lectures by James Hillman
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JAMES HILLMAN lectures, March 7-9, 2008
PAGAN PSYCHOLOGY: A Therapy for Psychotherapy
Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California
Note: James Hillman’s thinking is complex, erudite and discursive. My notes of course cannot contain three days worth of ideas and may or may not capture things accurately, so please don’t hold Hillman responsible for my poor note-taking talents! What I’ve written below is my best recollection, understanding and transcription of what he was trying to communicate. Anyone interested in viewing the complete DVD of the event should contact the Public Programs department at Pacifica Graduate Institute at www.pacifica.edu
Also, I have bolded the material that especially relates to ecopsychology and ecotherapy. During the lecture Hillman frequently addressed himself to these issues.
Hillman, dapper and straight-backed at 82 and wearing his “I’m a Born-Again Pagan” button, presented an alternative third cosmology (creation story) to 1) the scientific Big Bang to Black Hole idea and 2) The Creator myths, including the current Matthew Fox “God continuously creating” notion. This third cosmology is pagan and “starts with multiplicity, is discontinuous and is lovely to the senses.” He is less interested in theories of the Whole (the string on which the pearls are strung) and more in the pearls themselves, the particularity of things both physical and imaginal. His focus is on Beauty and on Aphrodite, who has been banned from modern culture and from psychology but who is evident in the “return of the repressed” in sometimes perverted form.
His three-day lecture was divided into 5 parts: 1. Animism and sensory aliveness 2. Looking backwards to ancestors and connectedness 3. The qualitative order of the world. 4. The gods, especially love and Aphrodite. 5. The Cosmos and Cosmology.
- ANIMISM
He began with a description of Freud’s art collection, which Freud kept with him in his study and brought with him when he escaped to England from the Nazis. The little statues of gods, goddesses and ancient beings that he would lovingly stroke and touch. (One book about this: The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis by Janine Burke.)
So from the very beginning, psychoanalysis was a return of the pagan world, subversive to the Western tradition. And Jung too, who in youth wanted to be an archeologist, ended up excavating the psyche and feeding the imagination with ancient images.
The critical fact: paganism looks at the world as if it were alive. For pagans, the world is inherently alive.
So what killed it? What killed the natural relationships to an alive world bearing some kind of consciousness (objects have some kind of intention, display themselves)?
Before therapy, where did people go with their personal problems? To an oracle, to a “daimonic person” (mediator, intermediary), to a cult communal event (e.g mass catharsis in ancient Green theatre performances which were held only once, like life events), to mysteries. In our culture, perhaps a rock concert, a mass sports event, theatre still can still provide that pagan communal healing event? But they usually lack adequate depth.
Modern culture offers little in the way of collective healing. Therapy is individualistic, personalized. No communal ritual. For example, no community healing ritual for rape. Commercialized into being part of a brand. But the individual psyche is not enough. We just see “my” problems, ignoring the many times when the community or the context ARE the problem. “People are sick because they’re cut off from ‘the rest.’” Materialism.
He spoke about friendship and how therapy is a substitute friendship. In sustained ancient cultures community and friends were critical. “Real friends,” he stressed. “not pets.” (That got a laugh from the audience.)
A Mexican student in the audience pointed out that in many cultures in the world this is still true. But in cultures with predominantly northern European populations, this doesn’t appear to be so.
A therapist in the audience commented that being a paid pseudo-friend had made it harder for her to have real friends. So is a therapist a “professional friend”?
Hillman didn’t want to diminish the therapeutic art, however. “A therapeutic intelligence is a special intelligence and gift.”
Freud and his followers were subversive, he commented, but therapy is no longer very subversive.
“Therapy is confined by Western theories of perception… We are isolated from nature, spirits… Paganism is animistic, nature is alive, everything has its intention.”
He discussed the senses at length. Vision, hearing and finally touch were explored. Psychology, he says, doesn’t trust the senses. He cited the experiment where one puts a stick into a bucket of water and sees that it bends. So psychology students are taught to trust their mental knowledge, not the experience of their senses.
He stressed the ancient Greek idea of reciprocity between what was seen and what saw. Rays left the eye like tentacles and went to the object and rays of light came from the object. They met in the middle. Conjunctio/marriage at that point.
We can still see that when we view some paintings that are luminous and seem to travel towards the eye. Ancient theories and ways of perception. A non-materialistic vision of vision. “The inherent intelligibility of all things,” all meaningful, is the base of animism. He also mentioned the doctrine of signatures (medieval) which was moral and was superceded by a scientific view that now stresses mere “sustainability.”
If the world were evident to the senses, there would be no ecological problem. We need the old way of seeing the world (as alive and reaching out towards us).
Also the Pagan way is open to hearing voices and not pathologizing or reducing that to psychiatric symptoms.
- LOOKING BACKWARDS TO THE ANCESTORS.
