[Reflection paper on the specific books]

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Reflection Paper on James Hillman

Revisioning Psychology

1. Archetypal Theory and the Construction of Self

James Hillman's work is helpful in articulating an alternate understanding of self--particularly in regard to contemporary psychological conceptions of selfhood. Although it is my contention that Hillman challenges traditional understandings of the self and therefore can be helpful for other work of this nature, his archetypal psychology is not as concerned with such issues as immanence and patriarchy as are many contemporary feminist thinkers.

Hillman holds that everything that affects an individual or a community is first and foremost psychological in nature.2 He understands the workings of the mind as central to all experience. All empirically experienced sensations must be filtered through the mind. Furthermore, all conceptual categories are products of not just individual imagination but of a consensual imagination that has developed over time as a result of myriad factors--religious, psychological, mythical, scientific, and artistic. To this apparent paradigm crisis in contemporary psychology's approach to self, Hillman offers another fantasy: the aesthetic response, or "thought of the heart." It is through the logos of the psyche, the language of the soul that we find a second means of approaching human social and psychic activity in a manner that is less restrictive than the literal, rational, monotheistic, and strictly scientific techniques (Hillman, 1977).

To Hillman, imagining is the primary activity of the soul. Furthermore, the soul is located in the heart--the heart of the lion, the heart of animal passions, the heart of spontaneity. This is the heart of our feelings and it is through our feelings, our reactions to the both psychic and worldly events that the soul makes itself heard.

2. Greeting the Angels' Fire in A Blue Fire

The yawning darkness, the musing mouth of Death, possesses a haunting loveliness, the soul of which is love itself. Greg Mogenson will write in the introduction to Greeting The Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, “From the imaginal point of view the end of life is not the end of soul.” (xi) Likewise will the myth say Psyche is condemned by the goddess of Beauty, Aphrodite to fall in love with the ugliest of faces and I presume by this the myth has meant this as the face of Death.

Love's darkness haunts soul-making. Soul-making amplifies felt-sense in a darkening loveliness. To see through an image in soul-making is to see lit with interior's lighting set to interior's music. However, this interiority is set in so impersonal a manner as death that psyche can also be conceived as transcending what you or I will make of it in our own lifetimes.

An imaginal perspective shifts vocality to soul's point of view. This view operates from many sides to form a graveyard vision, a cemetery through which wounded images come to life and haunt. So to view life from wounded sides means to see with a perspective for soul that darkens soul (Hillman, 2004). A darkness possessed with inner beauty is a seeing through of ...