest of all coincidences: the correlativity of life and death Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms inexhaustibly nouriched from both.... The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation Nows through both there is neither here nor beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the ‘angels’, are at home We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us... We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons eperdument le miel du visible, pour Faccumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de UInvisible.®* In Suicide and the Soul Hillman proposes that "the experience of death is requisite for psychic life." Referring tu » passage in Phaedo (64) where Socrates speaks of philosophy as the practicing of death, Hillman interprets this dying to the world of senses as the dying to the literal perspective that is necessary “to encounter the realm of the soul. ...”8® Experience of death uc- quaints us with "the very first metaphor of human existence: that we are not real."® We are not real to the precise extent that we deny our dependence on psychic reality. We are not real because we are reflections of the imaginal psyche; we are shadows of “shadows,” that is, in our literalness—as concoctions of “spirit” and "matter"—we are shadows of our sonls, for only soul (the imagi- nal realm) is not reducible to anything else and so constitules our true, on- tological reality. For the underworld of the psyche (the Jungian unconscious) is ‘a place where there are only psychic images. From the Hades perspective we are our images."*" ‘These are extraordinary lines. Instead of viewing death as an exogenous event, hefalling us from outside, Hillman has chosen to see it as something inherently, inalienally human, indeed, as “the side of life averted from us” (Rilke), as nourishing us via the imaginal sunt: life would have literally no substance without the experience of death. In Hillman’s view, therefore, death is the end of life only in a literal sense; imagistieally or from the soul’s perspec- tive, death is the beginning of life as well. It is all radically relative: to the extent that we are afflicted with literalism, we are dead in life, in fact—more dead in life than in death, In the words of Heraclitus: "It is always one and the same thing that lives in us: living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For the former turns into the latter, and the latter again becomes the former.”Roberts Avens 199 The discovery of the Hades—the archetypal background of life—"gives a sense of primordiality, of beginning at the beginning.”®? In Bachelard’s words, it gives "a mad surge of life,” for the “archetypes are reserves of enthusiasm which help us believe in the world, to love the world, to create the world.”*# Bachelard’s observation should be understood in connection with the highly unorthodox interpretation that Hillman gives to the Narcissus myth. In the Freudian theory sleep is a return to primary narcissism, and all dreams are narcissistic—disguised fulfillments of repressed sexual wishes. More specifically, the content of a dream represents the transfiguration of latent sexual urges into manifest imagery. In short, the dream work fulfills instinctual demands. The Jungian critique of Freud has pointed out that in- stinct has also a spiritual” aspect, which he called the archetype. Archetypes are the psychic instincts of the human specics; in the form of images and symbols they complete instinct by guiding it toward the goal of wholeness or totality (the Sclf), Thus, says Hillman, for both Freud and Jung the dream work fulfills an instinctual or archetypal need. Amazingly enough, however, this gratification is narcissistic precisely because it occurs within the dream itself: “the images mace in dreams fulfill the desire of the instinct." It is "as if it were enough for the psyche to see its own reflection by means of images, as if il were enough to imagine in poetic form its physical body and needs, its love, and its own self.” Nothing external is needed: the instinctual craving is stilled by the sheer presence of and participation in the image. he psyche sleeps in peace: it sleeps in peace because Narcissus is contemplating not a mere reflection of his being but something more distant and reposeful—a work of art. We must imagine Narcissus imitating (as nature imitates art) his “own” soul-image, not the other way round. Or, as Hillman puts it, Narcissus “be- lieves that he is Inuking al the beautiful form of another being. So it is not self-love of his ‘own’ image (narcissism) but the love for a vision that is ut once body, image, and reflection.”