“Pagan” means hill people, country people. We need to ground a psychology in the world before psychology, looking back at the ancestors and spiritual ancestors, as they do in Chinese and Indian cultures. Grandparents are a nourishing image. But in therapy we focus on parents with our obsessive “personalism.”
The context of Western therapy is personalism. We ignore or dissolve the wider context.
Where did we lose our ancestors?
Hillman talked at length about the 10 Commandments. The first 4 are theological and 6-10 involve the social context. #5 is “honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God has given you.” The human, personal parents (instead of the ancestors) now come to the fore and they have power over your life (span) and are linked to your ownership of the land. This supercedes the importance of the clan, separates people from the land.
So we go from pagan ritual taboo to Judaic commandments, from ancestor cults to parents who determine fate, from clan to family. We narrow the family to the immediate parents.
Today in therapy we need to relieve mothers and fathers of this burden! And too often therapists become mother/father substitutes.
In addition to personalism, another problem is literalism. And there is a literalism in paganism too.
The problems with Christianism (he prefers this word to Christianity, as other religions are described as isms – Buddhism, Hinduism etc.) as the context for modern Western psychology. A religion of the Child archetype. The 2000 year history and shadows of Christianism is a burden or “backpack” we in the West all carry, whether we’re overtly Christian or not.
It’s hard to see the myth you live in.
Monotheistic psychology has an obsession with historical facts – taking the patient’s elaborately detailed history. Literalistic case histories. Freud’s focus on Jewish historicism. We dig up evidence to prove or disprove historical facts just as detectives gathered mountains of facts at Columbine but gained no understanding. Therapists too often do this too.
Monotheism brings up the problem of Evil/Devil – a split from God. The Greek pantheon includes ignorance and ugliness as well as beauty and power. Each God had 2 sides. The Shadow was incorporated, embodied in each divine character.
He tackled the issue of Belief. The requirements of Belief by the Ego cut you off from full nature (outside and inside), he said. From the instincts of the moment.
***
During a break, I was fortunate to meet with Hillman and pioneering phenomenologist Dr. Ed Casey in a private talk. Hillman was interested to hear about the idea of retraining therapists to become ecotherapists, as in the work of Jungian Mary-Jayne Rust in the UK. I described the current struggle to define and conceptualize ecopsychology. I also told Hillman about Dr. Michael Cohen’s work with “natural attractions” and webstring theory and he was interested to hear of this. Hillman also talked about how a long time ago he met a patient at an outside bench and how this was seen as radical therapy then and still would be now. He continued his comments relating to ecopsychology throughout the subsequent lectures.
***
Back in the main session, Hillman said his goal is to ‘de-cultify therapists.” He’s trying to educate us about the weight or “backpack” of 2000 years of Christianism. He quoted Joseph Campbell: “the trouble with the Bible is that it’s a bad book.” Especially when taken literally. Paganism has no book, just stories, myths, rituals, practices. Most of us are trapped in a book religion culture, even if we’re not personally involved in such a religion.
Where did we go wrong? Where we went wrong is where we went right. He stressed the value of Science, but…
Taking things literally is part of the problem. The tale of Abraham and Isaac.
He also feels we’re hung up on seeing the Whole, the One. Monotheism, the stress on Unity. He focuses, as does paganism, on particularities, diversities, multiplicities. But “practicing phenomenology is hard,” he warns. He returned to the metaphor of the pearls and the string, the parts and the whole. David Abram focuses on the phenomenology of real objects. Phenomenologists explore imaginal phenomena?
In paganism “everything in the universe is watching me.”
So he is helping us remove what he calls “the 2000 year old backpack.”
- QUALITATIVE ORDER OF THE WORLD
PAGAN AWARENESS is connected to nature, the seasons, noticing the sky. Noticing the specifics of the world. Nature education, nature connection. “Until people feel an emotional connection to sky, they won’t care about it.”
Hillman always stresses the aesthetic. The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic, numbing.
There are 5-day seasons in the Chinese almanac, he said, 72 a year. Great particularity and attention to nature. “East Wind Melts the ice” is one season. “Prune fruit trees,” another.
Our seasons are determined by national festivals (Super-Bowl weekend, Christmas etc.) Nature disconnected.
He posed a direct challenge to ecopsychology and ecotherapy: can ecotherapy be urban? Can we have seasons of hot tarmac, city smells? He suggested that perhaps ecopsychology can follow the lead of urban anthropology, focusing on connection with human-made art and artifacts like architecture as well as far-away nature. As most people now live in urban and suburban environments, ecopsychology would be better off not having traditional “out there” nature connection as the only way to reconnect to nature.
He mentioned the way artists like John Cage, Gershwin, graffiti artists capture the “nature” of city life. The sounds, the images, the rhythms. We can also notice our own bodily sensations.
How to produce the ability to be aware, with senses awake? Meditation? Looking at sky? Aesthetics? He also stressed the importance of the restoration of the arts in schools – music, dance, art.
