Animating the Image:

[Triton]

Animating the Image:



For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake,
and you can spend a whole hour of therapy with this black snake,
talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, about
repressed sexuality, and all the other interpretative moves that we
therapists make. But what remains after all the symbolic understanding
is what is that snake doing, this crawling huge black snake that's
sliding into your life. The moment you've caught the snake in an
interpretation, you've lost the snake. You've stopped its living
movement. Then the person leaves the therapeutic hour with a concept
about "my repressed sexuality" or "my cold black passions" or "my
mother" -and is no longer with the snake.

The interpretation settles the emotional quivering and mental
uncertainty that came with the snake. In fact, the snake is no longer
necessary; it has been successfully banished by interpretation. You,
the dreamer don't need the snake anymore and you then form the habit
of not needing dreams anymore either, once they have been interpreted.
Meaning replaces image; animal disappears into the human mind.

There are various ways of keeping the snake around. It can be imagined
as a felt presence and talked with, it may need to be fed and housed,
painted and modeled. It can be honoured by attentions, like recalling
it several times during the day: by "doing something for it" -a
physical gesture, lighting a candle, buying an amulet, discovering its
name. It can be brought closer by visualizing it, sensing its skin,
its strength. Now imagination replaces meaning, and the human mind
gives itself over to the animal presence.



This is the psychological and imaginative work of animating the image,
giving a life-soul back to the snake that may have been removed from
it by your desire to understand it. The snake may have no objection to
being understood. It may be pleased with your turning to herpetology
books about snakes, by your visit to the zoo to watch them, by your
reading of ancient serpent mysteries. But whatever you do, consult
with the snake first so that you do not insult it by following your
own plan without recognizing its arrival in your life. For its arrival
is a summons to divert your attentions from yourself at least
partially toward it.

Animating the image - that is the task today. No longer is it a
question of symbolic contents of dreams. Over a hundred years ago
Freud brought us back to the old traditions of symbolism and the old
traditions of dream meanings; then Jung explored these symbolisms and
meanings even more widely and deeply.

But then both Freud and Jung made a move that we no longer want to
repeat. They both translated the images of animals into crystallized
symbolic meanings. They didn't let what appeared express itself
enough, but moved toward satisfying the rationalizing -and often
frightened- dayworld mind. "This means that."

Once you've translated the great snake into your omnipotence fantasy
or penis envy, or you've translated it as a mother symbol, the Great
Mother, you no longer need the image, and you let the image say only
one thing, one word: "Great Mother." Then it disappears. You don't
want that black snake really anymore. You want to work on your mother
complex, change your personality and so on. Now this leaves the soul
unanimated. That is, unalive. The images are not walking around on
their own legs. They've been turned into meanings. As somebody said
about Jung, his main myth was the myth of meaning. Now lets try to
leave meaning, and the search for meaning, and the meaning of life, so
as to stick with the animal image.

In our eagerness for conceptual meanings, we ignore the actual beast.
We are no longer astounded by its facts, or wonder over its presence -
that, for instance, a snake dislocates its jaw to swallow an animal
larger than itself, that its digestive system works without chewing,
without teeth or gizzard or cud, like a rhythmic peristalsis that
squeezes its meal against the snake's backbones, crushing its prey
into a digestible pulp. Or, for instance, the fact that its discarded
skin after shedding appears to go on shedding.

Lives without meaning hunger for meanings, and psychologists feed the
hungry with the living presences of animals. Patients as carnivores,
devouring the flesh of their dream animals to satisfy their gluttony
for knowledge. Or, have we psychologists become taxidermists,
disemboweling the snake, stuffing it with concepts, and preserving it
as a carefully fixed meaning?

[Hillman - Dream Animals]



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"Sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar"

I am trying to set aside psychodynamic and archetypal approaches for
something more direct, even if my move regresses to pre-psychological
modes for perceiving people. I am coming to the conviction, and to the
point of this convoluted letter, that psychological explanation of
human failing fails the human.

…I have long wondered why psychologists are so often off track in
their judgements about people, even about their own intimates. I used
to think it was part of the calling -to be especially obtuse in the
ordinary world of spades and cigars. Now, however, I am coming to
realize that we go off track because our perceptions of people are no
longer phenomenal, and our judgements follow. We can "save the
phenomenon" by seeing things as they are, but only if we say things as
they are, naming characteristics accurately. To replace
conceptualizations with characteristics is one reason I wrote my last
two books, The Soul's Code and The Force of Character.

There are implications in this move toward a more phenomenal
psychology that I have not even begun to work out…[but] the idea I am
beginning to gather is this: psychologists train your eye to perceive
traits of character, and use the great, rich tradition of common
speech and well-written prose to see the peculiarities of each
specific human being.

[Hillman - Spring Journal, vol. 65]