*? Narcissus—“the patron saint of imagination”—is in fact a visionary and a poet whose perception and powers of imagination extend far beyond the compass of nature. We must imagine Nar- cissus (rather than Sisyphus) happy Thus Hillman would not interrupt. Narcissus. He would not attempt to inter- pret the dream, because dreams can be killed by interpreters. Interpretation, even in the Jungian and Freudian psychotherapies, has become more and more linear and monistic in its concern with growth, sclf-realization, and life at the expense of the depth and the inherent ambiguity of the imaginal soul. If, as Jung said, modern man is in scarch of a soul, this soul, adds Hillman, “is lost. partly in life";®* it is lost through the attempts of modern psychotherapy to “explain” drcams by using the guidelines of the ego. The ineviluble result of this rationalistic and subjectivistic bias is that the ego becomes strong at the cost of soul and the imaginal. Freud has said that the dream is the via regia (the royal road) to the unconscious. Unfortunately, psychology since Freud, by moving out of Lhe unconscious toward the light of ego-consciousncss too soon, tov abruptly, has not only lost the soul, but-much more fatally—the memory of the loss itself. Gods have fled the soul. But fortunately, as Jung and Hillman have reminded us, gods are immortal—even in their infirmities. And in oursJournal of Religion and Health References 1. Durant, G., “Exploring the Imaginal,” Spring; An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and siungian Thought, 1971, p. 84 2, Heidegger, M., "Hlderlin and the Essence of Postry.” In Brock, W., od., Existence and Being. South Bend, Indiana, Gateway Editions, L. T. D., 1949, p, 289. 8. The Dream and the Underworld isa revised and enlarged version of leugthy essay published in the Branoe Yearbook, 1973, 42 (Brill, 1975). The book version has been published by Tlarper & Row, 1979, Chapter 6, entitled “Praxis,” is devoted to specific dream images as they appear in psychotherapentic work. Hillman cautions the reader that these imazes (black, animale, water, roundness, doors and gates, ete.) are not mages of an abstract or noumenal archetype. As throughout the book, here, too, the basic principle is: stick to the dream! 4 See Kirk, GS, and Raven, B,, The Pre-Soeratic Philnsophers. Cambridge University Press, 1957, p. 208, Hillman has observed that his The Dream and the Underworld is “a kind of prolonged commentary on Heraclitus.” (Private communication) The Iliad, XVI, 671 and 681 ‘Phe Romantic attitude toward dreams is comprehensively documented by Albert Beguin in his, bbook L'dme rumantiyue et le reve. Paris, Corti, 1960, 7. Coleridge, S. T., Biographia Literaria, Chap X11 The heat historieal and philosophical treatments of imagination are: Bundy, M. W., “Ihe ‘Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought,” University of Minuis Studies in Language and Literature XI. Urbana, 1927, pp. 3-284; Warnock, M,, Imagination Berkeley, University of Califurnia Press, 1976. An outstanding phenomenological treatment of imagination, unique in ts field, 38 Casey, B.S. Imagining: a Phenomenological Study. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1976. One of the hest books on the new psychology of images is Watkins, MM, Waking Dreams. New York, Harper & Row, 197. 8. The adjective imayinul coues from the French Islamic scholar Henri Corbin, who wants to distinguish it from the derogatory connotation of imaginary. He has propased the term ax pointing to an order of reality thot is ontologically no leso real than the physical reality, on the ‘one hand, and the spiritual or intellectual reality, on dhe other, The characteristic faculty of perception within the mundus imaginalts is imaginative power, which, noetically or eogni- tively. is on a par with the power of the senses or the intellect. According to Corbin, the imaginal world functions as an intermediary between the sensible world and the intelligible world, Cf, Henri Corbin, “Mundus Jmaginalie or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” Spring 1972, p. 15; p. 7; Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Tbn Arabi. Princeton, University Press, 1968, IV 9. Wheelwright, P., Heraclitus. New York, Atheneum, 1964, Fr. 42. All the other numherings: of Heraclitus’ fragments follow the DielsKranz. arrangement, trans. into English by K. Freeman in Anrilla to the Pre-Soeratic Philosophers. Oxfard, B. H. Blackwell, 1948, 10, Hillman, J, Suicide and the Soul, Lirich, Spring Publications, 1964, p. 48; ef, Insearch: Psychology and Religion. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1964, p. 42. Because the word psyche isa symbol, we cannot find ont what it means hy going bark to an etymological origin. Psyche 16 the subject of our experience and not an object of experience that can be defined. As Jung says:."