Can we act “as if” a building were alive? All the artifacts of the city are ultimately from nature.
He discussed the “loss of place to space” (Ed Casey’s phrase, I believe.)
An attendee brought up the issue of people moving to a destroyed place that is a new suburb. Mobility is American. But it’s different to move to an older city like New York than to a new suburb. “Place is those who are with us – psychic, physical, historical and communal.” So people who move to a destroyed place that is now a suburb are displaced. Real community would be an expression of the place.
So we are missing a lot. With anesthesia of the senses, we are blind, tone deaf.
Have you missed what the gas stations are saying?
Another part of the Western “backpack” – constant shoulds, self-improvement.
The phrase “private practice” is another part of psychotherapy’s pathological individualism, personalism.
He recommends “living at the edge of the unknown.”
4. APHRODITE, LOVE, BEAUTY AND EROTICS
Hillman opened the afternoon discussion with the idea of our culture’s obsession with “sex offenders” as a “disturbance in Eros.” Aphrodite is repressed in Christianism and this is the core of what’s wrong in our culture.
The focus of Hillman’s current thinking is on how Beauty and Ethics connect and how in our culture we assume that beauty has no moral effect. We think of beauty literally, as art objects. He spent some time tracing the history of this split in psychology as well.
So the world of sense changed into the world of interpreting meaning (insight therapy). Aphrodite is reduced to transference. “The gods return in our diseases”
Hillman talked in detail about the nature of Aphrodite. Things associated with her: complexity, the 8-armed octopus. She is a catalyst, joining heaven and earth, nature and fertility. She rises from the sea, greeted by 3 attendants who are the daughters of Zeus’s first wife Themis, the goddess of Justice. These daughters are peace, order and good government. So Aphrodite is connected to social structure right at her arising.
We are a Puritanical culture at heart, says Hillman. We scorn Aphroditic adornment, the display of beauty artfully adorned and enhanced.
Hillman connected aesthetics and biology (E.O. Wilson’s “biophilia” – the intrinsic love of nature, or all living forms for one another). There is an inherent aesthetic sense and response. Ugliness makes us shrink away.
Our whole biological world originates in flowers, connected in mythology to Aphrodite.
“So paying attention to aesthetics is an ethical act.” (my note: so aesthetic education needs to be part of ecotherapy?) How can we awaken the aesthetic response?
When we marry Aphrodite and Justice we get restorative justice because Aphrodite is relational. But we who suffer from what Hillman calls “The Mayflower complex” (Puritanism) are stuck on an eye for an eye – revenge justice.
The word aesthetics come from “breath.” As in the “wow” or awe response.
5. COSMOLOGY
Hillman talked about “Northern and Southern Psychology.” He defined Northern Psychology” as “north of Switznerland and “Southern Psychology” as Mediterranean.
“You are in the Psyche – Psyche is not just in you.”
He talked about laughter. The Greek gods smile but “monotheism discourages laughter.”
Hillman spoke about “polytheistic cosmology” and the importance of bringing Aphrodite into cosmology. Physical displays of beauty come before anything else. He dismissed the idea that “self preservation is the first law of nature… a view of life without spirit, sport, play, art, joy.”
Beauty comes first, even before the eye that can see it. Many beautiful life forms existed before any animal had an eye.
So the cosmos is “an aesthetic fact” and the world (nature) is “a presentation.” Our job is to “notice and enjoy the display and appreciate and protect the display.”
“With a cosmology that begins with beauty” there would be no need for an ecological movement.
So Hillman’s view is polytheistic and aesthetic. It is Greek (poly and city), not Roman (One Empire).
As poet Yeats said “the center cannot hold.” Oneness always devolves once more into poly – the Many.
Ironically the word cosmos is connected to cosmetics – it implies ornament, embellishment. It is sensate. Aphrodite’s smile = beauty. Life’s particularity without Aphrodite would be chaos. Sophia or wisdom and crafts is one face of Aphrodite. Craftspeople now complain that their raw materials (wood) are degraded.
An ethical decline comes with an aesthetic decline.
Celebrate ‘eachness” – each thing has “its own smile.” Encourage the capacity of heart to find joy in a pluralistic cosmos.
“Love Nature” is too abstract, says Hillman. He advises ecopsychology to take up this question. “Only that which is personified can be loved. We need a sense of animation, living soul, particularism.” We don’t love “nature,” we love this stream, that tree, a specific bird or animal.
The origin of things is not the important question, he says. People are victims of their ideas. Bad ideas are pernicious and have many heads (e.g. pupils of a professor who then get jobs in many universities.)
We need to turn events into experiences that touch the heart.
Beauty in our culture is used unethically, commodified, not held sacred.
As therapists our job is to treat the culture, not just the individual person.
To bring us back to our senses, back in touch.
He says we need to ask the young not “what do you want to be?” but “what do you want to do?” (with your hands.)
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