Inter Views:

...Hillman even says that he once "began a little book called 'Why I Don't Read Hillman...

...To the Jungian goal of wholeness Hillman prefers "fal-ling apart" into multiplicity, the psyche's natural mode...

...Nevertheless - and this too seems generally characteristic of his work - there are aspects here interesting enough to offset the dissatisfactions, and merit for the whole a cautious recommendation...

...The volume under review is a book-length interview with Hillman tenaciously conducted by a pseudonymous "Laura Pozzo" - rumored by some to be Hillman himself in anima disguise...

...Since then my enthusiasm has steadily dwindled, though his popularity it seems has gone the other way...

...How can one help but like a writer with whom one has had difficulty when he admits that clarity is hard for him, that his style is uneven because he himself is "mixed, meshugge," and that he writes " about all sorts of things - like reflection - I don't necessarily do but might wish I could do or think I should do...

...And like a great religious tradition it offers, albeit idiosyncratically, the holy promise of liberation from the narrow prison of ego...

...The reluctant high priest of a new polytheism, Hillman thus counsels recognition of all the gods of the psyche...

...We can never stand above the gods, and psychologically speaking, we are quite unfree...

...Obscurity, loose ends, and inconsistency are as readily apparent in this work as his massive learning...

...I made notes on all the dodges in my own thinking, all the loopholes and cover-ups - everything I couldn't bear in my own work...

...But whether archetypal psychology will become a lasting force in human reflection or be remembered as an avant-garde vocation of belletrists seeking to bear, ennoble, and even sacralize ordinary human foibles - this remains to be seen...

...In a telling passage, Hillman discloses the link between aesthetics and healing: ". . . if we imagine ourselves engaged as artists in life, . . . then we would work with the daily mess in our lives as material for psychological creativity...

...Time and again she presses the elusive Hillman on such weak points as have been mentioned...

...Finally, there is Hillman in an anecdotal and confessional mode - an unexpected delight...

...For example, he will denounce views that dare to prescribe how we "ought" to be, yet his own work distinguishes psychically healthy and unhealthy modes of being, thereby implying oughts right and left...

...Hillman shows himself aware of its constraints and observes that the interview, like the talk show and the panel discussion, is a modern contrivance that tends to render trivial that which is entrusted to it...

...I happily admit that my antipathy toward the man, the residue of intellectual disagreement, melted as I read...

...Philip Novak TEN YEARS AGO I read James Hill-man's erudite and brilliantly original Myth of Analysis sensing psychological genius...

...His work is part of an "aesthetic revolution," and is nourished by the hope that "we could rebuild psychology on an aesthetic basis...

...Working in this vein, Hillman has been prolific and provocative...

...He has also been annoying...

...Traditional spiritual paths are rejected as soulnegating because of their one-sided preference for unity and light...

...After all is said and done, archetypal psychology strikes its own blow against the forces of repression and fosters psychological maturity through the differentiation of psychic life...

...And that is what therapy, as I try to do it, is all about: to get people to live their lives more from an artist fantasy of themselves [which] . . . accepts the mess, likes it, needs it...

...For Hillman, the psyche is not a hierarchy but an egalitarian pantheon, a field of archetypal patterns, or "god," whose ceaselessly shifting constellations shape our thought, our behavior, and our world...

...For Hillman and his Gemeinschaft there is a large remainder of the bearable, and yes, of the worthwhile...

...If one charges him with philosophical incoherence, ethical shallowness, or blatant contradiction, he will respond that consistency is not important to him and that, in any case, such charges indicate that one is afflicted with the disease of "monotheistic thinking" or "literalism," epithets Hillman hurls with irritating frequency...

...Second, it becomes clearer here than in any other work of which I'm aware that archetypal psychology has no pretensions whatever to being a science and that one errs, at least slightly, in criticizing it on that basis...

...He appears candid, self-effacing, witty, and utterly charming...

...His writings regularly contain polemics against other views (such as the Hebrew) which, by his own logic, are but other archetypal voices ("You can't open your mouth without an archetypal perspective speaking through you...

...Whereas Freud and Jung assumed the superiority of a conscious, analytical standpoint from which the irrational forces of the psyche could be conceptually mapped and rationally understood, Hillman argues that such supposed superiority is but another fantasy, another psychic posture, no freer of unconscious determinants than any other...

...None of the insubstantiality is Poz-zo's fault...

...It seeks to relieve us of the misery of the divided self in this unique way: not by unifying it but by teaching us how to live creatively within its natural (so the theory goes) fragmentation...

...Hillman's originality lies in having taken the psychology of the unconscious to its logical term...

...To mention but three favorable impressions: first, Inter Views contains many pithy clarifications of the main ideas and attitudes of archetypal psychology's theory and practice, quite helpful for the newcomer as well as for us more plodding students...

...He meanders, engages in straw man critiques (e.g., of fundamentalist Christianity, which often stands for the whole), and offers generalizations about human life and culture that are vapid as often as they are perceptive...

...There appears to be little ground upon which archetypal psychology can be challenged...

...We thrive psychologically by befriending and communing with our images (the speech of the gods) not by subordinating them to rational interpretation...

...Only when life is lived in and through the soul's pathologies (his word) is soul-making, the central opus of archetypal psychology, furthered...

...My] books are deceptive...

...This former director of the Jung Institute of Zurich, now something of a renegade among Jungians, has been hailed as the most original psychological thinker of our time and the founder of a new school: archetypal psychology...

...The implications are radical...

...In no less than fourteen places, Hillman indicates that he is not a scientist but an artist, not a psychologist (for logos connotes rational systematization) but a psychopoetiker, a poet of the psyche...

...We may lay some of the blame for this on the interview format itself...

...indeed, one could hardly ask for a more intelligent or informed questioner...

...It contains the same mixture of provocative observation and insubstantial musing that characterize Hillman's work in general...

...In everything we think and say and do, we do their bidding...

...But Hillman often dodges her or takes refuge in one of his metaphorical fugues...

...He urges respect for all the"gods" but in practice he neglects all but the Greek gods...