... the psyche is the object of psychology, and—fatally enough—its subject at the same rime” (Psychology and Religion, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983, p. 62). Among the standard works on the subject is Rhodo, K., Poyche, tran. W. B. Hillis, Sth ed. London, 1925. Cf. the pioneering monograph by Christou, E., The Logos of the Soul. Zurich, Spring Publica- tons, 1976 11. Ke Viaioning Paychology. Now York, Harper & Rov, 1975, p. x. 12. "The Fiction vf Case Histury. a Round.” In Wiggins. J. ., ed. Religion as Story. New York, Harper & Row, 1975, p. 161: ef. Suicide and the Sout, op cit, p 9R 13, See Hillman, Re Vioioning Paychology, op. ct, pp. 174, 162 14, The Latin word wuminvus originally refers to he animation of an image in a polytheistic cantext. and not ta the God of the Old Testament as R. Otto had presimed. See Hillman, “Pandamontum der Bilder: C. G. Jungs Beitrag cum ‘Erkenne dich selbet,’” Kranos 1975, 44. Leiden, Brill. p. 440. The image. far from representing something, is. in Wallace Stevens's wort, “the estential poem at the centre of things” (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Now York, A. A. Knopf, 1058, p. 440, "A Primitive Like an Orb”) 15, Jung, C. G., Collected Works. trans. It P. C, Tull. Dollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press, 1967, VI, par. 78; of par. 77; XI, par. 888.Roberts Avene 201 16. Rocher, W. M., and Hillman, J., Pan and the Nightmare. Ziirich, Spring Publications, 1970, p. xxy; of. Hillman, "Why Archetypal Psychology?”, Spring, 1970, p. 216. 17, Hillman, "The Fiction uf Case History,” op. cit, p. 159; of. "Peaks and Vales.” In Needleman and Lewis, eds., New York, A. A. Knopf, 1976, p. 118; Re Visioning Paychology, op. cit, p. xv » The Myth of Anatysis; Three Essuys in Archelypal Psychology. New York,’ Harper Colophon Buks, 1978, p. 16 19. ___, Re-Visioning Psychology, op. cit., p. 23. "An Inquiry into Image,” Spring, 1977, p. 68, of. p. 87, Jung, Collected Works, op. cit , VII, par. 402, XI, par. 829 an “The Fiction of Case History,” op. cit, p. 187. 22. Re-Visioning Psychology. op. it., p. 173. 23. Loose Finds; Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology. Zurich, Spring Publications, 1975, p. 3. 24. » The Dream and the Underworld, up. tila, p. 21 25. Jung, Collected Works, op cit., XIIT, par. 299; ef. 1X, ii, par. 4 26. Hillman, Re-Visioning Paychology, op. cit, p. 151 27. See Hillman, "An Inquiry into Image.” yp. cit., p. 80. ef. The Myth of Analysis, op cit. p. 179 28. Hillman, “On the Neeessity of Abnormal Psychology.” Eranos, 17/4, 43. Leiden, Brill, 197, p. 104, Further Notes on Images.” Spring, 1978, p. 152. 30. Jung, Collected Works, op.cit., VI, pat. 743. 31, Hillman, “Further Notes on Images,” op. cit, pp. 170-171 « Phe Dream and (he Underworld, op. cit, p. 4 88. Thid., p. 198. 34, Ibid, p. 200. 85. See Mbid.. pp. 8-12: of. pp. 75-79. 36. Fr. a0. ef stung, Collected Works, op. cit. VIL, par. 111 37, Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, op. cit. p. 80. 38. Ibid, p. 13. 839, It ix generally overlooked that Freud's scientific concepts (such au “unconscious,” “id,” “death drive,” ete.) are rooted in mythical thinking, Thus, as Giiggenbilh-Craig unce remarked. Freudians cannot properly understand Freud hecatise they take him literally. “The Jungians may he etter at understanding Froud because they can read him for his mythology” (quoted in Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, op. cit. p. 18). 40, Hillman, The Dream und the Underworid, op eir, p30 41. Thi, p54 42, Fr. 36 Wiels Kranz) 43. Hillman, The Dream und the Undermorid, op cit, p 138 44. Tid, p. 102 45, Ibid., p. 61; ef. pp. 99-100. 4G. See Tbid...p. 138. 47 The Myth of Analysis, op. cit, p. 184; ef, pp. 185-190. 48. » The Dream and the Underworld, up. vil, v. 96 49. Tbid., p. 197. 0 Ibid, p 138. 51. 1bid., p. 137. 52, Gaston Bachelard’s main works are: On Poetic Imagination, trans., with an introd, by ©. Gaudin. New York, Bobbe-Merril Uo., 1971; The Poetic Space, trans, from the French by M. Jolas. Boston, Beacon Press, 1969. The Poetics of Reverie, trans. from the French hy D. Rus- sell, Boston, Bescon Press, 1971. 53. Fr. 93 (Diels-Krana) 54, Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, op. cit., p. 128 95, Tbid., p. 128. 56. Ibid., p. 133. 57. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1924, trans. J. B Green and M. M. H. Norton. New York, W. W. Norton & Co,, 1947, pp. 373-374. 58. Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, op. cit, p. 76 59, Ibid., p. 71 60. Re-Visioning Psychology, op. cit., p. 20%. 81. Ibid, p. 207, 62, Fr. 88 (Diels-Kranz). We are uld und young, seney and puer throughout the course of life, See202 Journal of Religion and Health Section 6 of Hillman’s “Senex and Puer,” Eranos, 1967, 36, pp. 884-843. Heraclitus makes the same point by identifying Hades, the God of death, and Dionysos, the God of vitality and life (Fr. 15) See Hillman’s comment on this identification in The Myth of Analysis, up. vil., pp. 217-218, Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, op. cit., pp. 217-208. Racholard, On Postic Imagination, op. eit., pp. 97-98. Hillman, The Dream ancl the Underworld, up. cil. p. 120. Ibid, p. 121. Thic., pp. 221-222, nove 4) of, M. Stein, “Narcissus,” Spring, 1976, pp. 92-59. 6H. —__. The Dream and the Underworld, op. cit.. p. 202.